Something is Out There, But Not a Christian God
There are secrets in the universe and phenomena that could not have happened by chance. So what is it?
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Is there a God?
I’ve asked myself that question over and over for as long as I can remember.
A better question will be if there is a God like the Christian Bible says there is. A God who created the universe in a few days, cast our first human ancestors out of the Garden of Eden for eating an apple and flooded the earth because he was angry that humans weren’t doing what he felt they should do.
I would say, without a doubt, there is no God like that.
I can’t believe there would be a God who professes in one breath that he loves his little humans, and in another commits genocide and kills everyone off except for a few people in a boat with two of every animal, bird, and insect on earth.
I can’t believe in a God that “…so loved the world, he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life,” (John 3:16 — English Standard Version) but allows little children to be abused, raped, die from starvation, live in cages, and wither away from any number of a thousand different diseases.
No amount of free will makes up for all the suffering when we still have to bow and scrape to a God and his Son, who only pay attention to his sinful creatures when it is time to bring judgment and armageddon on them.
I can’t believe in a God who is all-powerful and omnipotent, yet allows his most important creation to have free reign to destroy his other creations and allows evil to thrive and influence the powerful among humankind.
I cannot believe in someone who expects us to pray and worship him and allows us to think he answers us, when luck, location, and chance are the reason some of us fare better than others.
I can’t believe in a God that would give a few fortunate people untold riches when they pray for it but would allow other people to die in poverty and starvation when they pray to the same God.
I can’t believe in a God like that.
“I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian God may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.”― Bertrand Russell
But there are wonderous things that happen all the time; patterns that are only seen if you look carefully.
- How was everything in place at precisely the right moment it needed to be to create the Big Bang?
- How were the conditions always ripe for every piece of matter to evolve into what we see now, billions of years later?
- Sometimes it takes millions or billions of years, but can you believe the earth and everything in it, and the universe all happened by chance?
My mind cannot fathom how it could have all happened by luck and happenstance.
As an example, let me use an illustration from my days studying the bible with the Jehovah’s Witnesses. This is one of the ways they tried to debunk evolution:
What if you had a complicated mechanical pocket watch, with hundreds of moving pieces, and you took it apart and dropped the elements in a bucket of water? Do you think if you stuck your hand in and agitated the water, eventually, you would have a complete pocket watch again? Even if you stirred the water for a million years, do you think the piece would ever come together to create a precise timepiece?
I wonder what the chances of this happening are? Now, imagine if this would have to occur with a computer, a camera, a smartphone, and a million other things that we see around us today. Could that minuscule chance happen again and again until everything exists again, even if you had a billion years?
Not likely.
Now think about one thing: the human body. Is there a chance that the brain evolved into the sophisticated computer that it is? Then the eye, do you understand how complicated the processes in the eye are to allow us to see color? What about the ear, the heart, the muscles, or the hand?
Did all of this come about by chance, or was there another force at work helping these creations to evolve into what they are now, over billions and billions of years?
It makes you wonder.
It makes me wonder if there is not some ever-present force, call it “the universe,” or “mother Nature,” if you will. What if there was something behind the scenes, tweaking the threads and encouraging one piece of matter to combine with another, or pushing one person into the influence of another.
It might help us explain other things as well:
- When we have a conversation with someone in our head, who are we talking to?
- Why do people fall so deep in love they feel like they were destined to be together?
- How can some of us remember past lives?
- What is déjà vu?
- Are there infinite universes that bump into each other, causing people to see ghosts and apparitions?
- How do you explain Karma and how a person often gets what they deserve?
- What happens when we die? Do we wake up as a baby in another universe and live another life?
- How can we believe we are the only life forms in an endless universe?
How come things appear to happen by chance, but on closer inspection, seem directed by some other force?
“So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You’d better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can’t rearrange the universe. “— Isaac Asimov
There are so many unanswered questions, and humans don’t live long enough to answer them all. Even with hundreds of years of science, we are no closer to understanding the nature of the universe.
The sad thing is: humans will destroy the only home we have and our existence in the process. All those years of study will be lost with us, and the universe will go on evolving.
Maybe an alien civilization will find our remains and study us and find that we were close to understanding everything, but our greed and stupidity caused our society to implode.
I believe in something, but it’s not the God from the bible. I don’t fault anyone else for their beliefs, but I chose not to believe in fiction and fairy tales.
But, I can’t ignore that there is some force at work in the universe, causing creation and evolution, casting universes to close, and bringing people and events together seemingly by chance.
There is something at work, and it makes me feel good knowing we aren’t alone in the universe.
