Yes, lame post title. It’s how I roll baby. But holidays mean mindless TV, mindless TV means being annoyed at stupid religious propaganda, and stupid religious propaganda means venting in blogs. Oh, and blogs mean puns. To me anyway.

The Futurama episode titled ‘Godfellas’ has bending unit Bender shot out into space accidentally, apparently leaving him alone for the rest of eternity. During his voyage he runs through an asteroid belt and a small asteroid gets lodged in his casing. The asteroid is home to little living thingies who happen to think that Bender is god, and well, he orders them around and tries to help and ends up making things worse before they eventually blow each other up. Fair enough.

After all of this happens, a mourning Bender manages to crash into the actual theistic god who has somehow taken material form (I’m sure the dualists will make up some unconvincing argument as to how this is possible) and learned binary along the way. Bender shares his experience as ‘being god’; how it was so damn demanding and how it was so difficult to manage their society. Those who had faith in Bender the god believed that he would smite the unbelievers after listening to their prayers, leading them to victory, while the unbelievers for some reason were immoral bastards trying to bomb the religious, apparently because they’d ‘lost hope’ and were jealous or something. God tells Bender that it’s a balancing act and for some reason thinks this gem is relevant:

“When you do things right, people won’t be sure that you’ve done anything at all.”

According to this supposed god, people shouldn’t be able to know for certain if he exists or not because they will assume that he will always come to their rescue and do the good for them. Subjects are supposed to gain their own moral awareness, shown in the fact that by the end of the episode Bender is unknowingly led to do the good by something that this supposed god has told him. This also seems to involve knowing which prayers to answer and which not; leaving this balance so faith can work is supposed to justify leaving some prayers unanswered.

Picking on this is too easy. Perhaps I should have found something different to write about. But it was there, so what the hell.

It’s pretty obvious for starters that there are people out there who claim that they “know” that god exists. A majority of the world, in fact, despite them all meaning different things when they say it. Most notably we have the dramatic rise in fundamentalism world-wide. The funny (or perhaps scary) thing is that this conviction does not lead to passivity one bit; it leads to passionate action. Instead of (logically) assuming that an all powerful being can sort out his own problems, people feel the need to do things for him. Hence we have Osamas, Bushes and Robertsons.

Secondly, there are people who firmly deny the existence of god (even if only probabilistically like myself in a weak atheism) that haven’t ‘lost hope’, so to speak, of living a meaningful life; these people seem to be the majority of the unbelieving population (from personal experiences, being involved in atheistic communities). Not only this, but finitude is arguably more desirable than infinite consciousness - and the episode even offers similar arguments!! Bender’s drifting through space for all eternity is seen as meaningless because he will eventually become infinitely bored as less things come to entertain him. Imagine existing for all eternity, doing all the things that you have always wanted to do. Assuming that one has conscious thought capable of change, one will eventually do everything there is to do, know everything there is to know, perfected every attribute of ones being to the extent that one is capable of. While one may dream of living forever as a child (when the religious dogma is seeded), growing old leads to different attitudes towards death. Finitude is not necessarily an evil.

So the justification for faith (reasonless belief) is misleading. Which leads us back to the question: why should one believe that all events are working towards the greater good when it is not very probable at all that they are?

While Futurama and the Simpsons may be commended for their light-hearted stabs at organised religion, their depiction of the universal acceptance of a god is downright disgusting and incorrect.

    In the compulsory Christmas episode of the medical comedy Scrubs, ardent Christian surgeon Turk (denomination unspecified, but probably Catholic) begins to question his faith after countless people die and turn up injured on Christmas Eve. “How can I believe in a God,” he asks, “who lets innocent people suffer?” When confronted with the problem, his girlfriend Carla is also unable to give an answer. To understand this statement a major point needs to be clarified. If there is a deity or a god worthy of worship it must be omniscient, omnipotent and omni-benevolent. That’s the traditional theistic definition of god (the rejection of this argument being atheism). If your ‘god’ has a different set of characteristics then the atheist / theist positions are irrelevant to you, and no, you are not a theist. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s extend on Turk’s worries and chuck it into standard form, eh?

P1. A god is by definition omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good.

P2. A perfectly good being would do everything in its power to increase good and decrease evil (unless an evil necessary for the greater good or to avoid a greater evil)

P3. An omniscient being knows all evils.

P4. An omnipotent being can eliminate all evils.

P5. There is a gratuitous amount of evil in the world, i.e. unnecessary evils that do not add to the greater good.

C. It is unreasonable to believe in a god.

    The show sends Turk on a mission to save his faith; after all, it feels so good for him to have faith in his god. We can’t have one of the show’s lead characters being content without some type of religious belief, can we? How can Turk account for all the seemingly unnecessary pain and suffering that he just witnessed? What we need here is a miracle; not an overtly religious message, but enough coincidence and luck to suggest that ‘higher forces’ are at work. So without any rational reason for his behaviour, assumedly just urged on by divine forces, Turk runs down the road to find a girl giving birth and saves the life of a baby or something like that.

    What is meant by ‘miracle’? Perhaps a miracle is a logically impossible event that does occur. But Turk’s ‘miracle’ is not logically impossible; similar unlikely things happen by chance all the time. Perhaps they mean a miracle is something that is unexplainable. As a sceptical philosophy student, I experience things daily that are unexplainable; to me, anyway. But they aren’t miracles. We often just lack a decent explanation for phenomena. It would have been silly for early 16C biologists to just assume that babies were miracles because they where unable to account for how foetuses develop. Perhaps they mean that a miracle is just a low-probability event that occurs, perhaps without a good explanation. When patients unexpectedly die without reason on the show they do not run around calling it a miracle, so it should probably be added that Scrubs defines miracles as being morally good events as well.

    Let us just assume that miracles in this broad sense do happen, that such low-probability events occur and are indeed unexplainable. In this reading, Turk would be using the god hypotheses to explain away the improbable and unexplained good deed that just occurred. Let us even assume that this act would be logically impossible to occur: rather, that the event entails a logical contradiction of natural laws and supernatural forces logically must be at work (assume that this is possible for a moment, fellow sceptics). Even with all these assumptions, it does not follow that Turk should retain his belief in a god. For Turk’s concern was with the gratuitous amount of evil and suffering that he witnesses working in the hospital. The fact that unexplained good occurs fails to account for the unexplained evils that make up P5, and all the premises of the argument from evil remain intact.

    So in the end it seems as though Turk has mastered self-deception. But watching this episode reminded me of reading David Hume’s Dialogues… although Cleanthes is said to come out on top of the debate, the points the Philo makes are left unscathed. I hope the wishy-washy miracle conclusion didn’t stop viewers of this show from considering its earlier reasoning.

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