Is God Dead? A scientific journey of discovery.

Disclaimer: The pun is intended, to draw attention. This article is not about the Black Sabbath song. If you haven't heard the song - stop reading now find it and come back after that.

My scientific inquiry in God's existence is based on the presumption that we - humanity are by nature on one hand - imperfect and unreliable and on the other hand somehow manage to survive and seem destined to do so. However it should be noted also that contemporary genetics tell us that not everyone's progeny survives - essentially we come from 2 common ancestors - we may call them Adam and Eve and not only that but from Adam and Eve's offspring only certain branches have survived through the tens of thousands of years of evolution. Now back to the question - Is God Dead?

If god had to rely on human offerings - he would be dead by now based on human inconsistency so we can conclude with fair certainty that if such god ever (or goddess) ever existed - they must be dead by now.

Also, if god had to answer all prayer probably humanity won't ever learn anything and spend days and nights on the couch in front of the TV praying for fast food to be delivered and second if that prayer answering god ever existed he or she must be dead by now - frustrated by people's vanity, animosity and greed. So that god is dead too.

If god had to prove his or her existence by miracles that seems a bit dodgy to me too. If you are a true believer - you don't need miracles. Alternatively if you only believe if you see miracles then any circus magician is your prophet. Perhaps that god is dead too.

Ozzy mentions in the song that he would keep the wine :-) That's one miracle that happens every year in in wine producing countryside - water comes from the sky and is turned into wine once the collected grapes ferment. It is a miracle but needs human agency to plant the vineyard, take care of it, collect the grapes, squash them for the juice and patiently wait for the miracle to happen.

Every woman or man of faith knows that. David didn't pray for Goliath to disappear, but took matters (in his case stone and slingshot) and by opposing ended the treat. Yes  he had great faith too, but took action based on that.

So is God dead?

If you believe that the universe appeared out of nothing by chance - perhaps, If you believe that the laws of physics just by chance happened to to be just the ones needed for life to be possible the that may be so. If you believe that atoms created in the starts converged by accident to create life on Earth then you may not need God. I find it unexplainable. I agree that you could by chance walk into a casino every morning instead of going to work and win your yearly salary by spending a quarter - it is possible but highly improbable. We don't need God to explain the unexplainable - for that we have brains an critical thinking but I believe that there is some meaning in this continuous symphony of creation and I cannot find any other way to call it but God.

Tell me what you think?
Is God dead?

I am the way...

If faith grows out of love and love from hope and hope based on knowledge which is the best remedy for fear, then faith in oneself is the highest most honest faith that one can have. Because it's obvious that you can only love what you know and that what you know best and deepest you are destined to love most. If you believe that you were created in God's image or you believe that you are the pinnacle of evolution no matter how imperfect you are - you have to love yourself to be able to love anyone and anything else

It is a delusion to believe that I know anything at all if I don't know myself first and from myself my deepest desires and boldest dreams. Then it looks like you can't believe in anything at all if you don't have faith in yourself first. And if that is the most honest possible faith why don't pray to yourself:

Dear me - please, help me become the person that I want to be and may my will be done... Perhaps if you do that then God, or Nature or Society or all of them together will help me achieve just that. Or not - you do believe that God will trade favors for prayers (as if God needs anything from me) or Nature will just take a course naturally favorable to me (it actually did already if I am the progeny of a long line of survivors or perhaps because they were survivors it looks like nature was simply good to them.

David didn’t wait for God to kill Goliath - but picked up a couple of pebbles and opposed the scary giant who died confused by his own arrogance. I can’t imagine David praying to God to kill Goliath because David is understandably reluctant to do it himself. David has faith and took action in his own hands to get what he wanted. Was he always good - no. But what makes David admirable is his honesty and faithfulness to himself.

You cannot be saved if you don’t save yourself. That’s what airline safety instructions tell you to do. If you don’t put on your oxygen mask first you may faint before you are able to help that child next to you. You have to love yourself so everyone can love you and so you can love the others. And you can only love yourself if you reach deep inside to that divine essence, some call soul.

There is no gate to the way but many roads lead to it.

Can a government burden future generations with debt they haven't had a chance to agree to.

Definitely not! That is against the principle of no taxation without representation.

But what if the money is spent to keep the parents of these future kids alive?

What is good and what is bad we might be able to tell but how to measure it? Does the greatest good for the most people maxim work? The experience of Hitler and Stalin's persecution of minorities under the false pretext of common good tells us enough to be able to judge. Most important, ignoring the fate of unrelated minorities will lead inevitably to the time when they will come for me and then there will be no one left to protest.

While the Tea Party religiously is carrying the future generations to the mountain to sacrifice them to an imagined principle of decency Obama is trying to do the intuitively correct thing and borrow a sacrificial lamb from the neighbors although he doesn't seem to have a very clear idea how he is going to pay for it.

Who is right? Burden the future with debt or kill the present in the name of the principle even if the principle is in itself correct – even sacred? There is no one correct answer. Perhaps we need to keep in mind that the Sabath was created for the people not the people for the Sabath. But then again the unity of diversity makes the nation and even if the people can be enslaved a proud nation – never.

