What do you think of the Bible?

Inside the Fridge

In class the other day my professor brought up the fridge analogy in our discussion of theism and atheism. A reduced explanation of the fridge analogy being this: If someone says there is an elephant in their fridge, the first next step is to open the fridge to see the elephant. If you can’t see it you can claim that there is no elephant in the fridge. However, what if the elephant was hiding behind the ketchup? What if the elephant only appears when the fridge door is closed? What if the elephant can’t be seen by humans?

Basically the argument is made to shed light on the slippery slope in the debate about god’s existence.

Obviously the argument requires a suspension of disbelief. We all know that an elephant doesn’t fit inside of a household fridge and so we pretend that one can. However, without this sinking into rhetorical warfare, I want to shy away from that interpretation of the analogy. I want to be a little more literal with our understanding.

If the world is represented by a fridge, and the god you’re looking for is an elephant, your god doesn’t fit inside the world.

If we accept that the world that we live in has supplied us a framework or “fridge” for the universe, then whatever claims we make about the God(s) that created it need to be consistent with the framework.

It seems that, on both sides of the argument, people have placed their feet in concrete. Atheists that believe that since certain characteristics of a god don’t fit inside the framework, there is no room for any god to exist inside the framework. This is contrasted by theists that think that our understanding of what a god is or can do cannot progress any further than it was a couple thousand years ago (to use Christianity as an example).

I think the answer to the problem is simple. If you’re going to make claims about god, you need to make sure it fits inside of the fridge.
The discussion and debate should not be dealing in absolutes, it should be in refining each side’s beliefs and claims. The truth is we all have a choice in what we want to believe, but that doesn’t mean someone claiming to have an elephant in their fridge is as likely to be correct as someone claiming to have beer and leftover pizza in theirs.

 

What do you think?

 

There are people that will say “how could you fit God into the framework of something he created” … to which I’d reply that nearly everything we gather about the god’s we believe in is based off of our experience in this world. If we cannot learn anything about the supernatural by the framework of the supernatural, we cannot make any suggestions to the character of a god.