A Thought Experiment on Divine Irrelevance
This is not an argument for god.
It is a controlled thought experiment.
For the sake of analysis only, let us assume that a god exists and triggered the universe into being. We will not argue for this claim, defend it, or attempt to make it plausible. We grant it provisionally, as one grants a premise in logic, to see what follows from it.
Then we impose a strict constraint.
All religious texts are removed. Every scripture, prophet, revelation, miracle claim, vision, commandment, promise, and tradition is set aside. No holy books. No divinely sanctioned histories. No appeals to authority written long after the events they describe. No theology smuggled back in under poetic language.
What remains is a single question, and it is deliberately narrow:
What difference has god made to the world from roughly two million BCE to 2025 AD?
Not what people believe god has done.
Not what institutions claim god has done.
But what impact can be identified without reintroducing revelation by stealth.
If a god exists but leaves no detectable footprint, that god is not merely hidden. That god is irrelevant.
What “impact” means when belief is excluded
Before auditing history, the rules must be explicit. Otherwise the discussion collapses into assertion, metaphor, or emotional insulation.
Impact, in this context, means at least one of the following:
- Repeatable intervention that alters outcomes in ways not explained by known natural processes.
- Moral guidance that is clearly non-human in origin, coherent across time, stable across cultures, and superior to what humans reach through experience and social evolution.
- A demonstrable difference between a world with god and a world without god that does not rely on scripture to define the difference.
Anything less is narrative rather than explanation.
David Hume framed the epistemic standard with characteristic bluntness:
“A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”
A god that exists only in assertion, tradition, or private feeling does not earn explanatory weight. Existence alone is cheap. Relevance is expensive.
Deep time: two million BCE and the long silence
For the overwhelming majority of human existence, humans were not theologians. They were prey.
From roughly two million BCE onward, the defining features of life were hunger, predation, disease, injury, and early death. Infant mortality was extreme. Life expectancy was short. Pain was routine. Survival depended on luck, endurance, and cooperation, not virtue or belief.
If a god exists and cares about human wellbeing, this period is not a footnote. It is the main chapter.
There is no detectable intervention. No easing of suffering. No moral instruction. No protection for the innocent. Entire hominin branches vanish without ceremony. Extinction is not rare. It is normal.
The planet behaves like a closed system governed by geology, climate, and biology. Ice ages advance and retreat. Volcanoes erupt. Asteroids strike. Species disappear. None of this looks curated.
Blaise Pascal, writing centuries before modern evolutionary theory, captured the emotional impact of confronting such a universe:
“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.”
Terror, however, is not evidence of care. Silence is not guidance. A universe that terrifies does not automatically instruct.
Nature as it actually operates
Remove theology and observe biology without sentiment.
Predation is not an anomaly. It is the engine. Animals survive by killing and consuming other animals, often alive. Parasites evolve to blind, sterilise, and hollow out hosts from the inside. Disease does not distinguish between the virtuous and the cruel, the young and the old, the believer and the sceptic.
This is not a corrupted system. It is a functioning one.
If god designed this system, cruelty is not a deviation. It is integral.
If god did not design it, the system explains itself perfectly well without intention.
Either way, god adds nothing to the explanation.
Richard Feynman’s unsentimental reminder applies directly:
“The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.”
Nor, it seems, to spare you.
Attempts to frame suffering as “necessary for growth” or “part of a plan” dissolve under scale. There is no growth lesson in parasites that eat eyes from the inside. There is no moral development in mass extinction events. These are not teaching tools. They are mechanical outcomes.
The emergence of humans and the absence of supervision
When anatomically modern humans appear, nothing fundamental changes in the structure of the world.
Tools improve slowly. Fire is mastered. Language develops. Social bonds strengthen. Progress is incremental, fragile, and uneven. Knowledge is lost as often as it is gained. Civilisations rise and fall without learning from one another’s mistakes.
There is no identifiable moment where a god intervenes to clarify morality, restrain violence, or correct error. Humans learn by failing. They learn by imitation, punishment, cooperation, and catastrophe.
If god is teaching, the method is indistinguishable from neglect.
John Lennon’s line, stripped of sentimentality, remains accurate:
“Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.”
No divine annotation appears in the margins of history.
History without scripture: causes remain stubbornly ordinary
Strip away religious narratives and audit history as a chain of causes.
Empires rise and fall due to geography, logistics, resources, administration, disease, and military technology. Crop failures trigger famine. Pandemics spread regardless of prayer. Earthquakes flatten cities without regard for devotion. Wars are won by supply lines, not righteousness.
