God Has Left the Building! Part One

The alleged most important being in the cosmos has the absolute least amount of evidence to verify that very existence. Either that being is incredibly shy, doesn’t exist, or exists under false pretences or via a human misconception. And that’s just the tip of the Godly anomalies.

Let’s start with several premises. 1) There exists, or existed, a being that we collective call God. 2) God isn’t an actual God, but ‘God’ a flesh-and-blood extraterrestrial who arrived on Earth in his Starship Heaven. 3) ‘God’ has ‘left the building’. To suggest that “God has left the building” is actually a tad kinder than that well worn 60’s phrase “God is dead”, though that may well be the case since ‘God’ is just another mortal flesh-and-blood being, albeit extraterrestrial, but if ‘God’ is just an extraterrestrial then he drops significantly in the cosmic scheme of things and is hardly the most important being in the cosmos. 

Premise One: God exists or at least existed. Well, there are certainly a lot of references in literature, in culture, in art, in music to something that goes under the collective name of God, a conceived supernatural all-powerful, all-knowing, deity who has had some influence over the cosmos, Planet Earth, its life forms, especially humans. Billions of people over many centuries have believed that this deity exists and has some sort of personal connection with them. A whole major industry has flourished solely because of these collective beliefs. When it comes down to God’s reality, as one saying goes, “billions of people can’t be wrong”, yet I’ll counter with “a foolish idea is still a foolish idea no matter how many fools believe it”. I mean, most of the world’s population believed once upon a time that ‘here be dragons’; ‘the Earth is the centre of the cosmos’; ‘the world is flat’; ‘the Sun moves around the Earth’, ‘the heart was the centre of the intellect and of emotions’, ‘before God there existed thousands of gods’, etc. Now I suggest here that what’s foolish isn’t that there’s no God, rather that ‘God’ is a supernatural deity. There is no such thing as supernatural; there are no such things as supernatural deities. There might be ‘God’, there might be ‘gods’, but they often find themselves having to ‘phone home’.

Premise Two: So, if ‘God’ exists, or at least existed, but isn’t all-knowing (just knowledgeable), all-powerful (just powerful), isn’t supernatural, and isn’t a deity, and wasn’t totally a figment of human imaginations, where does that leave us?  If God isn’t imaginary; supernatural; and terrestrial, then ‘God’ must be an ordinary extraterrestrial! Since God’s abode is considered to be a physical place called Heaven, and since if ‘God’ is an extraterrestrial, it’s logical to postulate that God arrived via his spaceship, and that spaceship is called ‘Heaven’ as in ‘Starship Heaven’. Instead of the fictional NCC 1701 Enterprise under the command of Captain Kirk, we have Starship Heaven under the command of ‘Captain God’. Well, as Sherlock Holmes is so found of pointing out, “When you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”. I’m actually giving God the benefit of the doubt here seeing as how there bugger all actual evidence that God (in any shape, manner or form) exists at all. How do you verify your existence? Well there’s your birth certificate, your school records, photographs, other people who will vouch for your bona-fides, tax records, etc. You have a paper trail of sorts. Even thousands of years from now some archives will verify that you once graced the world with your presence. What’s God’s paper trail? No real time ‘photographs’ (no witness ‘identikit’ drawings, carvings, paintings, frescoes, statues, etc.); witnesses so few and far between (and now dead, so really, really dead if they existed at all) as to have relatively little credibility – more people have seen the Loch Ness Monster than God. More people have slain dragons than have had a close encounter of any kind with God the Supernatural. God has no real physical documentation at all, certainly way less than that exists for Zeus say. At least Zeus has a statue or two or three to his credit.

Discussion: What’s so ‘impossible’ about a supernatural God? Answer, there’s bugger all evidence that the supernatural exists and that it is necessary to resort to the supernatural to explain any part of life, the universe and everything. But rather than throw the concept of a real supernatural God out with the supernatural bathwater, let’s play with the idea of ‘God’ the extraterrestrial (ET).  Might I suggest that between 6000 BC and the current date, ‘God’ (the ET) has ‘left the building’ we call Planet Earth. I’ll return to that theme shortly, but first…

Surely the Bible proves God’s supernatural existence? Well, book stores and libraries are full of works of dubious historical accuracy, not to mention works that are no doubt in the minds of all and sundry to be purely imaginary works of literary fiction. I mean anyone can put down words on paper and publish their version of reality and of history. That doesn’t mean that their version is of necessary an accurate version. The evidence for God is no more in the Bible than the evidence for the existence of Sherlock Holmes is because he appears in the collected works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Does Winston Smith exist because George Orwell wrote “1984”?

Now nobody doubts the actual existence of Plato, or Aristotle, or Socrates, or Homer, or Pythagoras, or a host of other historical figures from before the Christian era. Surely they must rank below God in terms of cosmic significance. Yet the most important pre-Christian era being of all, God, has the least evidence that points to an actual existence. And thus, we’ve been pretty much reduced to inventing philosophical arguments why God should exist – the Universe had a beginning, therefore there must have been a Creator (not necessarily – anyway who created the Creator); the Universe appears to be designed and finely tuned to allow life, therefore there must have been a Designer (again, not necessarily so – anyway who designed the Designer). Speaking of philosophy, if it takes the existence of a supernatural deity (God or otherwise) to give your life meaning, then you’re in pretty bad shape. The onus is on you to give your own life meaning. Don’t pass the buck! You don’t need a crutch!

Philosophy aside, surely it’s not illogical to require some hard evidence for the actual existence of a supernatural God before you invest a lot of time and energy in your devotional and worshiping activities, especially with so many other religious flavours on the market all in competition for your time (and money).

You’d be willing to bet considerable amounts that Plato, etc. above actually existed. Would you be willing to bet the family farm on God’s reality based on the actual evidence presented to you in the Bible? And what about other Biblical characters like Adam and Eve, Noah, Moses, Jonah, Methuselah, and all the other Old Testament characters? Would you put your neck in a noose as a test of your good faith that they really existed, of that if they existed did they accomplish and do the things the Bible said they did? Well I wouldn’t.

Now the Bible was written over many, many hundreds of years, by many, many people, many, many decades after the events so described, and of course there was a lot of text left out (missing books of the Bible), and what was included was often hotly debated as to whether it should be included (i.e. – ‘Revelation’). Talk about a dog’s breakfast! The Bible is really a hodgepodge of rather tall tales. It’s an anthology of short stories, with way less than ideal consistency between them; stories that often are in conflict – that is, down right contradictory. The Biblical texts are hardly something that if deemed to be the absolute true word of God, that the real God (assuming a real God) would be pleased with and proud of. God did a very poor job in proof-reading His Word!

To be continued…