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My thoughts on God and Religion



Introduction

A few months ago, some friends of mine sent me The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief with a very nice note explaining why they thought I should read it. These friends are Christians, and they know that I am not, so I expected the book would be very focused on Christianity. I was pleasantly surprised to find that although it was written by a Christian, the first 60% or so was not focused on Christianity, but was pretty non-specific in regards to God.
Ultimately, I thought the book was only marginally interesting (sorry guys), mostly because the thoughts and ideas the author had on God were not anything I had not already heard or read about (more on that later), but the book did cause me to wonder about what exactly my friends thought about my beliefs. On considering this, I realized that they probably have no idea, as I tend to be very quiet about my beliefs.
I don’t talk about religion or even spirituality often for many, many reasons, but it is not because I don’t think about it or have opinions about it. In fact, the opposite is true; I have spent many long hours since the age of seven or so contemplating these questions. I actually don’t discuss it often or frankly because it is a very emotional subject for many people, and people (myself included) tend to be very close-minded about it. Debating a subject that you are unswayable on with someone who is also unswayable is simply a waste of time. Furthermore, it’s an unprovable problem, so it’s not worth any effort defending.
Secondarily, and this may sound somewhat arrogant, but I don’t really want to impact another person’s faith. When I was younger and much more brash, I actually enjoyed challenging other people’s religious views. But now that I’m older, I realize that it’s not the nicest way to conduct myself. These days, I am much more likely to live and let live, as long as the other person does not try to sway me.
All that being said, the note from my friends made me realize that there are people close to me who would hope that they could sway my beliefs, so this series of posts is simply to lay out for the world my thoughts on God and religion. I don’t hold these attempts against my friends and family, I understand that they are simply doing what they think is right, and are likely doing out of concern for me. However, anyone who would attempt to influence my thoughts will have to address and overcome all of the logical discrepancies I list below in order to have any chance of success. If you are unable to do that, you will never influence my thought process. And in my opinion, any all-knowing, compassionate creator would understand and forgive a disbelief in the illogical.
One final note; In many ways, this post will focus on Christianity in particular, as that is the religion I am most bombarded with. I want to make it clear that, if you are a Christian, you are probably going to disagree with and perhaps be offended by some of what I say. I also want to make clear from the outset that I do not mean to offend anyone. I am simply trying to be as honest, direct, and clear about my beliefs and reasoning as possible. Unfortunately, that’s very difficult to do with a subject like religion without offending people. So, if anything I say in this post offends or challenges your beliefs, I would like to apologize in advance.

Defining God

The first step of this examination must be the most basic: Before I can discuss my beliefs regarding God, I must first define God. Webster’s defines God as:

“The Being perfect in power, wisdom, and goodness who is worshiped as creator and ruler of the universe”

That’s fair enough, but a little too specific for my taste. I would define God as the creator of the known universe. I think many of the other assumptions inherent in the previous definition (power, wisdom, goodness) are pretty specific interpretations, and I’m not sure I agree with any of them.
So, for the purpose of my exploration, I’m going to define God simply as the creator of the universe, but inherent in that is that God is the creator of the ‘rules’ that govern your fate after death. Other than that, I do not and cannot make any other assumptions about God. I do not assume its sex, I do not assume its number, I do not assume its type, I do not assume it is living or dead, I do not assume its properties, you get the idea.

