IN DEFENSE OF GOD by Lenny Levinson
Let’s face it - God has gone out of style. Many consider God a delusion, an anachronism, a fallacy, a big scam.
I still believe in God. How can anyone still believe God in this modern technological age? I must be stupid, superstitious, unscientific and/or narrow-minded, right?
I believe in God because I’ve been forced by the nature of my mind to confront a certain nagging question: HOW DID LIFE BEGIN?
Scientists theorize that life began in some warm primordial pool of water in some sleepy lagoon somewhere, aided by natural selection, random mutations and perhaps cosmic rays. But specifically, how did life actually begin? Scientists cannot answer that question definitively, or create life itself despite multi-million dollar laboratories filled with the latest gene-splicing and other jazzy equipment.
Modern science believes that nothing simply happens, therefore everything is caused. Modern science does not believe in spontaneous generation.
Well folks, if nothing simply happens, and everything is caused, what caused life to begin? According to the rigorous principles of science and logic, it seems reasonable to postulate that SOMETHING had to jumpstart life, some force, energy, intelligence, spark or imperative. And that force, energy, intelligence, spark or imperative has been called, by various people at various times, God, Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah, the Dharmakaya of Buddhism, the Great Spirit of the Plains Indians, Yusn the Lifegiver of the Apaches, the Logos of the ancient Greeks, the Force of the Star Wars movies, or the Tao which often is translated as The Way, or the term I prefer, the Process. Spinoza believed that God and scientific laws were one and the same. And these are only a sampling of the many names and concepts of God.
In order to explain the God phenomenon, many books have been written such as the Bible, the Koran, the Buddhist sutras, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, etc. These books were written long ago by people at an earlier stage of human consciousness. They were trying to describe the indescribable, which produced a language similar to mythology and poetry. Admittedly, these books are not precise scientific documents, but why should the truth of science always trump the truth of poetry?
On NPR a few years ago, a renowned scientist atheist was asked the big question: How did life begin? He replied: “Just because I can’t explain how life began - that doesn’t mean I’m going to believe in some kind of god.”
That is the crux of the matter. Atheists, agnostics and other types of non-believers shrink from confronting the big question, evidently because they’re afraid of where it will lead. Why, it might cause them to consider the possibility of some kind of Great Spirit or God jumpstarting life, but unfortunately God and religion are so terribly unfashionable these days, and all their friends will stop talking with them, no one will take them seriously anymore, and they will be considered stupid, superstitious, unscientific and/or narrow-minded.
6 comments:
Ain't about to get into an argument with sophisticates over deist or atheist theory. My new-found faith was born last Easter after what Marco Beltrami called in his lyrics to the song Truckin "a long strange trip."
I have a theory, but of more interest, I suspect, is what can be objectively proven: Jump Jackson and the Second Easter Mystery
From Peter Winkler
"HOW DID LIFE BEGIN?"
How did God begin?
If you insist on explaining the origin of life, and your answer is "God did it," then you have to explain the origin and existence of God.
Which you can't do. Nobody can. Did a super-God create God? Then who created super-God? Welcome to the paradox of infinite regress.
Furthermore, merely saying "God created life" explains nothing about the actual process of how the first single-celled organism appeared on Earth. It's merely an invocation of magic.
"I don't know how such-and-such exists, therefore God must have been responsible" is the classic argument from ignorance.
There is so much that is just plain wrong in Levinson's argument--starting with "Scientists theorize that life began in some warm primordial pool of water in some sleepy lagoon somewhere,"
to
"it seems reasonable to postulate that SOMETHING had to jumpstart life, some force, energy, intelligence, spark or imperative. And that force, energy, intelligence, spark or imperative has been called, by various people at various times..."
and throughout the "existence as an excuse for God" argument.
The big question is not "Does God Exist?" but "Why did you post this here, Ed?"
Len is a friend of mine and a regular blogger here. His opinion is not necessarily mine but the only things I won't post here are those I consider hateful. Hell I post stuff I don't agree with all the time.
Ain't nothing like friendship--you both just moved up a page in my book
Why must we accept the Bible literally to believe in God, especially the hardest thing of all to believe, that God created anything? Would it be irrational to theorize that we created God, a real God? Not just in the sense of our childhood invisible friends, but that something of us survives after death--call it soul or spirit? In the sense that the spirits of all beings coalesce into something akin to Jung's collective unconscious, growing continually and perhaps even reaching into the living to inspire, console, even to guide those who are receptive?
We would have laughed at the idea of radio waves before they were proven. We know brain waves are real, measurable scientifically. Could they, do they survive as a dynamic, perhaps interactive essence beyond corporeal life? Can it be proven they do not?
Is it blasphemous or ignorant to wonder?
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