What’s your opinion on God?

You don’t have an opinion about the existence of God. You may think God exists. You may think God doesn’t exist. Regardless, that isn’t an opinion. You’re either right or you are wrong.

It’s okay if you didn’t realize that before. The Pew Research Center surveyed Americans in 2018, and it turns out that only a little more than a third of all Americans are able to identify fact and opinion statements correctly.

Facts are those statements which are objective. Opinions are those statements which are subjective. Another way to say this is facts remain the same regardless of how you feel about it; opinions change based on your feelings.

Perhaps a practical example will be helpful for some people. Let’s talk about an apple. There’s an apple on my desk. It doesn’t matter if you feel like there’s no apple on my desk, it’s still there. If you feel that there’s no apple on my desk, you’re wrong. Now with that said, from where you are, there may be or there may not be a kiwi on my desk as well. Now, you have a feeling about that kiwi. You feel that it’s there or you feel that it’s not. (Or you don’t, some people have practiced suppressing that feeling. If you’ve practiced suppressing that feeling or otherwise don’t have that feeling, allow yourself to guess. Guessing puts you in the place of having that feeling for the purposes of this demonstration. The case where you honestly don’t have a feeling on the subject is outside the scope of this conversation.)

Your feeling may be strong. Your feeling may be slight. Regardless, you are either correct, or you are incorrect. The existence of the kiwi on my desk is not dependent on your feeling. If I gave you more information, such as there’s a fruit salad on my desk, this might strengthen your feeling or weaken your feeling. This will depend in part on how fruit salads you’ve had in the past were prepared. If every fruit salad you’ve had has had kiwis in it, then you are likely to feel more strongly that there’s at least one kiwi on my desk. If every fruit salad you’ve had has been prepared without kiwis, you’re likely to use that as an indication that I was expecting you to extrapolate that there’s no kiwi. Regardless, the actual existence or nonexistence of that kiwi has not changed.

So now I’ve exposed you to two facts: there’s an apple on my desk, and there’s a kiwi on my desk. The truth of these statements does not depend on how you feel about it. The existence is something that the object — the apple — has independent of how the subject — you — interacts with it. That’s why it’s called “objective.”

The apple on my desk is a Fuji. The reason it’s a Fuji is because I like the taste of Fuji apples. There’s an objective, factual statement there: the chemical interactions between my tongue and the juice in this apple will cause a sequence of events which will result in the release of dopamine within my brain and cause me to be happier. These are facts. It is also a fact that some other people’s tongues will interact differently with the juice in this apple and result in them being less happy. So when I am the subject, it is possible to assign this apple the quality of “tasty.” “Tasty” isn’t inherent to the apple. It has to do with how the object — the apple — interacts and affects the subject — me. That’s why it’s called “subjective.”

God’s existence, like all existence, is objective. Just like you might be wrong about the kiwi on my desk, you may be wrong about the existence of God. Just like the kiwi, the reason you are wrong may be that you have the wrong idea in your head about what I mean by “kiwi.” (After all, are kiwis fruit or birds?) It might be because you’ve wrongly interpreted the data you’ve been given. Regardless, if you’re wrong about the existence of something, that’s your deficiency, not a deficiency in the thing you doubt.

I don’t believe bigfoot is real. I’m not going into all my reasons for doubting the existence of bigfoot. It’s enough for this example to say I doubt it very much. If bigfoot is found, then I’m wrong. The deficiency is in me, not bigfoot. Bigfoot exists or doesn’t, regardless of how I feel about it.

Similarly for the chupacabra. The chupacabra either exists or doesn’t exist, regardless of how I feel about it. However, I identify two completely separate chupacabras. The idea of the chupacabra began in southwestern American folklore. Then, ranchers in the southwest started seeing animals that they identified with the folklore based on appearance and behavior. Then bodies of these animals were found. These bodies were all identified as canids. (Dogs, foxes, or coyotes.) They had mange or some other condition that caused them to lose their hair. Words have the meaning we give them, so when those farmers pointed at an objective object and said, “That’s a chupacabra,” there’s a certain sense in which they define chupacabra at that moment. So there are now two separate items identified as chupacabra: one is any canid that has a condition causing it to lose its hair and avoid normal social interactions that would normally be characteristic of canids. The other is a beast of folklore that might be informally defined as the canid version of a vampire. The first is real and we have bodies to prove it. The second is far more likely not to be real. The not-real object is defined by features that are rare in nature, such as sustaining itself almost entirely on the blood of other animals but not the flesh of those animals. ‘Rare’ doesn’t mean ‘never,’ so it’s still possible. If these other kinds of chupacabra exist, they are distinct from the mange infested canids that we are currently aware of. If they exist, their existence isn’t based on my belief of them.

We start to venture into a very murky area, though. One quality of the legendary chupacabra is that it has three toes on each foot. Another is that it has a forked tongue. (According to some versions of the legend.) If we find a canid with a version of mange that causes it to survive on blood without flesh and to fork its tongue, but the number of toes remains unchanged, have we discovered the legendary chupacabra or not? How close is close enough? We even run into this definition problem with God: not everyone defines the word “god” in the same way.

How close is close enough is a matter of opinion. It changes based on who you are. When they discovered that some mange infected canids became antisocial and aggressive and looked scaly from a distance, that was close enough for some. Not for others. It may be objectively true that there are no species of animals that meet all the conflicting legends of the chupacabra. Still, it is also objectively true that some diseased forms of known species exhibited enough distinct features to warrant a unique, colloquial designation and matched enough perceptible qualities with the legend for the name to stick.

So what if we discovered that some gorillas had escaped a zoo in the early twentieth century and were breeding and hiding in the western United States? Would that be close enough for bigfoot? Is the rhinoceros close enough to be a unicorn? Were the Kraken sightings of giant squid or sightings of wales or both or simply the product of overactive imaginations? We may never know for sure, but that doesn’t make those opinions. They are facts, they are just facts we may never know the truth value for.

So when someone says that it’s just your opinion against theirs whether God exists, they’re wrong. You don’t have an opinion about God’s existence. If you feel one way or the other on the subject, you are either right or you are wrong.