by James Lamont

In this essay I shall explain why I feel that the contemporary atheist movement misunderstands the nature of theism. I shall argue that the incoherence of the attributes of god make the statements “god exists” or “there is a god” meaningless sentences, which cannot be subject to truth or falsity conditions. I shall conclude that, ironically, atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris lets theism off too lightly.

The word “god” cannot be defined objectively in the same way that an apple can. Classical civilisations believed in many gods, yet the definition of a god is not the same as the definition of god a monotheist would use. Major religious texts are often very vague in reference to what their god is like. Moreover, there is no external reason why one should believe one scripture over another. For the moment, I shall refer to the god of the Christians.

A study of the Bible would reveal that god is an all-powerful, all-loving, all-knowing being that is always everywhere, and looks similar to a human. However, I assert that these attributes are logically contradictory.

If god is all-knowing, it follows that it would be able to see the future, and its own actions during this future. However, this would mean that it could never change what it will do in the future for any change it makes to its course it will have already seen. It follows from this that it would not be omnipotent. It does not follow; however, that god does not exist, as the atheist claims.

The implication of this argument is that the source of knowledge regarding the properties of god is flawed. The original source of discussion concerning god is the Bible. It would, then, be rational to regard claims from this source regarding god as suspect at best, given as it has been shown to be unreliable. We thus have no decent source for knowledge of the properties of god. It does not follow from this that god has no properties, merely that there is no way of knowing them. Any definition of god is thus going to be arbitrary based on the believer rather than the object of belief.

It could be argued that this is true of many objects: we have red mugs, white mugs, Philoscoffee mugs; but what separates mugs from god is that mugs all have certain properties that make them mugs: they hold liquids, have a handle etc. God on the other hand is left with no knowable properties that mark out “god” from any other entity. The lack of objective properties means that any definition of god is going to be highly subjective and not universal in the same way that a definition is required to be.

The implication of the above is that any statement which refers to god is in fact an meaningless statement, which is neither true nor false as it stands, and requires the word “god” to be replaced by a meaningful definition. “God” has the same logical value as “x” in statements. If this is correct, the atheist is effectively asserting that there is no x. This is obviously meaningless. Thus the atheist is misguided in their claim that god does not exist. Since there are so many different conceptions of god, and a lack of credible sources for knowledge of attributes that could provide a meaningful definition, it follows that the atheist merely asserts that their own conception of god does not exist. On the other hand, the theist does not have a strong case either. They are merely asserting that their own conception of “god” drawn from an arbitrary and flawed source exists. The statement “god exists” is just as meaningless as its negation. Similarly, agnostics make the same mistake by believing that “god exists” is a meaningful statement and can be either true or false.

Thus atheism misses the point. It claims that a meaningless assertion is false by ascribing to the statement “god exists” an objective meaning which it does not have. It could be said, ironically enough, that atheism gives religion something by denying it, an objective meaning that it does not deserve. Atheism must become more of a political movement, fighting to replace the meaningless in politics with the meaningful.

I have provided my argument in five steps below.

• “God exists” is not contradictory, it is a categorical part of the theist’s beliefs
• But attributes can only be ascribed to God by empirical or rational evidence
• There is no such evidence and existing sources are unreliable
• Therefore we have no way of knowing the properties of god.
• Thus “God exists” means nothing and it cannot be true or false.