IT AINT KANSAS ANYMORE

With the prestigious Kansas School Board in the news once again (the anti-evolution forces are mobilizing after losing control), the religious nuts and the atheist nuts have been going at it. At issue is whether or not there is a God -- nothing important, like whether or not there's milk in the fridge.

In the backlash, some are calling religion a disease. As the faithful teach us, one certainly can't prove it isn't. If it is, it's the only disease faith healers can't heal. It's possible one could culture it and see if little thingies grow in a petri dish.

The moderates out there insist that there is no way of proving or disproving the existence of God, and therefore, the only sensible position is agnosticism.

The Hell it is. Given five minutes and a piece of chalk, I can disprove the existence of God. The only sensible position, God willing, is atheism.

You can posit that there is a purple Volkswagen on Pluto, and though I can't go there, I can still prove it aint so. I can't prove there isn't life on Pluto, but I can prove there isn't a purple Volkswagen there: e.g.: where's the dealerships? The gas stations? The magic purple people eaters?

If there were a Volkswagen there, Woody Allen could prove it would start, but there is no more chance of a purple Volkswagen on Pluto than finding philosopher Bertrand Russell's famous "teapot orbiting between the orbits of Jupitor and Mars." Because you can say it, doesn't make it possible.

Anyway, I don't need to prove it's impossible. You need to prove it is. One never has to prove a negative because a negative can never be proven. If evolutionary thinking required proving negatives, we'd all have amoeba-sized brains. A negative, however, can be disproven.

Dr. Michael Scriven, in his book Primary Philosophy, tackled the issue when he wrote about the impossibility of a definition. God is simply the impossibility of a definition.

After all, all the world's religions have certain touchstones when defining God. God must be good, or at least fairly nice. God must be omnipotent, having infinite knowledge. God must be omnipresent-- everywhere at once. God must have created everything, including him/herself --lest there be other Gods and thus, circular reasoning.

I would add that God must be capitalized: especially through donations and/ or sacrifices.

Given these conditions, it is high school level logic to disprove the existence of God -- at least the God described by the world's major religions. One can not be everywhere at once while possessing infinite knowledge. It presupposes that reality exists without a frame of reference, namely position. And one cannot have local knowledge without settling down in one location, like perhaps inside that purple Volkswagen on Pluto.

At the same time, multiple vantage points obliterate the possibility of omniscience. As a matter of physics, it just aint going to happen.

Dr. Scriven reasons that the religious, while creating God in their own image have, in effect, invented the "squond:" a shape that is both perfectly square and perfectly round at the same time. What they've invented is the impossibility of a definition. The definition contradicts itself. They've gonged themselves before they can even begin to tell you the wonderful new qualities of your "squond." If you entertain their double-speak, you are picking up a virus in your brain.

Sure, you'll go on to make big bucks healing people, and blessing people and possibly even killing people under His guidance, but you've already shot yourself in the foot. Never contradict yourself to a smart person, at least one who hasn't been previously indoctrinated, and thus potentially diseased with a cranial virus.

Remember, just like disproving the existence of God, we can't disprove religion isn't a disease, either, or so the Believer's reasoning goes.

To say God is omnipresent and omniscient at the same time is a contradiction in terms. Nice try, but you're busted. And, if you backtrack to say, okay, God isn't omniscient but he's omnipresent (or vice versa) then you don't have much of a God. Indeed, you could find yourself left with George Bush.

Certainly, science will never have all the answers. Some, however, find comfort in being on the right track.

Others like deluding themselves into a doped state of wishful thinking called doctrine -- not that there's anything wrong with doped states or delusion. Many go there recreationally. There's just something very undemocratic about doctrine, religious or otherwise. It's fascist and makes for bad logic. It's unclean, if you will.

What is certain, is that religion is a dead end. There is no effective way for doctrine to evolve. Religion may treat the symptoms of ignorance, as an aspirin treats a headache. But that ache for knowledge will always come back. It's the essence of freedom.

I often take "creative license" when doing commentary, and when one Believer asked me who gave me that creative license, I told him, "why the creator, who else?" -- the source of all creativity. His Creator, of course, had endowed me with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty and creative license. Since we created the Creator, we must have had those inalienable rights all along.

He countered that I didn't believe in a Creator.

"For the purposes of this argument, I don't need to," I said, "as long as you do."