No civilisation is spared because it worshipped correctly. No society collapses because it doubted at the wrong moment. Belief does not predict survival.
Karl Marx’s sober formulation, often quoted but rarely understood, remains descriptively accurate:
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.”
Humans act within constraints. God does not appear as one of those constraints.
Even events later framed as divinely guided look, on inspection, like human ambition colliding with material limits. The explanatory work is done entirely by economics, psychology, and power.
Suffering as the constant, not the exception
Across history, suffering does not correlate with virtue.
Children develop bone cancer. Genetic disorders devastate families before moral agency exists. Earthquakes bury entire towns. Tsunamis erase generations. Plagues kill the devout and the sceptical alike.
If god intervenes selectively, the criteria are opaque to the point of incoherence.
If god intervenes universally, the interventions fail catastrophically.
The classical formulation attributed to Epicurus still frames the relevance problem cleanly:
“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?”
This is not rhetoric. It is a functional audit.
A god that does not reliably reduce unnecessary suffering does not function as a moral governor. At best, it is a silent origin hypothesis with no ongoing role.
Morality without revelation
Once scripture is removed, morality does not evaporate. It becomes observable.
Humans develop moral norms because cooperation outperforms chaos. Empathy improves group survival. Rules emerge to manage conflict. Punishment deters harm. Reputation matters. Trust becomes valuable.
As material conditions improve, violence declines and rights expand. When conditions collapse, morality collapses with them. This correlation is robust, measurable, and repeatable.
Thomas Hobbes, writing without illusions about human nature, was clear:
“Covenants, without the sword, are but words.”
Morality functions because humans enforce it, revise it, and renegotiate it. Not because it descends from the heavens fully formed.
If god authored morality, its implementation has been outsourced entirely to material conditions and human institutions.
Prayer, anecdote, and the problem of noise
Without scripture, prayer claims reduce to anecdotes.
Some people recover from illness. Others do not. Some tragedies are narrowly avoided. Others are not. Different cultures report incompatible divine responses with equal confidence and sincerity.
There is no signal. Only noise.
If prayer worked reliably, it would be measurable. Hospitals would track it. Insurers would price it. Emergency services would integrate it. None do.
As the physician and writer Ben Goldacre put it plainly:
“Anecdote is not data.”
Hope is not a mechanism. Desire is not causation.
Fine-tuning, beauty, and other detours
Arguments from fine-tuning, beauty, or consciousness are often raised at this stage.
Even if they pointed to a creator, they would not establish relevance.
A god that sets initial conditions and then never intervenes is not a guide, judge, or moral authority. It is a speculative cause with no bearing on how humans should live or how suffering unfolds.
Bertrand Russell drew this distinction cleanly:
“The question of the existence of God is one thing; the question of his relevance to human life is another.”
Origin is not governance. Explanation is not instruction.
The relevance test, stated plainly
At this point, the argument reduces cleanly:
- If god intervenes detectably, evidence should exist without scripture.
- If god intervenes but leaves no trace, the intervention is operationally meaningless.
- If god does not intervene, god is irrelevant.
The world behaves exactly as if option two or three is correct.
Either way, god drops out of every serious explanatory model.
What kind of god survives this audit?
Only a very thin one.
A god that initiates existence and then withdraws completely. A god with no interest in outcomes. No moral governance. No communication. No intervention.
Such a god is not the god of religion. It is a metaphysical placeholder.
Baruch Spinoza’s austere formulation captures what remains:
“God is nothing but Nature itself.”
Which is another way of saying: nothing changes.
Why religion persists anyway
If god is irrelevant, why does belief persist?
Because religion is not primarily about god. It is about humans.
Religion provides identity, hierarchy, certainty, comfort, and narrative order. It offers meaning where the universe offers indifference. It binds groups, legitimises authority, and softens existential anxiety.
Sigmund Freud was unsparing on this point:
“Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.”
Persistence does not imply truth. It implies utility.
Final clarification
This argument does not claim that god does not exist.
It claims something more damaging to religion: that whether god exists or not makes no observable difference to how the world actually works.
A god with no detectable footprint is not a guide, not a judge, and not a plan. It is a guess.
Closing
From deep time to modern time, the universe behaves as if no one is listening.
If a god exists, it does not steer history, soften suffering, clarify morality, or answer cries for help in any way that survives scrutiny. The world runs on impersonal forces and human choices, exactly as it would if no divine ear were pressed to the wall of existence.
