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1-Page Summary of The God Delusion

Overview

Regardless of what you call it, whether God or Allah or Vishnu, people have been asking the question: “Is there a higher power?” The answer has always been unclear.

Religion and religious scriptures can be valuable sources of morality. At first glance, the lessons from religion seem to provide us with a clear guide on how to live our lives. But if we look closer at those teachings, we might get a different perspective on life altogether.

This passage discusses the idea of God, primarily from a Christian perspective. It looks at whether or not religion can be backed up by evidence and how it could have evolved in people’s minds over time.

Big Idea #1: The most widely known and accepted arguments for God’s existence are simply not persuasive.

Humans have struggled to prove the existence of God throughout history. They’ve tried to do so through logical reasoning and cosmological proofs, which assume that God was the First Cause—the force that made everything else.

But what kind of proof do we need?

Well, cosmological proofs of God start by saying that an external force must have produced the universe. The most famous one was postulated by the medieval theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas, who took First Cause as the fundamental premise of all his proofs.

The argument was based on a “cosmological principle,” which states that everything in nature happens for a reason.

In the Cosmological Argument, Aquinas says that when nothing physical existed, God must have been there. The fact that things exist proves this point.

So, cosmological proofs assume that everything must have a cause. Humans and the universe would be included as well. Therefore, God must be this uncaused first cause of all things.

What they don’t say is that the First Cause—God—must have had a cause.

Some people use ontological arguments to justify God’s existence, but these are just word games.

Unlike cosmological arguments, ontological proofs rely on reason. Anselm of Canterbury first came up with this argument in 1078. He argued that we can imagine a perfect being, but it cannot exist only in our minds; rather, to be truly perfect it would need to exist in the physical world.

Since we can picture a perfect being, God must exist. If he didn’t, that would be illogical.

But there are some flaws in Anselm’s argument. First, it doesn’t prove the existence of God; second, it is logically flawed. Anselm assumes that existing is better than not existing—but philosophers like David Hume and Immanuel Kant have proved that this isn’t true. Existence isn’t a quality, so a perfect being can exist without actually existing.

Big Idea #2: The scriptures can’t prove that God exists because they’re full of gaps and contradictions.

It’s been said that the Bible is the world’s best-selling book. It must be evidence of God, right? However, it might not be as trustworthy as you think.

The Bible has changed over time and is full of contradictions.

In fact, all the Gospels in the Bible were written after Jesus died. To preserve them, scribes copied and recopied them over time. As a result of this process, very little remains of the original text.

If that’s not proof, then the contradictions in the gospels certainly are. For instance, John says Jesus’s followers were surprised to hear he was from Nazareth because a prophecy foretold of his birth in Bethlehem.