Theism

Theism is the claim that God exists. Standard approaches to this question involve arguing about issues like whether Jesus was raised the dead, or whether an omnipotent god could make a rock so heavy that god couldn't lift it. There is another way of looking at this issue: what problems would be solved or created by the existence of god?

Lots of people like to say that the existence of god would mean that morality is objective and so would solve the problem of how to decide on moral standards. Another question that some people say is solved by theism is the problem of how to explain why there are laws of physics. There are other similar problems.

Trying to solve such problems by invoking god runs into a problem that Plato identified centuries before the birth of Jesus in a dialogue called Euthyphro. In this dialogue a man called Euthyphro is going to try to prosecute his father for murder. Socrates and Euthyphro then have a discussion about justice. During the dialogue Euthyphro claims that an act is just if the gods say it is just. Socrates then asks whether an act is just because the gods say so, or whether the gods say the act is just because it is just for some other reason.

If something is just because god claims it is just and for no other reason that's not an explanation. How are we supposed to decide issues on which god hasn't given an opinion? Any way of making such a decision requires an explanation of god's position. If sodomy is bad is it permissable for a doctor to put a finger up your bum to check for prostate cancer? Since the bible doesn't mention prostate cancer some standard is needed to decide whether all rectal penetration is forbidden and if not how we should decide whether any particular kind of rectal penetration is allowed.

This raises the second part of the problem. If there is an explanation of god's position, then any feature of the world that implements that explanation provides an explanation of why it is good and the addition of god doesn't do any work. For example, if it is good to refrain from murder because each individual is unique and irreplacable then that explains the prohibition and god is irrelevant. So god doesn't play any role in solving moral problems.

The same problems apply to all other issues. If you want to explain the laws of physics, then how would invoking god explain them? If the laws of physics were decided by god, then either he had a reason for picking those laws or he didn't. If god didn't have a reason then the laws of physics are just a whim: this provides no way of picking out the actual laws of physics from any other conceivable set of laws of physics and so doesn't explain them. If god does have a reason for picking some particular set of laws, then any mechanism that instantiates that explanation will also explain those laws and will also explain other issues and have independently testable implications, unlike the theistic attempt at an explanation. For example, when light interacts with the boundary between two different materials it follows a path that minimises the time required to traverse that path. There are explanations for this in terms of continuity of electromagnetic fields across boundaries (Principles of Optics by Max Born and Emil Wolf, Seventh Edition, Section 1.5). This explanation has other implications such as how to describe the propagation of light in multiple flat layers of materials (Section 1.6 of the same book).

Theism, considered as an explanation, doesn't solve problems. Theistic traditions have some ideas that can give people comfort, they have contributed to the creation of great art and some theists have come up with better moral explanations, e.g. - Christian criticism of the slave trade. Good ideas may come from any source and should be evaluated according to whether they survive criticism, so while theists may have some good ideas that doesn't imply that theism is viable as a worldview and it isn't.