In a YouTube short (Ricky Gervais Debunked) posted by Alex O’Connor, he criticizes Ricky Gervais’s use, on Stephen Colbert’s show, of what I call the ‘just one more god’ argument. Gervais is an atheist and Colbert is a Catholic. The idea is that humanity has posited thousands of gods, all but one of which Colbert rejects. Gervais rejects all of the gods that Colbert rejects but adds just one more: the Catholic God in which Colbert believes.
O’Connor shows a short clip of that part of the Colbert/Gervais conversation, which goes like this:
Gervais:
So you believe in one God, I assume.
Colbert:
Uhhh, in three persons, but go ahead.
Gervais:
Okay, so you believe– okay. But there are 3,000 to choose from, you know, of people —
Colbert:
I’ve done some reading, yeah.
Gervais:
So basically, you believe in– you deny one less god than I do. You don’t believe in 2,999 gods, and I don’t believe in just one more.
O’Connor tries a reductio ad absurdum:
Which I think is the most, like, unthinking thing that you can say about the issue of God’s existence. Imagine you were sat around with your ten brothers and none of you had ever met your father, and you were discussing “What do you think our father was like?” One of your brothers says “Well, you know, I think he might have been French.” And someone says “No, no, no, I’m sure he was American. If you look at the kind of man that Mum’s into, I’m sure he might have been American.” And, you know, the next brother thinks he’s Italian, and the next brother thinks that he’s German, and it gets round to me and I say “You know what, guys? I don’t think we had a dad.”
And they’re like, “What? Of course you had a bloody dad. What are you talking about?” [I reply] “Oh, hold on, guys. Like, you don’t believe in the French dad, and the American dad, and the German dad. You don’t believe in any of those dads. I just go one dad further.”
I think you’re making a mistake there… Notice that there’s a huge difference between, say, the difference between ten and eleven, or the difference between five and six, and the difference between zero and one. It’s a difference of quality rather than just quantity.
He’s being unfair to Gervais. If you watch the full Gervais/Colbert segment and not just the part that O’Connor excerpted, it’s clear that Gervais isn’t trying to justify atheism, he’s just explaining it. Here’s the lead-up to the part I quoted above:
Gervais:
I’m an agnostic atheist, technically. ‘Agnostic’ means no one knows whether there’s a God. So everyone’s technically an agnostic. We don’t know.
Colbert:
That’s true.
Gervais:
An agnostic atheist is someone who doesn’t know whether there’s a God or not, as no one does.
Colbert:
So you’re not convicted of your atheism.
Gervais:
Well, I am. No, I am. Atheism is only rejecting the claim that there is a God. Atheism isn’t a belief system. Atheism– so this is atheism in a nutshell. You say, “There’s a God.” I say, “Can you prove that?” You say, “No.” I say, “I don’t believe you then.”
Then Gervais presents the ‘just one more god’ argument. To me, it’s clear that he doesn’t think it disproves the existence of God. He’s just explaining atheism and pointing out that Colbert is an atheist with respect to thousands of gods, while he is an atheist with respect to just one more.
When I use that argument, I use it to invite the believer to apply the same skepticism to their own religious beliefs as they do to the religious beliefs of others. If a Muslim tries to convert a Christian, the Christian will presumably demand evidence that Islam is right and Christianity is wrong. Without such evidence, the Christian won’t be persuaded. That same standard should be applied to their own Christian beliefs, and in my experience, that rarely happens. For most people, their religious beliefs are the default, and evidence is only required when they are asked to change those beliefs.
O’Connor is right that ‘just one more god’ would be a poor argument against God’s existence, but that isn’t what Gervais (or I) use it for.
Flint writes, “I’d argue that it’s not that there are as many gods as there are religions, but rather there are as many gods as there are theists”
This is an interesting point, and ties into some earlier comments about language. Abstract concepts, especially about non-empirical entities, including fictional entities, exist in the minds of individuals: they do not exist outside in some composite, unified manner. The only way they take on a quasi-independent nature is through the use of shared language, where groups of people come to have approximately similar understandings. So Flint is right in this sense: each theist has a different concept of what “god” means, from slightly different to very different. Furthermore, since there is no commonly accessible empirical experience of God, all that shared language can do is express an affirmation (but not a confirmation) of what a group of people want the word to mean.
Flint:
One of the most common mistakes I see theists making is that they assume that if their beliefs seem internally consistent and capable of explaining the things they think are important, then those beliefs are true. In reality, those are necessary but not sufficient. False beliefs can be internally consistent, and false beliefs can provide explanations.
What we really want (or should want) are beliefs that are internally consistent, capable of explaining, and better supported by evidence than competing beliefs.
aleta:
Right. We can’t observe God directly, so most of what people say about God is pure speculation. Even if we assume that he exists, we can only infer his nature from what we see around us. It’s evident that if God exists (and is omni-everything), then he doesn’t care much for humans, given that he allows us to suffer so badly, keeps himself hidden from us, and doesn’t give us the information we desire, such as knowing that he exists, what his plan is for us, what is and isn’t ethically permissible, how to cure cancer, who drank the last Coke in the refrigerator, etc.
People like Bill will argue that he does provide us with some of that information via the Bible, but as I’ve commented before, blaming the Bible on God is a huge insult to him. No self-respecting omniGod would ‘publish’ a book that bad and say ‘this is my word’.