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| Seeking a more logical cosmology. |
I've been involved in a lot of
discussions lately about the existence of God or, conversely, the
folly of faith. Mostly these have been fairly civil dialogues on Soul
Pancake or The Great Silent Majority page on Facebook. I recommend
either or both to your attention if you think it's fun to think and
write about life's great questions with people who are willing to
listen politely, even to those they consider to be idiots. I've
distilled much of what I've posted elsewhere into this little
treatise on why I believe in God and why I do not think this is
lunacy.
Atheists like to assert that
there is no evidence to support the existence of God. Believers then
are held to be an ignorant and superstitious lot who need religion as
a crutch to face the crushing realities of a meaningless existence.
Or, as comedian, Bill Maher, quipped:
Faith
means making a virtue out of not thinking. It’s nothing to brag
about. And those who preach faith, and enable and elevate it are
intellectual slaveholders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy
and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and
destruction. Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who
don’t have all the answers to think that they do.
Maher is a funny person and a
bonafide wit, but he has no more philosophical leg to stand on here
than Dr. Stephen Hawking who has suggested that the laws of nature
prove that there is no God. According to Hawking the universe 'popped' into existence, in accordance with the rules of quantum physics, as
an 'infinitesimally
small, infinitesimally dense' proton—so small and so dense that it
could not admit time. There was therefore no
time for a creator to have acted, and, indeed, no need of a creator
except to explain all these things before we had quantum physics to
take over the task.
For Hawking, Maher, and all the
rest whose understanding of our existence is rooted in the physical
sciences, God is a construct. They believe that men invented gods to
explain the mysteries of the universe. Presumably they believe that,
in modern times, Yawheh, Allah, and the Father of Jesus, all the same
God, are just more complex and fully realized versions of the same
superstitious hokum.
The
Big Bang is a theory whose purpose is to explain the existence of the
universe without God, and its proponents have made good on its
promise. Of course this is rather easier when the theoretical
construct was made without any reference to God. When it comes to
accepting theory as scientific fact though, in the absence of any as
yet complete proof, a certain amount of faith is required even though
those who advance the theory would probably deny it.
On the other hand, be He construct
or reality, God has always required faith. The faithful
already know this—the ones who actually think about it at any rate.
There is no conclusive proof of the existence of God. I will submit
that there is a lot of evidence, but there is no proof. I'm talking
about objective, scientific proof—the kind that can be tested and
verified by repeatable experimentation. There will always be some
theological wankers about who will quote the Bible as an authority in
an argument with an atheist as if Scripture carries any weight with a
non-believer. Most of us realize that this is not just an exercise in
futility. It is stupid. The Bible does not prove that God exists with
any authority except to those who already accept it. This won't work
to bridge the chasm between objective reality and the metaphysical
plane. For that we need faith.
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Faith is bigger than certainty,
but it may still require
heavy equipment. |
For
the intelligent believer, faith must necessarily contain an element
of doubt else it isn't faith at all but certain knowledge. Certain
knowledge does not move mountains. Certain knowledge does not even build churches. Certain knowledge is not
spiritual, religious, holy, nor full of grace. Certain knowledge, or
at least the requirement for it, is the necessary fundamental
limitation of the physical sciences. Science requires proof to keep
it honest. When science makes an assertion that is not backed up by
proof, it is required to keep looking.
Doubt,
on the other hand, is the liberating principle of faith and the
ultimate foundation of metaphysics. A metaphysical philosopher must
ask a question of the discipline that no self-respecting physicist
ever would or could ask about physics, and that is, 'Is metaphysics
even possible?' Asking this question makes metaphysics at once more
honest and analytical than physics will ever be. Why? For the simple
reason that it forces the philosopher to consider, with humility,
that he might be wrong.
As
I've already said, atheists believe that God, or the gods, are a
construct of the human imagination designed to explain the mysteries
of the universe. I believe that this human ability to conceive of a
creator god is the best evidence we have that one actually exists.
Here's why.
