Arpig
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Joined: 1/3/2006
From: Increasingly further from reality
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First of all let me stress once again that as far as I am concerned the jury is still out on the existence of any deity. I am not a theist. I have no faith in any given religion. I cannot accept the Jesus presented in the Gospels for the simple reason that I know the myths and legends of the near east and just how closely the Jesus story follows the traditional elements. And similarly I have difficulty accepting any religious teaching because they all require a degree of suspension of disbelief. I find most gods as presented in religious teachings to be capricious and petty. I can find no proof for the existence of God. I do find evidence though, things that make me wonder. Some of those things are the following:
1) The unbelievably complex, elegant and at the same time simple details of the laws and rules of physics as we understand it to date. The fact that a mathematician can by deduction alone determine how things ought to work, and then be proved right by experimentation. It is clear that there are indeed laws that bind existence. It is not the fact of the laws that make me suspect a deity, but rather their very complexity and the elegance with which they interact that does. It seems so very improbable that such a complex and wonderfully consistent structure could have happened by chance. Likewise, though to a lesser degree, the sheer improbability of intelligent life occurring by random chance, though given all the zillions of worlds out there, perhaps it is inevitable by the laws of probability alone that intelligent life would arise somewhere.
2) The fact that every culture, every tribe no matter how primitive, has (to the best of my knowledge) formed some sort of religious belief system, whether a belief in a God or Gods, or spirits, or in a cosmic intelligence. The universality of this experience suggests to me that there is something behind it. One could say it is just human nature to create religion in order to explain the inexplicable, but that doesn’t really answer the why for me. Why are we driven to the same general answer, why is it that all (or almost all) human groups come up with essentially the same answer? The scientific method is based on the idea that an experimental result must be repeatable, I grant that the analogy is strained, but here we have a similar thing happening…the attempt to explain the inexplicable always seems to come up with the same explanation (yes I know the details differ, but the end result is always the basic idea of the divine).
3) I understand why sex feels good…so we will do it and thus propagate the species, I understand why food tastes good….so we will eat it. But why does a summer rain feel so fucking wonderful? Why does it feel so good to play barefoot in the mud? These things have no practical value, and in fact may even be detrimental. Yet they are pleasurable for no apparent reason other than to glory in existence. There is so much in creation that is glorious for no apparent purpose….sunrises, sunsets, moonlight nights, things with aesthetic value for no apparent reason than to please. I understand the science behind the colours of a sunset or a rainbow, what I don’t understand is why the science would work that way…why is it beautiful?
OK, now that I have laid out some of the things that make me unable to say I am an atheist I will actually get to Esinn’s question…if a God exists how I would define him. I will use many ideas and terms used by the ID folks, but I do not subscribe to their viewpoint, but I was raised in the Judeo-Christian cultural milieu and therefore those are the terms which I must use to define God.
If a God exists, then I do not believe he is a personal God, I do not believe he takes any particular heed of what the individual components of his creation do. I do not believe that he craves or needs or would even be aware of worship. How can a being that is supreme and all powerful need the adoration of humans? God to me is more of a process than an entity. I would say that creation was done, not to fulfill some obscure purpose, but rather from the sheer joy of creating. Anybody who has created a work of art understands the profound satisfaction that the process of creating gives. The universe was created the way it is because that is the only way it would work. Evolution works because that is the only way life could develop. I do not accept the idea of creation as a fait accompli. The Big Bang, the expanding universe, the evolution of life by stages, all these things are the way they are because it works. I can conceive of no other construct that would allow for existence to take its present form.
If there is a deity, then it created the universe not because it willed it, but because it is in the nature and purpose of the deity to create. That is what the deity exists to do….to create. Now all the billions of years that the universe has existed may seem like an unimaginably long time from our point of view, from the perspective of the creating deity it may be no more than an instant. I believe the Big Crunch theory is correct….that the universe comes into existence, expands, contracts and goes out of existence only to be reborn again, endlessly cycling through existence and non existence. Perhaps there might be a deity akin to the Hindu Shiva…a destructive principal as well as a creative one, but I suspect that there would only be a single deity, something driven by its very nature to create, destroy, and create again. I have difficulty accepting the idea that all of creation was a conscious act of will, the God I perceive is probably not even aware of what exactly has been created. More of a first cause, a non-sentient need to exist that is so powerful that it causes the entire universe to come into being just so that this entity can exist. And the deity exists in all of creation…all of creation put together is the deity, and in that moment of self-creation (i.e. the Big Bang) the deity is also made real and is self-aware. That is the reason for the senseless beauty of creation, because the deity delights in its existence, and therefore existence is delightful. A self-aware universe if you will.
I know it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that is how I perceive deity at this point in my life. Hopefully it was worth the wait.
< Message edited by Arpig -- 8/27/2009 9:37:57 PM >
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