The myth of the divine toenail

By Brian Carp

Yale students have always been successful, but that's never stopped them from aiming even higher. This week, ambitious students tried to tackle the ultimate challenge: to prove or disprove, once and for all, the existence of God.

First came a Tues., Feb 16 point/counterpoint from the Yale Daily News. Following that forum was the "debate" between members of the Campus Crusade for Christ at Yale and the Yale College Society for Humanists, Atheists and Agnostics on Thurs., Feb. 18. Now everyone's in the same boat: we all want to know, for one reason or another, exactly who or what is responsible for putting these people on earth.

One can actually draw valuable conclusions from such confrontations. The first is that absolute truth falls into neither the category of "fact" nor that of "opinion." The second is that if people feel strongly enough about anything, there is very little you can do to change their minds.

The question should not be "does God exist?" but rather "does anyone believe God exists?" What really matters is meaning and consequences. Beliefs are very strong—and very personal.

Debates about the existence of God usually go something like this: everything has a cause so there must be an original one, and laws exist, so someone must have created them. Or, no one could have created these laws because then who created the creator? Then we get into the causes of causes and the infinity of time versus its implausibility, and it goes on forever. Scared yet? Hold on, because there are hundreds of thousands of pages written on the subject. After a couple of hours of exposure to that, all we've really achieved are headaches and reasons to stay home and watch World's Wildest Police Chases.

Unfortunately, no one can put the issue to rest by suggesting that both arguments are correct. While Americans may uphold the ideal of, "I may not agree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it," the God debate mostly consists of, "I don't believe what you're saying, therefore you are wrong."

Allow me to provide a less controversial example: I believe that stress does not exist. It doesn't exist because I don't believe in it, and to believe anything else would make life that much more unpleasant. A believer may lock herself in a weenie bin for 36 hours, drink lots of coffee, read a textbook three times over, and not retain any information at all. A "stressatheist" realizes that it's just another grade and that it isn't worth the loss of a good night's sleep. He then spends a couple of hours zipping through his notes the night before the exam. In most cases, the atheist will receive a satisfactory grade on the exam, and having defied this false "god of stress," he has proven its non-existence. It is a construct of the mind, a self-perpetuating myth. And there's nothing you can do to prove otherwise.

Except point to Patient Zero, who has spent the last week in DUH with "flu-like symptoms" or some other stress-related illness. We've all seen stress work its evil; it's responsible for poor productivity, loss of health, and suicides across the nation. Is it possible not to believe in something with such real consequences?

Stress does and does not exist. Whatever you believe, it most likely strongly influences how you live. Similarly, you cannot prove or disprove the existence of God, but you can't deny that it has meaning for countless people. Remember the Son of Sam? A man committed murder because he claimed God was speaking to him through a dog. You may debate the "truth" of divine communication, but you can't deny its meaning to the individual.

No one is going to run into your philosophy class next week with a divine toenail clipping that proves or disproves the existence of God. And few people are going to be swayed by a 200-page thesis based entirely on philosophical assumptions about the beginning of time and the creation of the universe. For every logical contradiction there's another argument waiting to take its place.

In the end, convincing someone that his or her beliefs are wrong and that he or she should accept on faith whatever you choose to accept on faith is about as easy as convincing a jury that a dog told you to do it.

Brian Carp is a sophomore in Calhoun.

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