The Question of God

A short article presenting my views on God.

In the beginning there were Gods.

The world was a scary place, so scary that even the mightiest and wisest of the civilizations believed in supernatural beings to make sense of natural phenomena like lightning, storms or eclipses. Name a natural phenomena, humans had a god for it. Imagine a violent thunderstorm with roaring thunder and lightning strikes, surely if you have no understanding about the science of the process, it would be one of the most frightening experience for any of us. Such a violent and powerful phenomena must be the result of the wrath of a supernatural entity. I think we can sympathize with our ancestors and understand how scared and helpless they must have felt against nature that they had to personify these forces into beings that can be pleased with worship. This was the birth of Gods.

Then there was God.

Move forward in time, as humans and civilization grew we needed morality and fear of an authority in our dynamic and unpredictable society. Welcome to the Age of Organized Religion. Now we have God, the ultimate embodiment of power, wisdom, love, righteousness and all the things we see to be perfect, and we have his opposite the Devil, Lucifer, Shaitan and so on. If you see where I’m going, this is a time of binaries. You are either good or evil. This kind of dependence on God for morality and order is efficient and has held our species stable for a long time but it has a fatal flaw. Although these organized religions are similar, one thing which they are not doing is, uniting the humanity. There are no doubt some positive teachings in all of them but they are more efficient as a tool for political and power struggle, which no doubt we are quite familiar with.

So who has the answers, welcome Science!

The universe is a machine governed by principles or laws — laws that can be understood by the human mind. The discovery of these laws has been humankind’s greatest achievement, for it’s these laws of nature that will tell us whether we need a god to explain the universe at all. The laws of nature are a description of how things actually work in the past, present and future. What’s really important is that these physical laws, as well as being unchangeable, are universal. They apply not just to the flight of a ball, but to the motion of a planet, and everything else in the universe. Unlike laws made by humans, the laws of nature cannot be broken — that’s why they are so powerful and, when seen from a religious standpoint, controversial too. One could define God as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of as God. They mean a human-like being, with whom one can have a personal relationship. The one remaining area that religion can now lay claim to is the origin of the universe, but even here science is making progress and should soon provide a definitive answer to how the universe began.

Science is a religion.

In the last hundred years, we have made spectacular advances in our understanding of the universe. We now know the laws that govern what happens in all but the most extreme conditions, like the origin of the universe, or black holes. The role played by time at the beginning of the universe is the final key to removing the need for a grand designer. What might be worrisome is that the void left by a creator-less universe will be too big for science to fill. The scientific process has already gained a large share of its followers with various names, atheists, agnostics, humanists etc. The these too come in all flavors just like other religions, there are radicals who think they need to wage war on organized religion and would go to all lengths. But there are also people who call themselves secular and believe that the reasonable thing would be to be tolerant to each others beliefs and coexist. Science is inherently a mindless machine of clockwork which just follows its rule-book. It lacks the human aspect of emotion. That’s where other fields of humanities come into picture to humanize this mindless machine with ethics, morality and empathy. Together this symbiotic relationship might just be what our species needs.

My verdict.

If I could meet Michelangelo, I would ask him, what he meant by painting “Creation of Adam”, because I’m going to use it present my view. God didn’t create us, we created the idea of God, inside our heads. The big questions we ask only exist because we exist to ask them. We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. I think that when we die we return to dust. But there’s a sense in which we live on, in our influence, and in our genes that we pass on to our children. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.

Related posts:

An overheard conversation between a software vendor and a security professional sheds light on a growing problem in the evolving battle to secure critical enterprise data and information. The vendor…

The technique I chose is ‘a fun palace full of activities defined by pieces of architecture’ by Cedric Price. Cedric Price was born in 1934 and Cedric Price is one of the most influential figures in…

If you are planning to build a small structure with a gable roof such as a shed, game room, storage unit, etc, you can find many plans to build it, but the roof is the most complicated to build…