The Likelihood that God Exists or Existed

Now that I have defined God, let me walk through my thoughts on the likelihood that there actually is/was a God. It is common knowledge that the universe, with all of its very specific constants, is extremely unlikely to have happened by chance (this is known as the Anthropic principle). For example, if gravity was slightly stronger, the universe would have never formed stars and planets, and life (at least in a recognizable sense) would not have arisen. It turns out that there are around 30 or so of these constants that have to be specific values in order to support life as we know it.
Equally well known is that this is a circular argument: We would not be aware of any universe that was not able to support our kind of life, because we would not exist. Still, there are several general thoughts on this as it relates to a God (I have collapsed a few because they are identical in this context):
  1. The universe was created (i.e. by God) specifically to harbor our type of life
  2. The universal constants randomly aligned to create this single universe that is perfect for our type of life (this also covers the case of multiverses)
  3. The universe is dependent on consciousness, and therefore formed on its own to support it
Of these three, by far the most interesting one is the third one. However, it implies that there is a type of intelligence in the universe itself. If the universe is a thinking entity, and the universe created thinking entities (an analogy would be a writer creating characters that are alive and thinking as individuals for the time he is putting them down onto paper), the universe is effectively God, which leads us back to the first theory.
The second theory is more plausible than it initially seems when you look at things from a perspective that does not involve time or make any assumptions about what happens in a singularity. For example, if we make the assumption that the universe can never generate enough energy from the big bang to expand forever (i.e. that there is some predefined relationship between the constants that prevents this), and therefore must always collapse back into a singularity, shuffle the constants, and explode back out, then it makes no difference how unlikely our set of constants are. In this situation, time is irrelevant and our set of constants will occur eventually. Now, granted, I am making some rather significant assumptions, but the point is that this is very commonly pointed to as so unlikely as to be nearly impossible, and I don’t think that is the case.
However, I still have one problem with the second theory: It doesn’t explain the beginning. Let me explain.
This theory simply assumes that the universe always was and is. It gets ‘rebooted’ occasionally, but it effectively never starts or ends. Even interpretations that have two or more universes that are sucked into singularities, tear a hole in reality and into another universe, explode out, only to later crunch back down and repeat the process fall into this same problem (known as the infinite regression problem).
Why is that an issue? Maybe it isn’t, but I have difficulty reconciling a world-view where anything is eternal (even God). In my mind, this is an unbreachable barrier to belief. So, because I cannot come to terms with an eternal universe, I do believe that there is a God, but I can completely understand those that do not. I would say either side is nearly as likely.
To further expand on the equal likelihood argument, on the side of an unending universe, you have Occam’s razor, which, while often misquoted as ‘The simplest solution is usually the correct one’. In general, a more direct translation would be ‘A solution that doesn’t require the invention of something additional is probably the most likely’. In this case, inventing a creator definitely runs afoul of the rule.
The other side of the argument is that mass cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be rearranged. So how could matter in this universe have been created initially out of nothing? It must have come from somewhere. Saying that it “always was” isn’t an argument, it’s an avoidance of an argument. No worthwhile theory of creation, in my mind, can avoid this argument. It must resolve this argument, or it is not a theory of creation, it is a theory of maintenance.
So, just on the basis of this argument, I believe there is a God simply because it seems the most likely theory. However, based on just these few arguments, it is a very slim victory.
The Fear of Death
This may seem an odd place to discuss this topic, but it is, in my opinion, the most important topic (on a personal level) associated with God. Put simply, I believe the fear of death is the primary motivator of most (if not all) people’s belief in God.
Yes, I hear the arguments already. My favorite is “I don’t fear death”. Bullshit. Everyone fears death. The fear of death and need for self preservation is as universal as anything in life. Unless you are missing an Amygdala, you fear death. You may not be conscious of that fear, or you may be delusional about it, but it exists.
Think critically about times in your life where you should have feared death. Have you ever been threatened with a knife or gun? Ever been in a car accident? Are you afraid of planes, or falling? If you feel or felt fear in these situations, quit kidding yourself, you fear death.
This is perhaps one of my favorite places to catch people in their own self-delusional, ignorant bullshit, and it most commonly happens with people who feel they have strong religious beliefs. People say, “I don’t fear death because I know I am going to heaven”. Yet, those same people do not smoke or do drugs, they try to eat healthy, most try to exercise, they do not drive fast, are risk averse, and would freak out if they found out they had cancer tomorrow. Yet, they ‘Don’t fear death’? What a crock.
I have met people who genuinely did not fear death. You know what happened to them? Shortly after they decided they didn’t fear death, they died.
My wife’s Grandparents were both this way. Both said they were ‘ready to go home’. Sure enough, it wasn’t long, and they did. Her grandmother had cancer and let it progress without intensive treatment. Her grandfather simply decided he was ready to go and refused to take his medicine, eat, or receive any care.
On the other side of the fence, one of my relatives claims she doesn’t fear death, and yet proves by her actions that she is terrified of death. If you are in pain, unhappy, and claim to believe you are going to a better place, why would you want to stick around? If that were truly how I felt, and I were in that situation, I would be trying to speed up the trip as much as possible!
On a personal level, I didn’t realize how much I feared death until I really sat down and considered the possibilities. The first one I started with was the most basic: What if there is nothing else? What if, when you die, you cease to exist…forever? Everything that you knew, everything you felt, all of your memories, your way of thinking, your approach to life, everything that makes you you is gone forever. You do not think; You simply are no more.
This thought brought about an awe-inspiring, stupefying level of terror in me. I cannot imagine any punishment, any universe, any Hell more terrifying than the thought that you are erased into pure, empty nothingness. Even eternal torture and pain allows (requires, in fact) conscious thought. The idea that everything is over is immeasurably worse.
This, in my opinion, is the core of why the majority of people believe in God and the afterlife. Because the alternative, to any thinking person, is so incredibly terrible. Hell, in any form, is simply a fallacy. The most exquisite punishment is to cease to be. If I went to Hell, I would be unbelievably thankful to God; That He would elevate me into a world of pain and torture instead of delivering me into nothingness is a priceless gift.
Hell must be a concept engineered by man to scare those without the imagination to understand the hellishness of nothingness, and without the experience to realize that all pain, when endured long enough, ceases to have as intense of an effect. Any supreme being would not waste time on such a place. If It decided you were beyond recovery, It would simply erase you. Torturing you is the solution that would be imagined by an angry, petulant child, not a universal creator.

