ALAN DERSHOWITZ
AUTHOR, LAW PROFESSOR, ‘MOST FAMOUS LAWYER IN THE WORLD’
Alan Dershowitz, Professor Emeritus at Harvard Law School, has written 52 books, and more than 1,000 articles. He has successfully litigated hundreds of cases, half of them pro bono. He taught 10,000 students in his 50-year career at Harvard Law School, and has been called the most “famous lawyer in the world.” Among his recent books are The Price of Principle: Why Integrity is Worth the Consequences; Get Trump: The Threat to Civil Liberties, Due Process, and Our Constitutional Rule of Law; and Killing: How the Law Decides Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die. A librarian told him that he has written more words than any Harvard professor in history, having been made a full professor at age 28, the youngest in the Law School’s history. At age 85, he continues to advise presidents, prime ministers, and others. He is deeply involved in American and Israeli political and legal affairs.
An Argument Against God’s Nonexistence
ALAN DERSHOWITZ
I have always been a skeptic. That is my God-given right, gift, and curse.
The nature and quality of my doubts have varied over the past 70 years, but the constant in my life has always been skepticism about everything. When I was a troublesome student in an Orthodox Jewish yeshiva, every day we recited prayers that began “Baruch ata Adonai” — “blessed are you God.” I composed a variation that reflected my skepticism and my struggle to overcome it:
“Baruch ata I don’t know (or adunno, as I pronounced it).
Baruch ata I deny
Baruch ata I’m not sure.
Baruch ata show me why...
Baruch ata maybe so.
Baruch ata why not try.
Baruch ata still not sure.”
If the existence of God could be proved empirically, then belief in God would be a matter of science, not of faith or religion. But it is in the very nature of the concept of God that there can never be definitive proof or disproof of God’s existence. The case for God will always be somewhat uncertain.
The strongest argument has always been a negative one: without a Creator, certain observable phenomena seem unexplainable. The “God of the Gaps” explains what science cannot, but as science explains more, the gaps become smaller and so does the function of God. But there is one gap that will never be filled, that is inherently unfillable. Science will never be able to explain how something came of nothing. The Big Bang theory might explain how big (the universe) expanded from small (subatomic particles), but it cannot explain how small came from nothing. Similarly, evolution can explain how complex (humans) evolved from simple (one-celled units), but it cannot explain how a living cell capable of evolving came from nothing.
It is this conundrum, Creation!, that prevents me from being an atheist. It requires me, an honest skeptic of all things, to doubt the non- existence of God. It is not a traditional “leap of faith.” It is closer to a rejection of non-faith — an enduring doubt about the non-existence of a creator.
Maybe someday science will fill even this gap, though I deeply doubt it. I believe it is inherent in the limitation of the human mind to be incapable of imagining nothingness becoming something based on natural change. I recognize that earlier humans could not imagine many of the remarkable insights that later humans possess, but I think this is different!
The never-ending march of science might prove me wrong, as it has proved so many other skeptics wrong. I would welcome a natural explanation of creation from nothing. But until this gap of gaps is satisfactorily filled, I shall continue to doubt the nonexistence of God and cannot understand how atheists are so certain that God doesn’t exist.