In the 1960's, it
was proclaimed that 'God is dead', a sentiment I wholeheartedly agree with. The
only problem is that in order for God to be dead, God had to have existed in
the first place, and IMHO, God never existed and doesn't exist now. 99.9% of
all the gods who ever were or conceived of (i.e. - Zeus) have been consigned to
the rubbish bin as garbage. It's time to dump one more God into that bin.
1) Let me start
with the Concept or Nature of God: There's something odd about God's origin and
behaviour.
If God created
the Universe, what, or who, created God? Who is God's mother in other words?
And if something or someone created God, what created that something or someone
(and so on and so on)? It's an infinite regression. It's far easier to believe
the cosmos has always existed though that doesn't mean our Universe didn't have
a point-in-time origin or beginning since a previous universe can give rise to
another universe (like ours) in sequence.
Actually, I
strongly suspect the answer to 'who created God?' is fairly easy, probably
downright obvious in an intuitive sort of way. Humans created God in man's
image (and probably all other deities as well, including Santa Claus, the
Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy), rather than the reverse - God didn't create
humans in God's image. [Actually, perhaps man was created in God's image. Based
on the writings in the Old Testament, God has to be described as a dictator
('thou shall not...') and a tyrant, a hypocrite (do as I say, not as I do),
someone who's vain and petty, someone who sanctions any number of atrocities in
His name (which if committed today would results in charges of war crimes),
someone who's cruel, jealous, nasty, raciest, and sexist, someone who's totally
up Himself, highly demanding and basically an all around SOB. Remind you of
anyone you know, or know of?]
If birds have a
deity, I'm sure their god would have a beak and feathers and go squawk (or more
likely 'gobble-gobble'). I suspect that humans have a quasi hard-wired need to
believe in a something(s) that one can always fall back on to explain and
answer those unanswerable questions, as well as provide comfort for that
ultimate question - the nature of death and what follows on from that.
Anyway, if God
has always existed, then God's infinitely old. In that case, an infinite amount
of time had to pass before His creation of our Universe - which is an
absurdity. How is it that you exist for an infinite amount of time and the get
then all of a sudden get this bright idea or urge to create a Universe? What
was God doing the 'day' before s/he created our Universe? Perhaps one answer is
that God has always created universes, one after another after another -
creating universes, that's God's thing! And if God is infinitely old, then
there must have been, or are, an infinite number of universes created and in
existence.
Speaking of
creation, and assuming just one Universe, that's an awful lot of Universe
created just for little old us! Seriously, and for example, if God created
everything, then God created the planetoid Pluto (and associated moon). My
question is what was the point of expending the resources to do that? We can't
see Pluto with the naked eye. If Pluto didn't exist would anything on Earth be
different? Pluto adds nothing to our quality of life (or lack of it) and
presumably ditto applies to any extraterrestrials in our solar system (assuming
that Pluto and moon are uninhabited that is, and that's a fairly safe bet). Of
course you may argue that perhaps Pluto was impacted by a killer asteroid that
otherwise would have hit us and therefore has affected our quality of life.
Then wouldn't it have been easier on God not to have created Pluto and not
created that asteroid as well? This creation of things with no relevance to the
apparent pinnacle of creation (the be-all-and-end-all of God's efforts), that
is to say, us, makes no sense. It's sort of like buying pots and pans, or a
chess set, for your pet goldfish. What would be the point? Further a field, we
couldn't see 99.999% of the observable universe, and 99.999% of the observable
universe has no bearing on our day-to-day existence. What's the point then of
creating all that extra 99.999%?
If God exists,
why doesn't He (I'll keep with tradition and assume the masculine) show His
face today? I mean, He wasn't all that shy about getting in the human race's
face way back in Old Testament days, so what is God so afraid of today? Maybe
He's afraid of our nukes! That aside, it wouldn't be all the difficult for a
Supreme Being to make a show today akin to some of the stunts He pulled way
back when!
If God so wants
humans to believe in Him, then it would have been so ultra easy to have just
one sentence somewhere in the Bible that would be understandable to later
generations, even if that Biblical sentence were baffling to contemporaries.