Albert Camus expressed the conclusion without metaphysics:
“The universe is indifferent.”
And indifference, when it persists for millions of years, is indistinguishable from absence.
Typical Objections (and Why They Fail)
At this point, the objections arrive on schedule. They are rarely original, often recycled, and almost always rely on quietly reintroducing the very things this thought experiment explicitly removed. What follows is not a debate. It is an identification of category errors.
Objection 1: “God works in mysterious ways”
This is not an explanation. It is an admission of failure.
When “mystery” is invoked, explanatory work has stopped. The claim becomes unfalsifiable, immune to evidence, and therefore useless. A cause that explains everything explains nothing.
Pierre-Simon Laplace captured the issue precisely when asked where God fit into his model of the universe:
“I had no need of that hypothesis.”
A god whose actions cannot be distinguished from randomness, chance, or natural processes is not a guiding agent. It is a placeholder for ignorance.
Objection 2: “You can’t expect God to intervene all the time”
This objection quietly shifts the goalposts.
The argument is not that god fails to intervene constantly. It is that god fails to intervene detectably, reliably, or meaningfully at all across millions of years of unnecessary suffering.
If intervention is rare, opaque, selective, and indistinguishable from coincidence, then it does no explanatory work. A fire alarm that sounds once every few centuries, at random, whether there is a fire or not, is not a safety system. It is noise.
Objection 3: “God gave humans free will”
This is a category error dressed as moral philosophy.
Free will does not explain earthquakes, childhood leukaemia, parasitic blindness, tsunamis, genetic disorders, or pandemics. These are not consequences of human choice. They are features of the physical world.
Invoking free will here is not a defence of god. It is an evasion of the problem.
As Voltaire noted after the Lisbon earthquake:
“Will you say, this is the effect of eternal laws directing the acts of a free and good God?”
Natural suffering remains untouched by this reply.
Objection 4: “Without God there is no objective morality”
This objection confuses origin with function.
Even if morality required a divine source, which has not been demonstrated, it would not follow that morality depends on ongoing divine involvement. In practice, moral behaviour correlates with institutions, incentives, enforcement, education, and material security.
Morality improves when conditions improve. It collapses when conditions collapse. This is not controversial. It is observable.
As J. L. Mackie put it:
“There are no objective values.”
And yet humans continue to behave morally, revise norms, and expand rights without waiting for revelation.
Objection 5: “You’re ignoring personal experience”
No. Personal experience is being placed in its proper evidential category.
Private experiences are psychologically real but epistemically weak. They vary wildly across cultures, religions, and individuals. They contradict one another. They track expectation, upbringing, and emotional need.
William James himself, often cited in defence of religious experience, conceded the limitation:
“Religious experiences are authoritative for the individual who has them, but they have no authority for anyone else.”
Experience explains belief. It does not establish truth.
Objection 6: “Science can’t explain everything”
Correct. And irrelevant.
The argument is not that science explains everything. It is that god explains nothing that cannot be explained equally well without god.
Ignorance is not evidence of divinity. A gap in knowledge is not an invitation to insert an agent with intentions, desires, and moral expectations.
As Bertrand Russell warned:
“What science cannot tell us, mankind cannot know.”
Invoking god does not turn unknowns into knowledge. It merely labels them.
Objection 7: “This is just atheism in disguise”
No. This is weaker than atheism, and more damaging.
Atheism denies existence. This argument questions relevance.
A god may exist and still be irrelevant. A god may exist and still leave the world exactly as we would expect if no god were present. That conclusion does not require denial. It requires observation.
A deity that cannot be distinguished from absence is, for all practical purposes, absent.
Objection 8: “You’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater”
This objection usually arrives when everything else has failed.
What it means, translated, is: even if the claims are false, religion feels useful. Comfort, tradition, community, identity.
That may be true. It is also beside the point.
Utility is not truth. Psychological comfort does not establish cosmic relevance. Humans invent many useful fictions. Their usefulness does not make them real.
As George Santayana noted:
“Faith in something not yet proven is the very definition of belief.”
Belief is not evidence. Comfort is not causation.
The quiet problem beneath every objection
Every objection above shares a common move:
they attempt to smuggle revelation, exception, or special pleading back into a framework that explicitly excludes it.
Once scripture is removed, god is left with no voice, no actions, no moral interventions, and no distinguishable impact on the course of events.
At that point, god is not being rejected. God is being outgrown.