The Likelihood of an Afterlife

Once I really considered death, and realized how horrible a thing death could be, I began considering the likelihood and potential form of the afterlife. First, let’s tackle the form, because I believe it focuses the rest of the conversation.
Each religion has its own idea of the form the afterlife takes. However, in general, you can narrow these down to two basic camps:
  1. Reincarnation
  2. Transcendence
Basically, on the reincarnation side, there is a belief that when we die, our souls are transferred into a new body, which may or may not be human, depending on the belief structure. Sometimes these beliefs include a heaven or higher plane that the soul advances to after all of the soul’s tasks or lessons are accomplished. However, they all have a common factor of being reborn into this universe.
Transcendent beliefs, however, simply involve transcending to another plane of existence upon death. The most common of these is a notion of Heaven or Hell, but the general idea is that the soul moves on to something largely different.
So, now that we’ve examined the two basic styles of afterlife, how likely is an afterlife? Well, it’s honestly hard to say. The totality of data we have on an afterlife can be summed up as follows:
That’s really it, from a scientific perspective. So, let’s tackle these in order.
On the spiritual front, pretty much all religions believe in some flavor of afterlife. In fact, as I mentioned earlier, I would argue that the belief in an afterlife is the primary reason for the existence of most, if not all, religions. Furthermore, many people who define themselves as ‘spiritual’ but not religious also believe in the afterlife. According to a 1998 poll, 82% of Americans believe in some form of an afterlife, which is kind of interesting, because this number is almost always lower than the number of people who claim to believe in God. In any event, it’s obvious that the majority of Americans believe in life after death. You can make the argument, then, that belief in an afterlife is nearly universal, so such a thing is likely to exist. I call this the “How can 6 billion people be wrong?” theorem.
Unfortunately, this is a flawed argument. Just because people believe a thing does not make it so, and statistics are not the same as facts. So, if you are going to try and analyze this logically, you have to throw these types of correlations out.
However, what about the fact that many religions share some startling similarities? For example, many describe the afterlife in every similar ways, or have very similar beliefs about the journey of the soul. Can these all be explained away so easily?
Actually, they can, unfortunately. A close comparison of major religions reveals that they fall into three basic categories, and within these categories are usually pretty similar in regards to afterlife beliefs, largely because they generally developed in the same geographic region from the same ‘base stock’ of mythology.
For example, Christianity shares a lot of similarity with Judaism and Islam, but that can largely be explained by the fact that they are all Abrihamic religions. However, even among this group, there is a very large disparity in the afterlife. They all pretty much believe in a transcendence, but the nature and form of that transcendence varies pretty dramatically between the religions (and in the case of different Christian denominations, even within the religion). So, ultimately, I think this argument also fails to convince when you really analyze the facts.
This leaves me with only Near Death Experiences (NDE) to use as a data source. An NDE is an experience that a person relates of ‘dying’ once they are revived from a state of clinical death. Since this experience purportedly occurs after a person has actually died, it makes a very tempting subject for someone who is looking for proof of life after death. In fact, it may be our only actual proof that there is life after death. However, we must treat this data with the same skepticism as we would any other claims of knowledge of an afterlife. After all, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
So, first, let’s examine the basic tenets of a typical NDE claim in order to have a solid grasp of what we are analyzing. A typical NDE starts with a verifiable patient death, usually due to cardiac arrest. In many cases, there is also a verifiable lack of brain activity. This is followed by awareness that they are dead, and a sense of peace. Next, the subject usually experiences an out of body experience, typically involving them ‘rising up’ and viewing their own body as they leave it, and a journey down or up a ‘tunnel’. Next, they encounter a being or beings that are usually described as ‘creature(s) of light’, and are given a life review. Finally, as they are being revived, they generally experience anxiety and a reluctance to return to life. These are all general statements (there are some major variants), but the vast majority of NDEs follow this pattern.
Now that we understand the typical NDE claim, let’s examine the major arguments against it being an actual afterlife experience.
The first and most severe argument is the one I will call the ‘flow of time’ argument. Essentially, NDEers claim that there experience began with clinical death. However, this is far from certain. We know (in most cases) that clinical death did, in fact, occur. However, we do not know when the NDE occurred.
For example, many of the best documented NDEs have occurred when a patient clinically died while under general anesthesia for an operation. During these cases, the patient was already under some state of altered consciousness. It is entirely possible that the patient observed these things prior to dying, or shortly after being revived. Truthfully, we do not, and cannot know. Just because the patient did die and did have an NDE does not necessarily mean that the NDE occurred while the patient was dead.
However, while we cannot have any proof on this front, there is some very good evidence in favor of the NDE occurring during clinical death. For example, there are many well-documented cases of NDEers reporting certain aspects that occurred in the OR/ER in startling detail, and giving them in the exact order that they occurred after they were declared clinically dead or while they were unconscious. One example is quoted below, from a study published in The Lancet on December 15, 2001:

“During a night shift an ambulance brings in a 44-year-old cyanotic, comatose man into the coronary care unit. He had been found about an hour before in a meadow by passers-by. After admission, he receives artificial respiration without intubation, while heart massage and defibrillation are also applied. When we want to intubate the patient, he turns out to have dentures in his mouth. I remove these upper dentures and put them onto the ‘crash car’. Meanwhile, we continue extensive CPR. After about an hour and a half the patient has sufficient heart rhythm and blood pressure, but he is still ventilated and intubated, and he is still comatose. He is transferred to the intensive care unit to continue the necessary artificial respiration. Only after more than a week do I meet again with the patient, who is by now back on the cardiac ward. I distribute his medication. The moment he sees me he says: ‘Oh, that nurse knows where my dentures are’. I am very surprised. Then he elucidates: ‘Yes, you were there when I was brought into hospital and you took my dentures out of my mouth and put them onto that car, it had all these bottles on it and there was this sliding drawer underneath and there you put my teeth.’ I was especially amazed because I remembered this happening while the man was in deep coma and in the process of CPR. When I asked further, it appeared the man had seen himself lying in bed, that he had perceived from above how nurses and doctors had been busy with CPR. He was also able to describe correctly and in detail the small room in which he had been resuscitated as well as the appearance of those present like myself. At the time that he observed the situation he had been very much afraid that we would stop CPR and that he would die. And it is true that we had been very negative about the patient’s prognosis due to his very poor medical condition when admitted. The patient tells me that he desperately and unsuccessfully tried to make it clear to us that he was still alive and that we should continue CPR. He is deeply impressed by his experience and says he is no longer afraid of death. 4 weeks later he left hospital as a healthy man.”