The sentence would have been a sentence attributed to God that something only
God (or an extraterrestrial) could have known at the time. For example, if
kangaroos had been mentioned, or Antarctica, or that bright light in the sky
that moves slowly through the heavens had rings around it, or that salt was a
mixture of two things, or what about another commandment akin to 'Thou shall
not go faster than the speed of light'. Just one simple little sentence -
that's all it would have taken - something, anything one-off that illustrated a
knowledge of biology, geography, astronomy, chemistry or physics that the
natives of the time wouldn't have known about. Alas, it was not to be. Methinks
God missed a golden opportunity to reveal His actual existence beyond
reasonable question. Or, updating to the present, God could fuse the Ten
Commandments onto the Lunar surface, easily visible through modest telescopes,
or do a repeat of one of those Biblical happenings like making the Sun stand
still for a spell!
If God exists,
yet we can explain life, the Universe, and simply everything without requiring
a God hypothesis, the God has gone to extraordinary lengths to make Himself
totally irrelevant!
2) Is God All
Knowing and All Powerful? Hardly!
Not even God can
get around the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics, which
states that it is impossible to know simultaneously any particle's precise
position and trajectory.
Presumably, God,
like gravity, and anything comprised of mass and/or energy can't operate at
faster than light speed. If God wants to smite you down, and God is a
light-year away, then you're safe for a year before His bolt hits you.
If God exists in
a physical location within the Universe, then God can't know about X until the
light (or other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum; or gravity) from X
reaches God. Since light has a finite speed, God is in the dark as it were
until the light and information it contains reaches God. For example, if God is
residing on Planet Earth, and for some reason the Sun goes nova, God (as well
as the rest of humanity) won't know about it for other eight-plus minutes - the
time it takes light to reach Earth from the Sun.
Not even God can
change the past. I mean, there are any number of instances where to correct
some mistake; it would have been easier to backtrack in time and undo
something.
If God is all
powerful, why did God need to rest on the 7th day?
If God is all
knowing, what's the point in the whole creation business? There's no fun or
satisfaction to a creation if you know to the minutest detail, exactly what
will happen at each and every moment to everything, everyone, and everywhere.
Would your life be worth living if at say age 18, you had absolute knowledge of
the future and knew exactly what each and every future second would be like for
you in advance? So God created Adam and Eve, but since God is alleged to be all
knowing God, then He knew even then what would happen in the Garden of Eden, so
why bother? What would be the point?
If God can not
prevent evil, then God is not all powerful. If God can prevent evil, but
chooses not to, then God is hardly benevolent (see immediately below). If God
allows evil to exist in humans, and God created humans, then God must share
some responsibility for said evil. It's akin to parents having to shoulder
responsibility if their child runs amuck.
Not even God can
accomplish something that is self-contradictory, like creating a spherical cube
or a cubical sphere! Not even God can draw more than one straight line between
two points on a flat piece of paper.
3) God is a Cruel
God: God is anything but an all loving, friendly father figure and benign
figurehead.
Let's start with
immortality: I find it interesting that an apparently immortal being, which has
therefore no fear of death, creates mortal living things, including some
species having the intellect to contemplate the concept of their mortality and
death. If we were immortal would we have ever invented or have had a need for a
God, or gods, or a religion at all?
Any God who
orders up animal sacrifices is no God I wish to have an association with.
Societies charged with the responsibility of speaking out and preventing
cruelty too animals should speak out on this issue, since animal sacrifices is
apparently condoned, and sometimes still practiced by some of the world's major
religions even today!
I gather from the
Bible that God has a bone to pick with humans, and only humans. However, if God
created everything, like animals, then he also created the various afflictions
with affect animals, and which, viewed from a humane perspective, suggest that
God is guilty of animal cruelty in the extreme. I mean God could have arranged
things such that animals would die naturally, but always quick and cleanly.
