Divine Assumptions, or What Is God Really Like?
The vast majority of thinkers approach God in the wrong ways, trying to define Him according to their beliefs, be it Atheism, Christianity, Judaism, etc. For example, why do we use the pronoun “Him?” Does God have a penis? Is it just better than “It?”
The problem is humans can only understand God on human terms, as a wise old man throwing lightning bolts, jealous of our propensity to be distracted by bright and glittery things, spiteful and angry when we don’t follow God’s own rules. But what/who is God?
Thomas Aquinas starts out on the right track, proving the existence of God with the relatively simple notion there has to be some sort of force behind everything, the force that started everything, the initiator of the Big Bang or whatever theory about the beginnings of time you adhere to. Aquinas quickly went off track by confining God to the Judeo-Christian concepts and then your author put his book down.
But what or who did start everything? Something, call it the laws of physics, a supernatural force, or God, made it all happen. Something came up with quarks, electrons, protons and neutrons, the “God Particle,” all of it, and set it in motion. The egos of humankind being nearly as big as their notion of a God, humans naturally think it all points to us; God created a nearly infinite universe of trillions of heavenly bodies governed by laws of physics of nearly incomprehensible perfections with enough exceptions to every rule to keep humans eternally clueless, just so the guy who lives next door to a Baptist family will burn in eternal hell fire because he can’t see where Jesus clearly forbade homosexual unions but can tell Jesus thought very little of judging the behavior of others.
It is more obvious in the minutiae where religions and their theologians go wrong. Jesus had to be born without sin and never sin because He died for our sins as a perfect offering. So, for Jesus to be born without sin, He had to be born of a woman without sin who was also born without sin. Because otherwise we are born with the stain of sin on our (usually) sterile bodies, making Baptism for the forgiveness of those and all sins necessary, so we can go to confession to tell a priest all our other sins. Who was Jesus an offering to? God? And isn’t Jesus God? So Jesus died a cruel and otherwise useless death to prove to Himself that humankind could be justified by God’s grace through their faith in His death securing salvation from Him for us.
This all begs the question: How dumb do we think the Creator of the Universe is? Here is the force that brought about the first drips of life by combining genetic material with just the right enzymes and nutrients and surrounding it with a beautifully functional membrane that kept just enough out and let enough in so it could function and grow and then DIVIDE and create two beings from one! Wrap your neurons around that likelihood. Statistically it is possible that occurred only as a matter of chance over many billions of years, but what chance? Science can put all the basic instruments and components of life in a nutrient broth and they don’t form life. Do those components just need millions of years mixed together? Maybe, but the components are also always degrading to even lesser building blocks as well as forming bigger blocks over time.
Am I advocating for Creationism? Far from it. Nothing even remotely close to what is described in Genesis happened. The astrophysicists of today are much closer to the realities of the world than the admittedly clever tellers of the first creation myths thousands of years ago. The force that started everything made life possible and also made it happen, and the force has since been intervening just enough to keep life evolving and changing. Why?
The why is the biggest question. If we knew that, we would know the purpose of our lives, the reason to go on despite hardship and suffering. It is in the lack of obvious answers to the why that atheists draw their greatest ammunition. Is this why God tolerates religion in all its errors? Religion does at least try to explain the why, even though it is not even close to getting it right. And religions almost always have some good to them: charity, selflessness, pacifism, and morality for a few examples. In the hands of the kinds of men (yes, men mostly) who take charge of religions, the “goods” of religion are lost amidst the urge to control and create orthodoxy and obedience in people so they may be more easily governed/exploited. No religion’s good qualities can fully withstand the onslaught of those who try to organize and administer it.
Theologians and pastors everywhere claim things like the Bible explain the why. Maybe, but the Bible does it in a pretty crappy way. I am supposed to worship an omnipotent God who loves everyone, but Who, on many occasions, has ordered the genocide and complete extermination of multiple towns and ethnic groups down to the last child and goat? A God Who rewards those who serve God most loyally with brutally painful deaths at the hands of God’s enemies (though possibly by miraculously assuaging their suffering in some mysterious way)? A God Who gives laws to the people so complex hardly anyone can get them correct and then punishes them for every mistake?
Are these insights remarkable? Most, if not all, have been promulgated throughout history by atheists and heretics, often while under threat of death, but seldom as succinctly and with such an understanding of cellular biology. God created everything. God made life start, and God has subsequently controlled the changes to the environment and life to lead us to this event, an odd combination, even a paradox of detachment and micromanagement only possible from an omnipotent force.
Does God love us, all of us? This requires some parsing. Clearly, the force that is God often does not intervene to protect enormous numbers of people from terrible fates. God could, with mountains of evidence, be accused of having almost no mercy. There is little evidence God has ever shown any mercy at all; perhaps a ratio of 1:10 of mercy to no mercy would be ambitious. Yet I feel God has protected me many, many times from disasters great and small. Was that just luck, or fate, or are luck and fate actually God? Does God love me more than others? I would have to say it seems so, and I consider myself to legitimately be one of God’s Chosen Ones, but scores of others could analyze my life and say God doesn’t seem to like me at all (“You’re bald! Unmarried and alone at 51! You just found out you had thyroid cancer! Hardly anyone cares what you think or agrees with you!”). Nearly every religious person, in nearly every religion, has had a connection outside the physical realm with the force that seems to be God. We feel something odd is going to happen, and then it does. We need some help, and it arrives. This is the life of the religious. What then of the starving who go on to death, or the person hit by a stray bullet on the street? The religious say they will be welcomed into the next life with love, and at the moment of their greatest need, they received mercy and relief of their suffering. The skeptical see only an unforgiving planet in which luck, fate or faith are merely names for chance given to events that work out for the best, while all the times things go wrong are forgotten or ignored (or felt to be just punishments).
What of this next life? What is the proof it even exists? Are there any consistent stories? Near death experiences? I would argue there is at least some evidence of additional realities to those experienced by the five senses, but there is no consensus, and I have no idea what, if anything, exists for humans on the death of our physical bodies. If there is nothing but darkness, if death is the end, everything to do with organized religion is flipped on its head. The lack of an afterlife does not preclude the existence of a God; it only means we have gotten nearly everything wrong. But the central tenet of religion need not be an afterlife for the faithful. It might not be as nice, but we could come close to a kingdom of God on earth now. What would the world be like if we worked together with rather than fought with each other for more than our share? What if we helped others reach our level, if we held our best ideas in common, if we allowed all beliefs without conflict, if we banished all weapons, raised children without violence, with love, and helped every child to avoid the hardships that damage young brains and lead to so many future problems? Yes, there would still be cancers in infants, death would still always win, but every life would be lived to its fullest and have value and meaning. It is hard to argue something like this was not the intent of Jesus, Buddha, and other founders of the peaceful religions. It is far from an impossible scenario, but there are plenty who would never let it happen, if for no reason other than that is not what they want, and they are currently the people in charge, people who wrap their evil and cowardly ways in the blanket of religion.