Thoughts by Cicero, Jesus, Buddha and from the Old Testament were paraphrased in this post.

If faith and ethics mean anything in life they must bring real profit

But what is ethical and what isn't. Eve's pursuit of divine wisdom doesn't seem to have yielded any tangible results. I know there are uncountable sets of rules and regulations - legal, religious, cultural and whatnot. And most of them are very useful and going against them can get you into real trouble even if your indiscretion is not discovered by the relevant authorities. I am not talking about divine intervention because it seems that God more often than not looks the other way when the good are crushed and evil prevails. To sum it up life's different from an old Western with a happy ending. Perhaps there is some higher purpose or perhaps the atheists are right and the only real law is the law of the jungle of a tooth for a tooth and an eye for an eye.

Do moral principles work at all? Could there be a workable set of rules worthy of keeping by providing adequate return for the good guys apart from the questionable place in that luxury retirement home - Heaven - resplendent with scores of virgins singing boring hymns? What if there is no afterlife and we just die and rot which seems rather obvious except for that atheist Richard Dawkins who reckons we live forever in physical form through our own immortal selfish genes. And we are destined to live in this real, material and fluid world which could be Heaven or Hell depending on perspective, luck, attitude and the results of your actions.

Can you judge others and complain about their actions - yes you can but that is mostly a waste of time because you have to look at yourself first). If you don’t like the world you’ll have to start  and from the man in the mirror and be the change you want to see in the world. To look deep inside and find that divine God given soul or genetic predisposition for survival - depending on how you prefer to call it. Because that idea/form/gene/meme/soul that will survive is the only thing that matters. There is the way of life and the dead end of death. There is a way to learn to be immortal - we are all offspring of a race of survivors - all the way back to Adam and Eve. So we have inherited a treasure of useful knowledge and a lot of nonsense (there were people who believed you have to kill someone to make the sun rise or kill an innocent child to win a battle). I don’t covet the neighbor’s donkey or his ass and we all believe his partner in life is free to choose. Still if I treat my neighbor badly and disrespect his right to life, liberty and to choose the way he pursues happiness than most probably my neighbor will disrespect my rights and property. And then we’ll both be in real trouble.

And if you ask whether you are your brother’s keeper then he might be asking the same silly question too.

Thoughts by Jesus, Ghandi, Buddha, Petar Danov were used throughout the text.

Faith

The results of human action are the most important factors in anyone's life.
The results of our own actions first and what everyone else does.
All human action is based on faith,
And this is not about religion.
Religion is a human creation - the crutches and walking sticks for those whose fate needs support. And sometimes these walking sticks and crutches ares used for fighting each other not for propping faith that they were intended for in first
True faith is tested in real life. If life shows us that what we believe is true then it must be true. It doesn't matter if you call it divine providence or laws of physics. If you believe something is true and it helps you predict the outcome of natural events or your own actions or the actions of others in response to your actions or inaction.
Faith grows from hope and hope from love and love is often blinded by emotions. But emotions are rooted in reality and hope is a combination of desire and past experience on how things turned out after we acted or failed to.act.

Blind faith is bad. It's like being a fan of a rock band. A fan is blind. A rock band either makes good music or it doesn't. I love The Beatles but I'm not a fan. I found it very difficult to find a song that I don't like but finally managed to do so and here it is - "Obladi - oblada" - it's unbearable.

Still a mother loves her child even if the statistics will clearly indicate that her child is more likely to end up as a criminal or a loser. She loves her child based on faith in the good.

But if things still are not going well even the loving mother is bound to notice and take action. True love is based on true feelings True faith is based on reality. Blind faith can only lead to a dead end sooner or later.

True faith is honest.

Honesty is such a rarity ...

Who Needs Morals?

So Eve, God and the Snake conspired to teach Adam some ethics the hard way. Gone was the easy life of tree fruits and air-conditioned paradise. Now he had to work for his food and shelter. Also, regardless of the tens of thousands of years of experience, in sin and good deeds it seems Adam's and Eve's descendants haven't learnt a lot about morals. On the bright side though (one must always think positive) Adam didn't have steak, beer, or fried chicken in paradise and we suspect there was no sex too so he (and Eve) had gained something. And if we include the joys and trials of motherhood and fatherhood then humanity has had an opportunity to feel the frustration of trying to to teach good and bad and seeing no results. Just like God.

On the other hand the way Adam and Eve's descendants have set up a society in which, regardless of declared principles, deception, manipulation and coercion are the preferred methods to get what you want. So obviously wrong and frustrating was that that Buddha decided that all desires must be wrong. But without desires Adam will return to his vegetative state of the pampered gardener of Paradise – with no freedom, no pursuit of happiness and frankly no life to speak of.

Perhaps if your passion is focused on higher purpose you will achieve worthy goals but what if your passion is drifting towards something horrible – than if Nature or the Divine are cruelly fair then your self-destructive wish may be granted too.