This is, in my opinion, a perfect example of why you cannot dismiss an NDE out-of-hand. Here was a patient who was likely clinically dead on arrival (it does not say for sure, but he had to be defibrillated and required artificial respiration). Regardless, he was undoubtedly comatose with poor heart and respiration function, and had a low concentration of oxygen in the blood (as he was cyanotic).
This individual could accurately recount what went on as he was brought in from the perspective of someone watching from above his body. Can this be explained by guesses and coincidence combined with a state of incomplete unconsciousness (while appearing to be comatose)? I am not a doctor, but I imagine it could be explained in that fashion. However, I am not so certain that such an explanation is the least complex one. In short, evidence like this is, in my mind, persuasive enough to at least cast doubt on the ‘flow of time’ argument. And evidence like this is exceedingly common in NDE cases.
The second major argument against NDEs is that they are caused by purely physiological functions. In this regard, there are two main arguments:
  1. NDEs are caused by a massive release of drugs/hormones during trauma.
  2. NDEs are caused by some type of hallucinatory response to the brain being shut down or acute stress.
For the first theory, massive quantities Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) released from the pineal gland has been indicated as a possible cause, as DMT is a psychedelic drug. However, in a published study on this theory, Dr. Rick Strassman only reported that a small percentage (3%) of his subjects had NDE-like hallucinations. This does not line up with the incidence of NDEs in revivals, which in the previously mentioned Lancet study, was 18%.
Furthermore, if NDEs were caused by the release of a drug from the brain during acute stress situations, one would expect similar effects to happen in every acute stress situation known to trigger an NDE (which is a very large number). In Strassman’s study, over half of the participants experienced some type of hallucination, but only 3% was NDE-like. Again, this does not line up with studies on NDEs, which show that 18% of the time, subjects experience NDE-like effects and the rest of the time, they do not have hallucinations.
The second theory, that NDEs are actually caused by some type of hallucination brought on by the death of the brain, has similar issues when viewed critically. If this were the case, all individuals who experience similar situations should suffer from NDEs, and as we mentioned previously, that is not the case. This could potentially be explained by short-term memory loss due to the event. However, even in that case, that doesn’t explain why all of the experiences are different. Since the effect is supposedly caused by the same phenomena, all NDEs should be very similar, and they are not. For while most NDEs tend to follow the same general pattern, the details are all significantly different.
Furthermore, it doesn’t explain evolutionary motive. Why would the brain create some elaborate ‘grand finale’ when dying? There obviously isn’t an evolutionary purpose (a dying creature can’t create offspring, after all), so why would the brain have an elaborate mechanism to ease death?
In short, I think science doesn’t have a good explanation for what an NDE actually is or what it is caused by, and NDEs are the strongest evidence of an afterlife that we have. And so, based purely on NDE evidence, I believe that the evidence in favor of an afterlife is enticing enough to believe there actually is one, which brings me back to contemplating God.
Christianity and the Motivations of God
Now that we have looked at all of the prerequisite subjects, I’m back to focusing on God, and since Christianity is what I am most consistently confronted with, I will focus on it and it’s particular brand of God. Here, I will begin with perhaps the most important question: What motivated God to create us?
It seems kind of odd to me that this question is never answered directly in Christianity (at least to my knowledge). Most Christians will give some kind of cop out answer to this question. Something like “Because he loves us” or “So we could fellowship with him”. These are both pretty mindless when examined critically. For the first, you can’t love something that doesn’t exist. You can love the idea of a thing that doesn’t exist, but it doesn’t exist yet, and if it is a creature with free will, it will be different than you imagine it to be. For the second, what does that actually mean? Is God lonely?
It’s these kinds of questions that prompted some deep thought on my own about what would possibly motivate a supreme being to create other beings. I came up with four broad possibilities:
  1. He wanted someone to worship Him
  2. He needed pawns in a game
  3. He wanted a science experiment
  4. He was lonely
Each of these has a number of problems in the context of Christianity, so let’s begin with the first one: He wanted worshipers.
Let me get this out of the way first and foremost: Any God arrogant enough to create beings expressly for the purpose of worshiping Him is not a God I ever want to meet. Thinking about a God like that actually makes me WANT to worship a Satan. What a horrible, miserable creature this God must be, that he needs billions of subservient creatures groveling at His feet to feel important. Any God motivated to creation by such arrogance does not deserve to be awed.
So what about the second choice? This one is the one that actually seems the most compatible with Christianity, with the sole exception of part of the book of Genesis. Unfortunately, since it at least appears that Lucifer didn’t fall until after man was created (since God looked at his creation and decided it was ‘very good’, and how could it be very good if Evil was a part of it?), this voids this motivation. After all, there was only one player in this game of cosmic chess until Lucifer fell.
Still, the Bible isn’t very clear on the point, so let’s concede that it’s possible that Lucifer fell before God created the Universe. In this case, you run into one of the classic multi-threaded contradictions in Christianity: God is all powerful and all knowing, and yet he somehow needs humans to worship him so he can win a galactic chess game with Lucifer. Huh? Either the first premise (God is all powerful and all knowing ) is not true, or the last (He needs us to worship Him) is not true. If the last is not true, then his motivation cannot be for us to worship him. If the first is not true, then Christianity is built on a LOT of lies, because the Bible claims God is all powerful many, many times.
I know at this point many Christians will speak up and say “Well, God is playing by some rules he set for the game with Lucifer. He’s still all-powerful, he just chooses not to use that power to prove he is better than Lucifer.”
OK, well, that doesn’t paint a very pretty picture either. That shows a God that chooses to allow a lot of suffering just to prove a very trivial point. And who, exactly, is God proving anything to in this case? Lucifer? Ultimately, I believe that this whole explanation is just a (very poor) personification of God. If God is nothing more than a stubborn child out to prove a point no matter what cost, I still have no desire to enter into any kind of a relationship with Him.
OK, so what about the third case: God as a scientist, and humanity as an experiment? Well, empirically, I think this case is probably the one supported by the most evidence. I mean, in this case, you would have a creator that created creatures with complete free will, and started the simulation to see what happened. If He/It is scientifically minded, that would certainly explain the hands-off approach and complete aloofness regardless of the suffering He sees. However, the Bible is pretty well set against this type of God, claiming that God loves us and has interfered at times to modify our progress. Can scientists love their experimental subjects? Perhaps, but it’s a really bad idea, and is therefore not something a ‘perfect’ scientist would do. Still, of the four, this one is my favorite motivation, because it actually makes some kind of logical sense.
The last motivation is that he was lonely, which makes logical sense to some degree, but falls a little flat when you consider that if He was an all-powerful God and was lonely, why hasn’t He chosen a more direct method of communication than prayer? Furthermore, what about Angels? Why are they not valid companions? Are they not capable of free will and independent thought? If not, how do you explain Lucifer? Was Lucifer perhaps His first experiment with a companion that failed, so he created us expecting that some portion of us would be worthy companions to join Him in Heaven?
Sadly, this last theory actually makes some sense, but again, paints a very bad picture of God. This shows a God that is not only not all-powerful and all-knowing, but that seems to be only marginally more capable than we are; A God that is so mistake prone that He had already created a single massive, uncontrollable failure, and chose to hedge His bets with His next attempt by creating an entire procreating ecosystem of creatures. If this is God, again, I’m not sure how deserving of praise He is, though He may be an alright guy to have a beer with.
There is one final motivation that I haven’t included in the main list but I feel I must mention for completeness: Entertainment. Perhaps God is so insane that He created a self-aware ecosystem of creatures simply for his own perverse entertainment. After all, The Sims are only a poor attempt at replicating this, and look how entertaining most people found them.
Ultimately, when God is imagined through the simplistic framework of Christianity, these are literally the only motivations I can see as credible, and none of them really satisfy. Furthermore, those that mesh the best with Christianity as it is portrayed in the Bible (in my opinion, options 1 and 2) do not describe a creature that I have any desire in getting to know. So this is the first place where I begin to part with Christianity.

