God Doesn't Act
In an article in a WSJ blog about one of my personal heroes, Penn Jillette, the author discusses Penn’s atheism, which is a theme of his new book God No!, Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales.
My comment:
Praying in particular I don’t understand. If God is omniscient, he doesn’t need you to tell him what you’re thinking or what you desire. He knows better than you do. But more interestingly than that is a logical conclusion arrived at by understanding action and its purpose. What is action? It is man attempting to make a change to his environment to remove some felt unease. If man felt no unease, he would be content, and would not act. Man feels unease because he is neither omniscient nor omnipotent, and his environment is unsatisfactory to fulfill his desires.
An omnipotent, omniscient being such as God, therefore would not act. There would be no desires to fulfill, because his desires would dictate his environs without action. Hence, what good is prayer or worship when your God does not act? If he exists and is omnipotent and omniscient, present conditions will always satisfy him, else they would not have occurred.
What strikes me as odd are the number of devoutly religious austro-libertarians. I basically stole that point directly out of Human Action, yet nearly all the big Austrian names are religious, and many of them enough so that they have written entire books on the subject. With human reason being such a strong part of the foundation of Austrians and Libertarians, it’s surprising to me that many are so strongly religious. Poking holes such as this into religion is trivial when you apply a little reason to the picture.
Perhaps I should read some of their books about religion and see if they discuss these kinds of logical conundrums. It would be fascinating to see the ways they contort themselves to explain them away.
Posted by wobbles on Saturday, September 17, 2011