Kant's Categorical Imperative provides a framework to discuss morality in humanistic terms -- any morals must be universally applicable. I also stated here that we live in a web of interdependence because of the mystery that shrouds our existence. The two principles that I believe to be universally applicable are love and justice. Now, we will elaborate more on the God problem.
Kant lists three proofs of God's existence and explains why they are flawed:
Ontological Proof of God's Existence
God is perfect; therefore, He exists. But the problem with that, according to Kant, is that it is an attempt to start with a mental construct and end with a physical construct.
Cosmological ("Prime Mover") Proof of God's Existence
If anything exists in the Cosmos, then there is an Absolutely Necessary Being. But again, this is an attempt to translate a mental construct and turn it into a physical construct.
Physico-theological ("Watch Maker") Proof of God's Existence
The creation itself testifies to the glory of God. But again, God is simply a subjective construct of the mind here.
There is another "proof" of God's existence that could be discussed here -- one cannot create something out of nothing; therefore, God. But that argument presupposes God's existence and is thus subjective. In other words, most people believed that the earth was flat and that the sun rotated around the earth in 1492. But the construction of the world could just as easily be explainable by scientific processes as it would by supernatural. In the same way, although we don't understand the basic scientific mechanisms of the Big Bang, it does not follow that God therefore exists. The Big Bang, with the benefit of 100 more years of scientific discovery, could be explainable by science in the same way that the Solar System is now, along with the fact of the Earth being round.
None of this, of course, disproves the existence of God. God may have had nothing to do with the creation of the world. God could BE the world. The concepts of God existing and creating the universe and the Big Bang being explainable by science could very well exist side by side. The one thing that we know is that God is, as of this writing, outside the realm of human or scientific observation.
All we know is that we are in this world together, that I am who I am, and you are who you are, and we are thus interdependent on each other. When one gets sick, the rational thing to do is not to do nothing in hopes of God miraculously healing; the rational thing to do is to go to the doctor. The same thing applies to hunger or anything else. As I stated above, none of what I mentioned above disproves the existence of God. But God has not revealed himself through physical human observation. Therefore, there are at least three possibilities:
- God does exist and does not care about us;
- God communicates through a still small voice;
- God reveals through dreams and visions.
And yet there is a universal collective longing after a spark of the divine. This is universal, not confined to any people or tribe, and is true both now and in the past. Most people today still believe in God or that something is out there. That does not prove that there is a divine soul resting within us, let alone that there is a God, yet it is totally possible that God could have revealed himself through #2 or #3.
Therefore, it is a matter of sound public policy for governments to leave these matters completely up to the person involved. All forms of religious indoctrination as a matter of public policy must be rejected as such. These include such right-wing policies as anti-gay rights, school vouchers, the attacks on Roe, and abstinence-based education. All of these policies are nothing more than religious indoctrination that has no Constitutional basis whatsoever; the Constitution explicitly prohibits the establishment of any religion whatsoever.
And there is another reason why this is sound public policy. The behaviorists, such as Lakoff, Mead, Prinz, and their followers have rightly argued that people are products of their environment and upbringing. Therefore, we must allow freedom of thought as a matter of public policy, free of government interference. If people have different upbringings and different personal experiences, they will therefore have different life outlooks in which their subjective judgments will be unique and different than anyone else. To follow a policy of religious indoctrination would be to deny people their essential humanity and deprive one's self from learning from people who are different.
In this country which allows freedom of conscience, we can once again take up the old arguments that were used to question the veracity of fundamentalism. For instance, why would a God deliberately deprive humanity of knowledge? What right does a small group of Galileans have to claim that one of their own died for the sins of all humanity? Why make a practice of flaunting one's poverty? The only reason that fundamentalism triumphed was because of its adopting of persecution as a weapon against doctrines that were different than it. "The Bible exists because the Bible said so," however, in this day and age, is no longer a valid argument.