Contradictions in Christianity

The second set of faults I have with Christianity is the sheer number of major contradictions present in the Bible. These range from direct, literal contradictions to indirect moral contradictions, but the Bible is pretty much chock full of them. Here I am just going to cover the ones that I think are the most damning. If you want a bigger list, a quick Google search is bound to bring up enough reading material to keep you occupied for quite some time.
The first one I hit pretty heavily in the previous section, but it is simply this: God is supposedly all-powerful (Matthew 19:26, Genesis 17:1, Job 42:2, Luke 1:37, Revelation 19:6) and all-knowing (1 John 3:20), yet wasn’t able to control Lucifer? Furthermore, if he knew Lucifer was going to rebel, or Eve was going to bite the apple, or any of a billion other things that caused all of our suffering, why didn’t He stop them? This comes back to the motivation issue, and if you spend much time on this, you will quickly come to the conclusion that either A) There is a very large lie in here somewhere or B) There is a very large part of the story missing. Something simply doesn’t fit.
This same issue leads to a bunch of other questions. For example, If He is all knowing, He would have known that we would need specific guidance on a large number of things. Take, for example, stem cell research. An all–knowing God could have easily added a clause on stem cell research. Maybe it was part of the 10 commandments Moses dropped. Oops, that puts us in another little quandary…An all-knowing God would have known he was going to drop the tablet and therefore would have only put the commandments we could ignore on that one, or better yet, had all commandments written on a single tablet. But hell, let’s not forget, He’s all-powerful too, so he could have generated a 72” plasma TV and a blu-ray player and broadcasted the damn commandments. I’m getting a little silly here, but can you see where I am going? A limited all-powerful being is an oxymoron.
The second major contradiction I have issue with is John 3:16. I’ll repeat it here for those who are unfamiliar (this quote is from the NIV):

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

This is line quoted by Baptists and a number of other denominations as the crux of the whole ‘being saved’ movement. Effectively, this line says (very clearly, I might add), that all you need to do is believe that God gave us his Son, and if you believe in Him, you will live forever. There are a few assumptions here, so let me be clear on what I am assuming this says:
  • God loved the world
  • God gave His one and only Son (which we must assume to be Jesus Christ, even though several people are referred to as such: Luke 3:38, Psalms 2:7, etc.)
  • Whoever believes in God will live forever in Heaven
This last point is the one with the most contention. Some denominations would argue that it means that whoever believes that Jesus died on the Cross to forgive our sins will live forever, but that is reaching a bit I think. Regardless of how specific you think the line is, it’s pretty clear that it states that if you believe that God that gave His son’s life so that we could live forever, you will do so.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, nullifies pretty much all of the Ten Commandments. After all, why bother with all of the ‘Thou shalt nots’ when you can just say “Eh, screw it” and decide to believe in Jesus? In fact, you can believe in this one line and make any narrative up you want to about what God actually is and still be in compliance. At WORST, all you have to do is believe that Jesus was God’s son and he died so that you could live forever, and BLAMO! Saved!
John 3:16 also contradicts several very specific passages in the Bible, like this one (Matthew 19:24):

