What If We Proved God Didn't Exist? | Unveiled

What If We Proved God Didn’t Exist?

Concepts of Faith and religion date back for thousands of years, across all of human history. Many of our most impressive pieces of art – from grand buildings to great works of literature – are influenced and inspired by religious stories, while societies all around the world order themselves according to our belief systems - despite many people not identifying as being religious at all. What, then, would happen if we knew without a doubt that divine beings weren’t real?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what if we proved that God didn’t exist?

For centuries, monotheistic religions like Christianity and Islam have been amongst the most followed on Earth. Together they attract around half of the world’s population today, with Christianity being the most widespread religion globally. But there are also increasing numbers who don’t adhere to any religion at all, with the rise of secularism in the nineteenth century prompting more and more people to seemingly favour science over religion. Atheism - to actively disbelieve - and some other belief systems not centred around deities have also existed since at least the fifth century BC, as the quest to find (or not find) God has proven a human constant… But, despite how the divide is often perceived, it would be wrong to say that science and religion do or have always worked against each other.

Many of history’s most famous scientists, including Charles Darwin, have also been to some degree religious, while not viewing their positions as contradictory. While Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” was no doubt controversial in the nineteenth century, he himself reportedly identified as agnostic - as someone who accepts that they don’t and can’t know the nature of God - and he didn’t think that his theory of evolution definitively “disproved God”, either. In a letter written in 1860, for example, Darwin said that he “had no intention to write atheistically”. He, like many other scientists who also practice religion, suggested that the existence of God could still make sense as a “first cause”; the idea being that it was God who set evolution into motion or, to today’s mind, that it was divine intervention which put the laws of physics in place and triggered the Big Bang.

Later in history, even Albert Einstein - often perceived as though he was entirely dismissive of religion, particularly after his “God letter” came to light in 2008 - was said to be just as against labelling himself as an atheist, too. Einstein, similar to Darwin, didn’t view science as a straight up replacement for religion. But, of course, there are and have also been scientists who seemingly do want to completely disprove religious ideas… including the physicist Stephen Hawking, who wrote in his final book that “the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing, according to the laws of science”. One especially common scientific argument against the existence of God highlights the sheer scale of the universe, reasoning that; if God made man in his own image, which implies that God was particularly preoccupied with Earth and mankind, then why make the universe so incomprehensibly huge? And why have it existing for so long before humans did?

Not that acceptance of science is the only thing believed to be behind increased secularism, though. For many, it’s a philosophical matter, at the heart of which is the logical problem of evil. Simply put, the problem of evil is how does one reconcile the existence of a God with the existence of suffering? For the singular God of Christianity to actually be “God”, for example, He has to be three things: omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent. If God is good and knows about suffering but cannot stop it, then He’s not all-powerful and therefore not God; if God is good and could prevent suffering but does not know about it, then He’s not all-knowing and therefore not God; and finally, if God both knows about suffering and could prevent it but chooses not to, then He isn’t good and therefore not God.

Among the various counterarguments are that God’s actions cannot be understood by humans and He is working for the “greater good”… but this might be deemed scant consolation for anyone who has just gone through a horrible tragedy. For example, one major event that led Charles Darwin to question his Christian faith was the death of his nine-year-old daughter Annie. It’s perhaps, then, understandable why people could lose Faith, if the God they put that Faith into apparently allows something horrible to happen.

In a world where God was scientifically proven not to exist, however, the problem of evil would be much less of a “problem” at all. Evil, or just more generally “bad things happening”, would never need to be considered through the lens of religion. Tragedies would be more a fact of life, and unattractive human behaviours like “unkindness” would be measured against something other than religious texts and teachings. As for the creation of life, the universe and everything, there would still be debate, probably forever… because with or without the suggestion of God, no one can yet claim to know with absolute certainty how everything came to be.

But this brings us to arguably the most important aspect of religion, for any follower: Faith. Generally speaking, religious people don’t need cold, hard, scientific proof that God exists because a vital part of worship is simply having the Faith that He does. It’s something which has been studied in itself, with it suggested by some that there are some sociological reasons why humans might have devised and accepted religion a few thousand years ago, including the Terror Management Theory. Terror Management Theory argues that religion is one route humans take to mitigate their death anxiety, since all of us are cursed – or blessed – with the knowledge that one day, we will die. Believing in religion and, by extension, some kind of afterlife – be that heaven, reincarnation, or anything else – allegedly helps to alleviate this anxiety… with TMT theorists contending that it’s comforting to think that if you follow certain rules, then you’ll be taken care of for eternity. In a world where God was conclusively proven not to exist, then such terror management tactics wouldn’t be possible either… but only if everyone accepted the findings of whatever study or experiment was claiming to have “debunked God”. And, that last part, isn’t likely to happen because of Faith.

It might be argued that science, particularly in the last two hundred years or so, has made major moves to topple religion in society; that, for a long time it was religions that provided the answers to our largest philosophical questions, but that science is now also in a position to do so. Nevertheless, human beings have not yet and are not likely to lose their Faith en masse - even were seemingly watertight evidence against God to be put before them. Religious doctrines are still one way society attempts to make sense of the strange world around us. Yes, it’s already simple enough at this stage in history to dismiss certain stories (like the world being created by God in seven days or Jesus coming back to life), but that doesn’t stop large numbers of people from choosing to follow Jesus’s teachings.

As far as “scientific proof” goes, then, today’s secularists might think that there’s now more than enough evidence to justify their worldview, but religious followers believe the same about their own ideas… meaning that, from some perspectives, it might be said that we’ve already proven that God doesn’t exist. Yet, still, the debate continues.

Perhaps the only thing that could convince everyone that there truly wasn’t a God would be if some kind of divine, all-knowing authority visited Earth to deliver the news… But all that would prove is that there actually was a God, who for some reason was trying to convince us that there wasn’t. Ultimately, it depends on Faith… in religious teachings, or in science, or somewhere in between. There are many avenues to go down by which to mount evidence against God, leading to an increasing number of atheists in the world. But despite this, it’s likely that no amount of science would ever totally supersede Faith, or the overriding feeling that when it comes to understanding everything… we might never know for sure. And that’s what would happen if we proved God didn’t exist.