Alas, that's not the way God wanted it. He clearly wanted some animals to
suffer hideous and long drawn out deaths. While there's probably an example for
every animal species, lets examine beak & feather disease which affects
cockatoos (and other members of the parrot family apparently). In brief, this
viral disease causes the bird's beak to grow uncontrollably resulting in
something akin to an elephant's tusks, and the bird's feathers/plumage falls
off. The animal takes one an un-groomed, downright filthy appearance. Death
results from a combination of exposure to the elements and starvation. Once
you've seen a bird in this condition, it's unforgettable, and heart-rending in
the extreme. If God created this condition, the God shouldn't be
top-of-the-pops in the eyes of any feeling human being, rather downgraded to a
nasty brute that should be totally and utterly despised.
The upshot is
that if God did not create this disease, then logically He didn't create
cockatoos or humans or the world or the Universe. You can't arbitrarily
pick-and-choose between what bits He did and did not create; what bits He is,
and is not, responsible for that suit your particular philosophy. It's all or
nothing.
God is a
sticky-beak! If God exists as described in the literature, then God ensures
that you have no privacy, ever. Everything you do is known to God. God can read
your most private thoughts, see even into your dreams (so where's the scientific
ways and means that credits telepathy?). Doesn't that remind you somehow of Big
Brother? So by what right does God have to violate your privacy? You wouldn't
tolerate that from even your closest of relations - child, parent, or partner.
But not to worry, even if you sin in your dreams God won't know. Why? God
doesn't exist IMHO, so that's a relief. The Privacy Act hasn't been violated.
4) God's Ten
Commandments: Something's rotten in the state of Biblical lands when it comes
to these gems. A few are decidedly unworthy of the tablets they were carved in.
Thou shall not
kill is one of the Ten Commandments I believe. So you'd think that God would
practice what He preaches. But isn't, according to the Old Testament, God the
greatest mass murder in the history of the world that puts tyrants the likes of
Hitler to a status of a rank amateur? I mean there is the Biblical flood story,
and what about Sodom and Gomorrah? You can't trust a god who basically says 'do
as I say, not as I do'.
There's something
somewhere in the Ten Commandments about honouring Mum and Dad. I bet a lot of
kids who were abused, even sexually abused, or sold into slavery, or had other
atrocities fostered upon them by dear old Mum and Dad would have some trouble
in accepting this edict, and would probably have a few choice words to say
about it.
Then I recall
something about not coveting thy neighbour's wife. Now that's downright sexist.
What about not coveting thy neighbour's husband? I don't believe that got a
mention anywhere!
Then there's
something (actually several commandment something's) about not having any other
gods before Me (The Almighty God). There's something disturbing about a God so
insecure or jealous that He would have to issue these resolutions. Can one
trust such an emotional temper-tantrum-throwing God? Does the very issuing of
these (you'd better make Me Number One now and always) Commandments suggest
that there is in fact, other gods (extraterrestrials perhaps) that exist?
5) God: The
Intelligent Designer: I'll put it this way, if God created/designed humans, if
'man' is created in God's image, well, next time your back goes out of whack
(or any other part of your anatomy for that matter), have a few choice
utterances about how great a designer God really is! If God were an engineer,
peer review of His design of the Universe would have Him expelled from any and
every professional engineering society in existence. In fact, it's rather
unlikely He ever passed Engineering 101.
6) God Works in
Mysterious Ways: The buzz phrase that 'God works in mysterious ways' has got to
be one of the greatest cop-out phrases of all time. It explains absolutely
nothing because it attempts to explain everything. No matter what dilemma
you're forced to deal with, this is an ultimate answer. It's what you fall back
on when you don't have an answer to a penetrating question. Talk about your
ultimate security blanket! It's akin to a parent telling his questing endless
series of 'why' questions that children are so prone to ask, 'because I say so'
- it's highly unsatisfactory from the child's point of view.
7) In Conclusion:
A supernatural God (and associated Biblical baggage) is unnecessary and
illogical and in all likelihood doesn't exist. If God does exist, He is in all
likelihood an extraterrestrial - or a cat. There's a saying that dogs have
masters; cats have staff. The dog says 'my owner feeds me, keeps me safe and
warm, looks after me and plays with me - he must be a god. The cat says 'my
owner feeds me, keeps me safe and warm, looks after me and plays with me - I
must be a god'! And to be perfectly honest, I'd far sooner worship my cats than
the Biblical God! No matter which way you slice it, a cat has a far better
disposition or personality than the Biblical God - and they catch mice too!