“It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”

Silly Bible, don’t you know all the rich man has to do is believe in Jesus? Again, I’m kind of poking fun here, but this isn’t a hard exercise. Look through the Bible with even a slightly critical eye and you can find tons of these types of logical issues.
Finally, there are all kinds of minor contradictions that none-the-less keep anyone with a critical eye from taking the Bible seriously. A few of these are below:
  1. Killing is bad (Exodus 20:13), except for when it’s not (Exodus 22:18)
  2. Turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:39), or an eye for an eye (Exodus 21:24)?
  3. The sins of the father are both visited upon sons (Isaiah 14:21) and specifically condemned from being visited on the sons (Deuteronomy 24:16).
Yes, I know there are arguments against these being contradictions, but the fact that they at least appear to be contradictions should disturb you at least a little. I mean, seriously, couldn’t an all-powerful God figure out some more definite way to clarify what He means? It seems a little suspect to me that there is any room at all for debate. I’m fairly sure I can find a lawyer (a completely human one, as hard as that may be to find) to write up a set of laws that are completely closed to interpretation. God couldn’t figure this out? Hmm.

The Mind of God and The Bible

Now, I’d like to talk about the last thing that really bothers me about Christianity, and that is the psychology of God. If you read the Bible, the entire Bible, its hard not to end up thinking either A) Some parts of this book aren’t accurate or B) God has some major psychoses.
For example, in the Old Testament, you have a God that basically acts like a spoiled 3-year-old. He is constantly throwing tantrums and wiping the sandbox clean (Genesis 6:5 – 10:32, Genesis 19:4-5), asking for fathers to sacrifice their only sons as a test of faith (Genesis 22), taking a truly pious man and destroying him as a test of faith (Job); that sort of nasty, mean-spirited shit.
It gets even worse if you imagine that this God was actually all-knowing and knew this was going to happen and knew how to prevent it, and instead of doing so, decided to kill or inflict suffering for the sheer fun of it. How’s that for sadism writ large?
Now, contrast this God with the God of the New Testament, who is all about peace and love. Then contrast that God with the God of Revelation, where he goes back to being a spoiled, petulant child, and even gets his Son in on the action.
Figure out how these two/three Gods can be the same being and not be very unstable and you will be doing better than I have. Many modern Christians can’t do any better, and therefore choose to mostly ignore the Old Testament and/or Revelations. Again, to me, this is a big red flag. When I have to selectively read the Word of God to avoid the errors in the narrative, perhaps I should question the source.
Other Christians have done even worse, in my opinion, and written all of these issues off with some trite line like “He works in mysterious ways.” And yet other Christians look at God like a Father figure that is correcting wayward children. The problem with both of these approaches is that they are contradicted by the Bible. Again, if God is all-powerful and all-knowing, he would have figured out a better teaching tool than suffering. Viewing God as a parent is a personification of God, and saying the mind of God is unknowable is simply an avoidance tactic, like sticking your fingers in your ears and refusing to listen when presented with conflicting information. In my mind, any theory that cannot stand up to scrutiny is not valid or worthy of belief, and this applies to creation theories as much as any other theory.
Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying the entire Bible is bad, far from it. There is definitely some deep wisdom and good guidance in it. However, even at its best, nothing in the Bible is revolutionary enough to have required divine intervention. All of the wisdom, all of the moral frameworks in the Bible are all things that man came up with independently on multiple occasions throughout history. Nothing in the Bible is earth-shattering.
To understand what I mean, let me give you an example of something that would be irrefutably revolutionary. Imagine that the Bible contained, written in such a way that it would not become obvious what it meant until we developed the scientific and mathematical prerequisites to decode it, a grand unifying model of physics that worked in all possible situations. This is considered the holy grail of physics, and every time we think we are getting close, a new data point emerges that throws things back into doubt. However, God would know how the universe worked at the lowest and highest levels. God would be able to provide us a mathematical model that would work on all situations, and that would remain valid even as new data is uncovered.
However, such a thing is not in the Bible. In fact, no really earth-shatteringly powerful data at all is in the Bible, just a collection of wisdom passed down through the ages, like all other books, interspersed with questionably accurate historical records along with logically challenged mythology.
At this point, many Christians respond with something like: Some advanced mathematical formula would prove the existence of God, and Jesus said ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe’, so God wants us to have faith; to believe without proof.
To this I respond: Why? Why is belief important? Again, think about motivation. Why is it so important that we believe? This, again, is at best sadistic. Create a creature with free will and a logical, problem solving mind. Allow this creature to discover that the way to truth is to test and analyze their environment using their senses. Then, tell this creature that to avoid eternal damnation, they must believe in something they are completely hardwired against believing in…Something that doesn’t physically exist and cannot be proven. This is completely sadistic. I cannot believe that such a horrible creature would be God. And if such a horrible creature is God, I choose Satan. At least he is honest about being evil, so I have some idea what I am dealing with.

