Should We Hope God Exists?**
Philosophers have long wondered whether God exists. There is a distinct but related question: should we hope He does?
Often in a crisis, people are comforted by their belief in God. The coronavirus pandemic is no different. Many Americans, and people around the world, took comfort in their belief and faith in God. Yet many philosophers and laypersons often wonder if belief in God—traditionally conceived as all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, and creator of the universe—is epistemically rational; that is, whether there is sufficient evidence for the belief.
Although both theistic and atheistic philosophers have offered reasons for and against God’s existence, perhaps the biggest stumbling block philosophers and laypersons have to taking belief in God seriously is called ‘the problem of evil’. The problem was succinctly put by the Ancient Greek philosopher, Epicurus:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
Here is a graphic example. I picked it to emphasize how bad the problem is:
[A] drunk driver traveling 70 miles an hour the wrong way on a highway struck a limousine that was carrying six family members home from a wedding that had taken place earlier that day. In the crash, a seven-year-old girl, who had been a flower girl at the wedding, was decapitated […] the flower girl’s five-year-old sister, father, and maternal grandparents were critically injured […] the flower girl’s mother, who had also been in the limousine, pulled herself from the wreckage and began searching for her family. She knew that her five-year-old daughter was alive because she could hear her moans, but as she searched the wreckage she found her seven-year-old daughter’s decapitated head. The mother picked it up and clung to it, screaming to her husband that ‘Katie is dead.’
If God exists, how can He allow such apparently pointless suffering? The amount of seemingly pointless suffering in the world is shocking. Humans suffer murder, rape, horrendously disease, famine, war, and so on; not to mention the natural suffering of animals that clearly suffer too, often seemingly without reason. While theistic philosophers have offered a number of explanations to reconcile the staggering amount of seeming pointless suffering with the existence of God, many philosophers remain skeptical. We lack the space, though, to adjudicate a seemingly intractable issue like reconciling the existence of God with apparently pointless suffering.
On the flip side, perhaps the strongest argument for God’s existence (and a personal favorite of mine), though there are many arguments for God’s existence, is known as the argument from religious experience. We can sum up the argument as: we ought to believe things are as they seem to be, unless and until we have strong evidence we’re wrong. We apply this principle to domains like perception and memory (e.g. I seem to be typing on a laptop, so it is rational to believe that I’m typing on a laptop). If we distrusted appearances until and unless they were proven reliable, we would never have justified beliefs as the proof of, say, the reliability of our eyesight must itself be proven. And so on and so forth. Many people testify they’ve had apparent experiences of God—a powerful, transcendent, and benevolent being. So we have (some) evidence that God exists, unless and until better evidence refutes their testimony.
Someone may object that we shouldn’t trust such testimony, as we can recreate those experiences by stimulating the brain. But we can recreate perceptual experiences too, like colors and sounds, just by stimulating the brain; this doesn’t show perceptual experiences are unreliable.
Now that we have covered an argument for and against the existence of God—an issue many philosophers have debated for millennia—there is another question related to the attitudes and opinions we should have about God, namely whether we should hope God exists. This question differs from asking whether we should believe that God exists. The former is roughly about goodness, and the latter about evidence. When we ask whether we should hope something is the case, we are asking if it would be good were it the case; we aren’t taking a stance on whether it exists. So the question of whether we should hope that God exists is about whether it would be good if God existed compared to God not existing. And we can only rationally hope something good is the case if we don’t know already that it isn’t—we cannot rationally hope, by example, our parents didn’t divorce when we were kids if we know they did. Hope is governed by goodness and the possibility something could be.
One reason we should hope that God doesn’t exist is that God, as an all-knowing being, would deprive us of our privacy and solitude; God would know everything there is to know about us. Some philosophers argue this would be bad: some individuals greatly value privacy and solitude; God’s existence would deprive them of that.
Christopher Hitchens nicely expressed the point that the hope God exists is like,
[The] desire that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority who can convict you of thought crime while you are asleep, who can subject you to total surveillance around the clock every waking and sleeping minute of your life, before you're born and, even worse and where the real fun begins, after you're dead. A celestial North Korea.
And there’s something to this point: whatever the intent of the observer, even if wholly pure, many of us greatly value our privacy, and don’t want to lose it.
On the flip side, there are a couple reasons we should hope God exists.
First, should God exist, the suffering around us wouldn’t be pointless, no matter how bad. The reason is simple: if God exists, then He wouldn’t allow suffering that wasn’t morally necessary. Why? An example will probably help here: when parents take their children to the dentist, to undergo a painful procedure, they don’t do it to make their child suffer for the sake of suffering, but because suffering is a necessary component of preventing even more suffering by their child later on. And the same applies to God: if God is perfectly loving, He wouldn’t allow us to suffer without solid moral reasons. The suffering we see in the world, were God to exist, would either be necessary produce a greater good, or prevent greater suffering, since ‘God would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering He could, unless He could not do so without thereby leaving things worse off than they otherwise would be’. So we should hope that God exists so that this horrendous suffering has a moral reason—it would be far worse if the suffering were morally pointless.
Second, we value knowledge—it can be practically valuable to know things—but we don’t just want to know anything. Most of us don’t care how many specks of dust are in the attic, whether there are an even or odd numbers of stars, or how many grains of sand fit in a soup can. These items count as knowledge, but they’re junk; it would require precious time to learn them, but it wouldn’t be a valuable use of time. We thus want a reliable source of substantive knowledge without trivial and junk knowledge; one that offers only knowledge that is practically value. God fits the bill nicely: not only is He all-knowing, but He knows us perfectly, and thus knows what knowledge is of practical value to us, and what would be junk and trivial knowledge. As God is perfectly loving, we can trust Him as a source of knowledge—through, say, the process of revelation—he would only give us what we need for our practical purposes. God would be the best source of knowledge that one could hope for. We should thus hope for epistemic reasons (that is, reasons related to knowledge) that God exists.
Should we hope God exists? You tell me.
**reposted