God

On this utterly insignificant little blue-green planet (as a certain Mr.Adams famously put it) where the sapient life forms have barely evolved, it is utterly predictable that their idea of God has barely evolved as well.

The so called ‘lively’ debates concerning the existence of God have given rise to many arguments. There are several arguments in support of the existence of God, like the anthropic argument, which is based on the anthropic principle involving "superlaws". The argument that there was a "first cause" that is identified as God is also known as the cosmological argument for the existence of God. The teleological argument argues that the universe's order and complexity are best explained by reference to a creator God. All of these and many more such arguments have been and will continue to be rubbished by science and reason.

Let us try and discuss some of the more basic ones.

Probably the most basic problem is that there is no universally accepted definition of God. Theologians gleefully claim that people with faith constitute the majority in this world. But when you pick out randomly a hundred such people and ask them what the definition of God is and why they actually believe in God, the answers differ staggeringly. In contrast, when you ask them the shape of the earth or whether the moon is made of rock or cheese, the answers are uncannily similar.

These varying opinions can actually be used to explain the basis for the existence of a plethora of religions. Most religions are social institutions that take it upon themselves to ‘rid the earth of all sin’ but in the process, cause bloodshed and wars, and result, most undesirably, in causing wide-spread cultural and behavioural polarization. Modern religion conveniently denies the demonstrability of the existence of God on the basis that proof denies faith. How absurd. How very annoyingly absurd. And there is of course the popular argument that religious teachings form the basis for the moral behavioural code of man. Where do you get your morals from Mr.Atheist? The most popular answer to this popular argument can be better explained by quoting Mr.Richard Dawkins, if I may. He once made a remark that contained the words “vindictive, blood-thirsty, misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully” to describe the God of the Old Testament, and if you are getting ready to check your dictionary for revisions made to the meanings of these words, or for looking up some very polite names to call Mr.Dawkins, you would be surprised to know that the holy scriptures do contain references to activities of this sort. So, given that, you would expect an extraordinarily large number of believers in monotheistic or polytheistic dogma to be amoral and resort to racist and genocidal activities, wouldn't you? I mean, we do have sufficient examples of holy wars and oppression of women, don’t we? But in all fairness to people with faith, most of whom are respectable and responsible citizens, they are able to filter out "the bad" from the Holy Scriptures for themselves, without instructions from anyone else. Need I say anymore about where morals actually come from?

I do not wish to elaborate any further on the misuse of religion and its negative influence on free society.

This, in a way, leads us to the God-is-a-personal-experience argument for God’s existence, conveniently eliminating the possibility of a counter argument based on the lack of a common universal definition of God. There is this claim made by some of the so called ‘great thinkers’ of this planet that there are God-related experiences that are either a means to realise the ‘self’ and subsequently realise God, or a means to attain salvation or liberation, and these experiences are apparently quite personal. A state of concentrated attention of the mind, involving the empirical phenomena of moment-to-moment conscious experience in order to make our sense of ‘the self’ vanish and thereby uncover a new state of personal well-being, does exist. Scientific experiments have proved beyond doubt that this is actually a state of bliss which the human mind is quite capable of sustaining and is achievable by stopping the continuous chain of thought through meditation, thus putting an end to this absurd argument to prove God’s existence.

We could go on like this but clearly the point is that there is no verifiable evidence for the existence of God. I would also like to add here that, contrary to popular sentiment, belief in the creator God actually removes the zeal and the passion from life itself, in that it attributes thoughts, actions, art, nature and in general, the beauty life, to some sort of imaginary creative intelligence or super power which is apparently unfathomable to our petty little minds, thereby making man seem quite impotent and a lot less powerful than he actually is. Imagining that God created man for a definite purpose, removes from life, the joy that man can derive by shaping into existence a purpose for himself and working towards its fulfilment.

There is a long way to go before a majority of the barely evolved sapient life forms on planet earth are convinced about the power of reason. But gradually, in the minds of many earthlings, a hope is building up – a hope of strengthening and arming the resistance against faith.

Peace.
AMD