404: Evidence Not Found – Reviewing ‘The Language of God’

Now we come to the spark that started this entire series: The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief by Francis Collins. I’m actually not going to spend much time here, as this book has already been responded to very thoroughly by George C. Cunningham in his book Decoding the Language of God: Can a Scientist Really Be a Believer?. What I will say that I haven’t said already is that this book proposes to offer evidence for the existence of God and then offers, in my opinion, nothing.
The main pillars that Mr. Collins lays his belief upon are Moral Law and the need for fellowship, and let me say that these pillars are weakly supported. First up, Mr. Collins states that Moral Law is universal amongst man, and that this is proof of God. Let’s examine this belief.
To begin, let’s define Moral Law. In Mr. Collins case, the closest definition would probably be ‘An innate sense of right and wrong that defines a code of conduct shared by all of humanity’. The problems with this are numerous.
First, not all societies agree on what is right and what is wrong. The vast difference in laws amongst societies provides ample evidence of this. Second, there are some very good theories as to how the similarities in morality and the reasons for altruism evolved. These are theories that Mr. Collins seems to intentionally avoided, and pretty directly answer all of his questions in the book with scientific data. Instead of digging into this, I would simply point to the following Wikipedia entry, from which the following was taken:

“Morality is not absolute, but relative and constitutes any set of behaviors that encourage human cooperation based on their ideology to get ideologic unity. Biologists contend that all social animals, from ants to elephants, have modified their behaviors, by restraining selfishness in order to make group living worthwhile. Human morality, though sophisticated and complex relative to other animals, is essentially a natural phenomenon that evolved to restrict excessive individualism and foster human cooperation.[13] On this view, moral codes are ultimately founded on emotional instincts and intuitions that were selected for in the past because they aided survival and reproduction (inclusive fitness). Examples: the maternal bond is selected for because it improves the survival of offspring; the Westermarck effect, where close proximity during early years reduces mutual sexual attraction, underpins taboos against incest because it decreases the likelihood of genetically risky behaviour such as inbreeding.”

In short, Moral Law is far from universal, and even those aspects that are mostly uniform (including altruism) have evolutionary evidence to back their existence.
The second pillar he mentions is a universal need for fellowship with the creator. By this, it appears that he means that all people have a need to try and find God, which I strongly disagree with and furthermore, I think misses the point. I don’t believe people universally search for God. I believe people universally search for a reason for existence. The concept of God came about because that search is largely fruitless.
And I believe this search is universal because of two other universal aspects of human existence: We are self aware, and we are naturally curious. I believe that any creature that has both of these features will eventually always ask the questions: Where did I come from, and where will I go? And once these questions have been asked, some part of your mind will always be searching for the answers. This is why all human beings search for ‘the meaning of life’. In short, I think the ‘need for fellowship’ is far from universal, but the search for meaning absolutely is. And the search for meaning can be easily explained, no God required.
In a nutshell, I didn’t find The Language of God to be very thought provoking. The letter my friends sent with it, however, inspired me to finally write this (rather large) post. Overall, I found The New Evidence That Demands A Verdict Fully Updated To Answer The Questions Challenging Christians Today to be much more scientific and thought provoking than The Language of God, and would recommend it to anyone who is interested in a good look at Christianity and the Bible from a mostly logical perspective. And yes, I recommended it despite the fact that it is very pro-Christian.

My Beliefs in Regards to Religion, Christianity, and God

In the last section, I’m going to clarify my stance on Religion (and specifically Christianity) for everyone who would convert me. I really don’t believe in God or an afterlife in the same way that most religious people seem to – with fervor, conviction, and passion – largely because I’m not completely sure that those things exist. Rather, I am trying to determine what is the most likely of possibilities based on the research I am familiar with and the data I have available, which is largely rather circumstantial.
Because the evidence in favor of these things is so flimsy, my conclusions based on that evidence are similarly fallible, and I will not defend them vehemently. If solid, contradictory evidence is presented, I welcome it and would embrace it.
However, before shooting me a million links to kooky websites, please read that previous sentence well – The evidence must be solid. I refuse to debate circumstantial evidence with circumstantial evidence, and in general, I’m not going to waste any time on someone else’s view of one or more holy books. In short, regardless of the arguments you bring to me, it is unlikely to completely convince me unless it is unequivocal.
To fully understand my disbelief, ask yourself the following question: If the God of Christianity – an all-powerful, all knowing, benevolent creature who loves us and wants a personal relationship with us – exists, why hasn’t He shown up on my doorstep and spent 20 minutes talking to me? An all powerful creator can do anything: Spawn a copy of Himself to personally materialize in front of every living creature, stop time, ANYTHING. He has no limits and no boundaries. So why is He not physically in front of us talking to each and every one of us right now? When you find an answer to that question and the thousands of questions that your answer generates that makes logical, coherent sense, you will have something worth listening to. Until then, I see no choice but to continue to disbelieve in an all-powerful creator that loves and needs us.
This does not mean that I do not believe in God or an Afterlife in principle. Far from it, I actually believe those things are more likely than not. However, every religion that I have studied in my life always seems to be more beneficial for the leaders of that religion than for anyone else. For this reason alone, I instantly distrust organized religion almost to the point of hostility.
Back on point, however, here is what I believe: If this life is just a beginning, if there is something greater that we transcend to, then it seems more realistic to me to imagine a God that would be intelligent enough to create a universe that has all of the things you need to learn already ‘baked in’ as the best way of doing things. That if you need to love and be loved to succeed in the afterlife, the world would be built to foster that (and indeed it appears to be so). If you need to show kindness and cooperate in order to reach your potential, the world should nurture that (and so it appears to, even from a completely evolutionary perspective).
If God is indeed such a powerful and intelligent creature, then a list of rules are not necessary. A list of things to believe in is superfluous. Belief or disbelief cannot make any difference in the end, the only thing that should matter is whether or not you learned the lessons that the crucible of life was built to teach you. And if you did not? Well, allowing you to try again seems like a reasonable thing to do, and wouldn’t you expect an all powerful, supremely intelligent being be reasonable?
More than anything, if there is a God, I hope He is intelligent and reasonable, because otherwise, Heaven is going to be Hell.