If
you subscribe to Stephen Hawking's idea of the Big Bang—that a prototypical, protean proton 'popped' into existence and exploded, and that all of
the untold trillions of selective events that happened between then
and now, leading to our current state of evolution and development,
were completely natural and godless and random, then what in our
experience of this process would lead us to conceive of a creator cause?
Someone
once said, 'all art is derivative.' (I've been trying for several
days now to find out just who said it first, but it's all over the
internet without any attribution. If anyone knows who said this first,
please let me know.) What this means is that, even in the arts - presumably mankind's most creative endeavors - nothing is truly
original. Everything is built on something that went before. I submit
that this is true of everything that men do.
There
is nothing man has accomplished that is not rooted in something else
that already existed. To be sure there are materials that exist today
that did not exist at the dawn of time, but every one of them is
comprised of stuff that did. There are concepts and designs and
theories that seem new and wondrous, but all of them are derived from
and built on the foundations of the past. Even at the height of its
power, humanity is not capable of producing anything from nothing.
Everything humanity has done is derivative. Science does not beget;
it discovers. Or, as Ecclesiastes has it:
What
has been will be again,
what
has been done will be done again;
there
is nothing new under the sun.
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Beatific vision or
atmospheric pollutants? |
If we are nothing more than the
sum total of all the random electro-chemical responses that have
flowed into our genetic makeup, how did any of us come to conceive of
a creator at all? If there is no God then there could be nothing in
our naturally-selected history upon which we could begin to assemble
this concept. If God doesn't exist, we couldn't possibly have made
Him up. What I think instead - no, what I choose to believe - is that
we are predisposed to believe in God because we were imbued with a
spark of divinity by the creator.
I believe this because it has
been given to me to do so. I am not a fool, and I am not insane. I
know full well that I had to make a choice to get to this state—a
choice that is not supported by any objective, scientific logic, but
one that nevertheless makes perfect sense to me.
There is a word in ancient
Hebrew, 'ruach.' It is usually translated as breath or spirit. We
first encounter it in the Genesis account of creation. I am not
offering this as any kind of proof. I am offering it as an
explanation as to why I believe what I believe. I am not getting into
an argument of Genesis vs. evolution. I believe in evolution, and I
accept science, as far as it goes, as demonstrably true. I also
believe Genesis—not as a literal account of creation, but as a
lovely, poetic allegory for the metaphysical reality of man's place in
it.
There
are famously two accounts of creation in Genesis. They are different
from one another, our first clue that the Bible, even for believers,
is not meant to be taken literally. As to the origins of man, the
thing I mean to consider here, Genesis 1:27 says, 'God created man
in His image, in the divine image He created him, male and female He
created them.' In Genesis 2:7 it says, 'the Lord God formed man out
of the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of
life, and so man became a living being.'
These
two accounts are different, but they are meant to be taken together.
They are two different ways of looking at the same thing. The Aramaic
word for 'breath of life' in chapter 2 is 'ruach.' Its parallel in
chapter 1 is 'the divine image.' God breathed His divine self-image
into mankind, male and female, and made of us something entirely new.
This is the only reason I can fathom that we are even able to
conceive of things beyond our knowing.
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| Pondering imponderables. |
Were
it not for this ruach, we would not be able to ponder infinity. We
would not be able to embrace divinity. We would not be able to
approach holiness. We would instead be imprisoned by our mere
chemistry. Without the breath of divine life we would be incapable of
bridging the gap between the physical and the metaphysical. We would
be the pinnacle of mammalian existence, but we would be incapable of
imagining anything else.
This
for me is the best evidence that God exists. It doesn't have to be in
the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition. Virtually every religious
tradition has its own creation narrative, and they all presuppose
some sort of relationship between mankind and the divine. My point is
that, no matter the faith tradition, somewhere, somehow God has
enabled us to know something of Him, and had He not done so, had He
not intervened in our evolution, we would not be able to think Him up
on our own. Of course I rely on my faith to tell me this...so I could
be wrong.
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