When man became good at accumulating the things that he wanted three things became obvious = first, that with your neighbor’s help you could produce more, second, it’s easier to steal the fruit of your neighbor’s labor instead of laboring yourself, and third, with the help of your neighbor you can easily overcome the resistance of your other neighbor when you are stealing the fruits of his labor. Unfortunately that other neighbor might have figured out the same arrangement before you did.

Centuries of trial and error led to the universal understanding that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable rights - not because that sounds good but because it is in my personal interest. Obviously without life there cannot be any appreciation of happiness and without the freedom to choose your own path to happiness it can never be real happiness.

Without the freedom to choose to know what is good and bad Adam and Eve couldn’t have been created in God’s image!

Adam and Eve - not a happy ending

"I should have married the Devil instead of you."
"But, Eve, you cannot marry a close relative."

Adam and Eve - Ethics, God and ME!

It is part of the Bible that has always perplexed me. I hope to somehow understand it sometimes. I believe I will regardless if it happens as a result of conscious analysis or an epiphany.

It is the story of Eve with the apple (i wonder if Steve Jobs hasn’t named his company after that particular apple:-). The story goes like that - God creates a man and a woman and leaves them in the Garden of Eden where they can live happily by eating the fruits of the heavenly plants. There is one catch though - they are not allowed to eat the fruit of one particular tree - the Tree of Wisdom which will make them know the difference between Good and Bad and eventually make them Godlike. One day - when Adam is asleep (presumably after downing a couple of beers out of boredom - remember he is not working and there is nothing worse or more dangerous than an idle man;-) Eve - the woman wanders by the tree and is seduced by a talking snake (some say Satan him or herself or the devil though at that point of time the ancient Jews seem to not have developed the concept of the devil so let’s just settle on a talking snake) to try one of the fruits of the Tree of Wisdom which remember will make her equal to God by giving her the understanding of what is good and what isn’t. Being naturally sociable Eve wakes up her snoring mate to share this remarkable opportunity. Adam is a bit wary - he prefers the lazy life of doing nothing and knowing nothing (more like the three Japanese monkeys who cover their eyes, ears or mouth) but Eve doesn’t accept Confucian excuses and he reluctantly shares in the forbidden fruit and presumably the knowledge of what is good and what is bad (for him it kind of worked more in the realm of sports, unhealthy food, alcohol and female appearance than any deeper philosophical or ethical insights that would bring him closer to God). Anyway both ate the forbidden fruit (often depicted as an apple but I don’t think it is described as an apple in the Bible and actually Steve Jobs named his company after the Beatles’ Apple which created some problems - then again perhaps the Beatles named their company after the apple from the Garden of Eden or it was a conspiracy between them and Steve).

After they ate the forbidden fruit they noticed they are naked and tried to hide their genitalia with a fig leaf - later called modesty patch and still sometimes used by contemporary politicians or other celebrities (at least by those of them who still care) and who have suddenly realized there is some kind of indecency in their lives.

Obviously that was an act of direct insubordination to God’s orders and God expel the curious couple from the Garden of Eden and gives them the whole world to explore. That exploration will be accompanied by suffering (including at childbirth for the woman) and they will have to work for their food and other essentials (including fig leaves).

That’s what they proceed to with them and their descendants suffering the consequences of this so-called original sin. That is the Judaist version. The Christian interpretation will add to that that Jesus by his death of the cross somehow absolved humanity of this original sin and now we can breath freely without feeling guilty about it and presumably sin as much as we want because we are miraculously “saved”.

I have a problem with that. Not with the story itself - I consider it as one of the most profound parts of the Bible (it just doesn’t speak to me clearly enough yet) but the blasphemous interpretations.

Imagine if you are a teacher and have just told this story to a bright little child and ask the poor kid about the moral of the story.

The most likely answer will be -

If you disobey someone powerful like God or a parent you are most likely to get a lovely present - like this whole beautiful world.

My mother, grandmother and sister are bad and all bad in my life is their fault. There must be

a way to get back to them for that.

There  must be something wrong with people in general even after having eaten from the Tree of Wisdom - of knowing what is right and what is wrong - they still seem to have difficulties telling right from wrong in words and deeds and precariously far from any useful wisdom.

But if God indeed is our creator wouldn’t God like us to be independent as every normal parent will? And if that is so wouldn’t God want us to know the difference between good and evil? And if that is so wouldn’t God try to entice Eve with the knowledge that will make humanity created in God’s image truly godlike (Adam being happy like a vegetable in the Garden of Eden fed and protected without the need to exert any effort at all).And wouldn’t we the people be happier and more thankful if given the freedom to pursue happiness whatever that means for each and every one of us?

It seems the whole world history from the first human beings until now points towards that. We don’t seem to long for a carefree living in a garden that we haven’t planted ourselves and we are not responsible for. And if all that was God’s plan it seems we are doing pretty well. A parent would have been proud with a humanity that regardless of all our deficiencies, errors and crimes ultimately find a way to rise from the dust, repent, reflect and proceed further.

Even if you don’t believe in miracles you have to be realistic and agree that is quite a miracle in itself.