Copland III

Something I don’t ‘get’ about theism is how they explain away the lack of proof for a god’s existence by telling us that we must have faith – in books written millennia ago.

If we are to put our faith in a book, we could put it in any book – and maybe even one with more verifiable authorship than the Bible, Koran, Upanishads, et cetera. For example, I could claim my beliefs are based around The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Scripture divinely inspired in the Prophet Douglas’s mind. It teaches in the ways of hitch-hiking, towel-carrying, and how to free oneself from the evil Vogons and their satanic poetry.

Of course, basing one’s belief system on a work of fiction would be nothing hort of clinically insane, as there is no evidence to suggest the Earth was destroyed in the 1980s by fat, slug-like creatures with bad breath and bad poetic skills. We also have no evidence to suggest that Oxford was once inhabited by hobbits, or that a hundred thousand years ago, a race of mysterious human-like beings fired an array of ring-shaped superweapons to fumigate the galaxy from an alien parasite.

So why on earth should we have faith in any book, without undisputable proof to back it up?