Sooner or later, all children come to the realization that the story of Santa just can’t be true and that Santa isn’t real, but part of our Christmas mythology. It’s that human trait, the ability to reason and figure things out rationally and logically.
There is so much philosophical baggage surrounding the concept of a supernatural creator God-of-the-Old-Testament that it is far easier to believe He never had any reality in the first place. Here's some of that philosophical baggage IMHO, along with some suggestions for additional readings on the general theme.
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.
To be continued…
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