A more satisfying debate about God

Usually any debate between an atheist and a full-fledged believer ends before it ever really gets started because religion entails a whole bunch of empirical claims that there just isn't any reason to believe--for example, that God created the earth, or that God parted the ocean. Ultimately, nothing the believer says about faith or anything else is going to get the atheist to allow miracles or God or any other supernatural thing into his empirical sanctum sanctorum. And this is as it should be: it is not valid to believe an empirical claim to be true when there is a total lack of any supporting evidence--even if you really, really, really, really want it to be true, as is often the case with religion-motivated empirical claims that are not or cannot be substantiated.

However, though I certainly feel that these short-lived debates resolve in the atheist's favor, there is the lingering feeling of having won on a technicality--like nailing Al Capone for tax evasion. And the dogmatic tone of the atheist's argument--These are the rules of empiricism!--makes atheism sound paradoxically religious.

The truth is, there are many more interesting conversations to be had between believer and atheist beyond that initial empirical sticking point. But how do you carry on a conversation about God when there isn't even any agreement at the outset that God exists?

I think one way to break the impasse is to ask a slightly different question than the one usually posed. Rather than, "Does God exist?", the question ought to be: "Is the existence of God possible?" By "modalizing" the question ("modal" means having to do with possibility), we elide the usual questions about evidence and proof and faith and instead focus on a more substantive target: the divine itself. We move the conversation from a primarily epistemological one ("How can we know that God exists; what is the evidence?") to a primarily ontological one ("What kind of a thing is God; is such a thing possible/coherent?"). We set aside the question of which, of all possible worlds, is the one that we happen to inhabit, and take up instead the broader question of divine being, irrespective of which possible worlds this divine being happens to reside.

Indeed, I think a lot of the more compelling arguments against God are the ones that criticize the God concept itself as incoherent, or unable to deliver on its metaphysical promises. For example, acerbic atheist Christopher Hitchens regularly characterizes God--giver of laws and arbiter of good and evil--as nothing more than a dictator in the sky. The criticism challenges the believer to account for just how--or in virtue of what--God is to be distinguished from a human being who claims supreme power. The believer can reply by saying that God is omniscient or infinitely wise, or whatever other assertion of superlative virtue, but it's probably not as strong a claim as the believer wants to make--it rests too much on accidental properties, is still too grounded in this-worldliness. I mean, we can imagine a powerful alien that had all these same superlative virtues, and yet the believer would still say that God is in a whole other metaphysical league compared with this alien. So for the believer it is really about getting across this idea that God exists in a fundamentally different and other-worldly kind of way--it participates in an altogether purer, perfect form of being that regular stuff doesn't normally have access to. But the problem for the believer who pushes this sort of point, in my view, is that his words start to lose their impact, their grip on anything meaningful: the believer falls into the pattern of distinguishing between God and some-ordinary-thing-that-happens-to-have-the-same-properties-as-God by insisting somewhat circularly that God is such that it is just totally not on a par with that ordinary-thing-that-happens-to-have-the-same-properties-as-God. But it becomes very difficult to conceptualize this--this metaphysical secret sauce, this thing in virtue of which God is different--as a thing in its own right, and not just a negatively defined argumentative construct.

Anyway, that's just one example of the direction things can go once the question shifts to the possibility of the existence God, rather than simply the existence of God. And I think it's a much more satisfying and fruitful way to go--for both believer and atheist.