3 Reasons Why Belief In God Makes Sense

…or not

In #religion

In a new book, Justin Brierley of the very good Unbelievable Podcast writes about 3 Reasons Why Belief in God Makes Sense. These reasons aren’t particularly compelling to me. They are the following.

God Makes Sense Of Human Existence

Here, Justin cites the Fine Tuning Argument, which has its best take-down in the Sean-Carroll/William Lane Craig debate. It’s really an argument from physics, and the physics isn’t at all clear on whether the effect is there, or whether the interpretation of the effect is even reasonable.

God Makes Sense Of Human Value

Here, Justin states:

But why exactly do we believe that human life should be valued? Why did Jaime do the right thing – the human thing?

I find it very hard to come up with an answer on an atheistic world view. Why should humans have any more claim for special regard on the biological tree of life than a louse? There’s nothing intrinsically special about us in a universe that is blindly obeying the laws of nature. Any beliefs in objective human rights, values and morality are ultimately an illusion, a side-effect of our evolutionary history.

Here I think Sam Harris has the best word for this but Matt Dillahunty also does quite well with it.

God Makes Sense Of Human Purpose

Finally, Justin states,

Atheism and Christianity tell two very different stories – one is of ultimate purposelessness and the other is of ultimate hope. Hope that there is a reason for our existence, hope that our lives mean something, the hope that death is not the end. Is it a delusion?

The word “purpose” I think is a little less defined than I’d like, but it seems that if heaven exists then there really is no purpose for this life. I am also not convinced that purpose requires an infinite time - that if you exist for a finite time then you can have purpose. It may also be the case that there is no purpose - but how we feel about that should have no effect on the truth.