The Hardboiled Heretic
For the amount of time that humans have spent talking, worshipping and teaching about god(s) exactly what “It” is constantly eludes us.
Despite the millions of names and faces we attach to the idea of god(s), the general agreement is that It is some entity with supernatural power, supernatural knowledge and supernatural capacity for caring.
These are all nice qualities for someone to have, if you are looking for a guardian.
I see god(s) as an entity not constrained to our limits of time and space, thus making it impossible to test for Its existence and rendering claiming to know god(s) as a problem.
Saying that you know something that clearly cannot be known is a statement of ignorance, but that does not mean we cannot observe Its effects. Defining god(s)’s attributes is not necessarily as important as defining what purpose it serves in our lives.
God(s) being greater than humans, It holds the perceived authority to hold judgment over us, which is Its ultimate purpose and it is our duty as followers of this entity to live according to Its guidelines.
Except these divinely inspired teachings are the projections of a society on itself, thus creating a feed back loop of social expectations. The divine figure always represents the mind and body of Its followers or those of your conquerors.
We have gone from finding god(s) to creating them in our image to serve as creating an ideal form for a particular group. Eventually this ideal form leads to conflict with other groups as they claim to have a better form than your best. If there is a entity that can rule all of existence, I am pretty sure It would not subscribe to what any hand full of advanced apes on a tiny rock orbiting a small main-sequence star in one galaxy out of billions thought about It.
Having a nicely packaged and ready-for-consumption idea of god(s) is as toxic for your spirituality as a Big Mac is for your arteries, yet people inject it into their bodies for the same reasons: it provides convenience and immediate gratification.
A formalized institution that dictates the idea of god(s) and regulates morality is a hindrance to meaningful social advancement. Any amount of humanitarian missions sent out by religious institutions is offset by the amount of bigotry they spawn intentional or otherwise.
Also committing acts of kindness in the here-and-now for your personal gain in a possible fictitious afterlife is the antithesis of morality and a distraction to spiritual enlightenment.
We need to make a personal journey unabated by preconceived notions and see the world for what it is to even begin to attempt to understand our own existence let alone comprehending a supernatural creator.
Again I am not saying yay or nay to Its existence, simply that I cannot claim testable knowledge of It. Instead of focusing on finding something that is the Meta to all, find the connection to all.
Religion and science cannot coexist because they hold opposing dogmas, but science and spirituality can coexist because spirituality is feeling a deep connection to the universe; and there is no deeper connection than that offered by scientific observation.
Our universe is designed in a fractal pattern of governance meaning that on any scale (subatomic to galaxy clusters) there is a recurring behavior of objects. A pattern that ties everything together in the most fundamental ways that is both tangible and incomprehensible.
To know that your body is a collection of particles that has existed since the dawn of time and space 13.8 billion years ago, to know that you could share the same air as a dinosaur and by the next evolution of humans, and to know that a you are smaller then a mot of dust to the universe yet still cared by it and all of its inhabitants simultaneously is that deepest sense of connection I can possibly imagine.
We entangled to everything around us and in us because we are all one. That is the point of calling it a universe: a single state of being for all things.
The numbers, equations and biology we learn in school are not some trivial stream of factoids to be spewed out and to be forgotten. They are our key to unifying our lives with all of existence because being able to see an unfiltered view of the universe offers the greats spiritual connection.
The formalized ideas of divine beings are a social Band-Aid for ignorance and power. Whether or not god(s) do exist, it is only the human hand that has ever fed the hungry, healed the sick, and loved the forgotten.
Grant Vargas
Senior Viewpoints Editor
~ Versus ~
The Defender of Dogma
Yahweh. Allah. Elohim. Brahman. All are names used in different parts of the world to describe some all-powerful force that exists eternally outside space and time in an absolute state of perfection. All refer to God.
But how do we know there is a God? Atheists often laugh at believers for entrusting their lives to some “invisible fairy” when for them the path to truth lies in science.
Stephen Hawking, the famous physicist and an ardent atheist, argues that God was not necessary for creation. He delves into complicated quantum mechanics to propose that space and time simply appeared and that God could not exist before this singular moment because there was no “before” as time had not yet started.
This is a convoluted attempt to explain a universe without God, claiming instead to follow the laws of science. My question is: Where’s the science? Even though I am no scientist, I do know that there is such a thing as a scientific method in which a hypothesis is tested through experimentation and proven or disproven accordingly.
Thus, when Hawking and other atheists ridicule God and claim that science has all the answers, I dare them to test their hypotheses. Somehow I doubt that Hawking could devise an experiment to test his theory of how space-time began.
In that sense, Hawking’s explanation is not science and is no more provable than the religious beliefs he mocks. Science cannot disprove God now or ever.
Contrariwise, if “rational” men like Hawking are all about science and reason, then pure logic suggests that a God must exist.
Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas argued that for the universe to exist, there had to be a “first cause” that was caused by nothing else and essentially existed outside the boundaries of space and time.
Sir Issac Newton, the famous physicist who discovered gravity, once wrote “Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion.”
So, for every explanation science develops for the universe’s beginning, one need only ask, “And where did that come from?” Eventually, science must admit that some supreme force with no beginning or end had to start time itself. This first cause is God or at least some God-like force.
Augustine of Hippo agreed, writing of God, “It is not in time that you precede time…You precede all past times in the sublimity of an ever present eternity” (The Confessions of Saint Augustine).
It is nearly impossible for us human beings to imagine existence outside of time but, logically, that is where a God-like force would have to exist.
In that case, who or what is God? Is God an old bearded man who lives in the sky as depicted in Renaissance paintings? This is an extremely naïve and limiting view of God, serving only to add fuel to the atheist’s fire.
Such depictions are merely our attempts to imagine God in a manner which we can understand. They are man-made symbols to represent the nature of something that we will never comprehend, just like a dog will never comprehend calculus.
So it is silly to try to pretend to know God’s nature. God could be a physical being, an intelligent force that infuses every atom in creation or any number of things—this is where different religions and people develop different explanations.
Throughout this article, it may appear that I am making science and God irreconcilable, but that is not the case at all. I believe that God, although not subject to science’s laws, governs the universe through them.
For evidence of this, we need only look at the order and logic of science itself. If some higher intelligence was to use any kind of governing system, then what better system then science? In essence, the order of the natural world itself is evidence of God’s existence.
In that sense, belief in a deity in no way contradicts belief in a God. Rather, the two complete each other. As Albert Einstein said, “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”
Tony Bara
Editor in Chief