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  1. #1 by Jennifer on April 29, 2011 - 4:13 am

    Speaking as the person who sent you the book  I figured I ought to create a login so I can add a few thoughts.
    “the note from my friends made me realize that there are people close to me who would hope that they could sway my beliefs”
    Well, knowing you and your strength of will and logical processing, I don’t know that my aspirations were as lofty as to actually cause a complete conversion of the soul just by reading this book. Yes, you know Mike and I are believers, and you’re respectful of that. I think I best understood your beliefs as being incredibly skeptical, but I wasn’t sure much beyond that. I found the book to be different and more logical than most writings that are meant to explain someone’s belief and faith. I’m honestly glad you could just take it and analyze it, as food for thought in your contemplations. I have never believed that beating someone over the head with a book (literally or figuratively) is a way to convert his or her mind and soul. I would much rather maintain a friendship and relationship with someone and be open to discussing things instead of giving him or her an ultimatum.
    Let me also add here that if ironclad, incontrovertible, scientific evidence of God’s existence, His plan, His purpose and His motives existed, it probably would have made headlines by now. Who knows what we will find in the future? Most of the evidence, accounts and testimonies that exist have had some level of scientific inquiry attempt to find any other possible reason or explanation other than what Christians believe.

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  2. #2 by Jennifer on April 29, 2011 - 4:15 am

    So after the intellectual exercising, it seems you arrive at 2 points and then further work on examining God’s motivations:
    “So, just on the basis of this argument, I believe there is a God simply because it seems the most likely theory. However, based on just these few arguments, it is a very slim victory.”

    “In short, I think science doesn’t have a good explanation for what an NDE actually is or what it is caused by, and NDEs are the strongest evidence of an afterlife that we have. And so, based purely on NDE evidence, I believe that the evidence in favor of an afterlife is enticing enough to believe there actually is one, which brings me back to contemplating God.”

    So, for your discussion on Christianity and the motivations of God, let me add a fifth possibility. It has been meaningful for me in my faith to see God as a God who wanted to share a world and creation with sentient beings who wanted to be with Him. To me, it seems more like a parent-child relationship. For me, it draws a lot of correlations. Parents tend to love their children unconditionally, even when the children screw up. When the children refuse to listen to the parents and go off and make mistakes, the parents’ hearts break for the children but the parents usually still love the children a whole lot. I believe God gave us free will because He loves us and wants us to choose to be with Him, spiritually while we are here on earth, and afterwards when our time here on earth is done.
    Parents know that children need rules and guidance, because doing certain things will just get you in trouble. Hence the 10 commandments, but more so, Jesus’s instruction to us to love God with all our heart, soul and mind, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. That’s hard! We are naturally selfish, proud, and not very concerned with others.
    Anyway, the parent-child relationship analogy is what means the most to me and makes the most sense to me personally in my faith. If we could force our children to do everything we wanted and they couldn’t ever choose for themselves, we would never know if they do what they do because they love us and agree, or because we have made them robotic.
    I’m not sharing anything past this point in order to try and change your mind, just to try and explain how my understanding is, and how I reconcile this in my personal faith.
    The Old Testament descriptions of God paint a very distinct picture, of wrath and awful circumstances that happen if God’s children disobey Him. Those same people in that time relied on the priests and temple to intervene and help them communicate with God and follow His laws (which were extremely numerous – just check out Leviticus).
    One of the purposes of Jesus coming to take the punishment for our sins is that we don’t have anybody between us and Jesus. We don’t need the temple or the priests anymore to talk to God for us. We can do that ourselves. I admit as a Christian it bugs me too when I see large denominations that are very focused on donations and offerings and not very focused on helping their parishioners or their world. It happens. Because of that and your skepticism of large organized religion, I understand why the hesitancy exists to get involved. Because large organized religion is run here on earth by HUMANS, and we are selfish, childish creatures (or can be), it is subject to most of the bad things that can happen as well.
    Christianity and fellowship in a church at its best can be seen when the church is a family of people who want to help each other and the world around them. It doesn’t require a lot of money, fancy buildings, candles, music, or dressy clothes to serve people the way Jesus envisioned.

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  3. #3 by Jennifer on April 29, 2011 - 4:15 am

    “And yet other Christians look at God like a Father figure that is correcting wayward children. The problem with both of these approaches is that they are contradicted by the Bible. Again, if God is all-powerful and all-knowing, he would have figured out a better teaching tool than suffering. Viewing God as a parent is a personification of God, and saying the mind of God is unknowable is simply an avoidance tactic, like sticking your fingers in your ears and refusing to listen when presented with conflicting information.”
    Oops – hey, you did consider this viewpoint  LOL I believe God is all-powerful and all-knowing, yet, what happens to the child if the parent bails them out all the time? I believe with children as with humans as God’s creation – there are some children that will listen and follow, there are some that have to learn the hard way (suffering), and God isn’t going to take our free will away from us in the process.
    “To this I respond: Why? Why is belief important? Again, think about motivation. Why is it so important that we believe? This, again, is at best sadistic. Create a creature with free will and a logical, problem solving mind. Allow this creature to discover that the way to truth is to test and analyze their environment using their senses. Then, tell this creature that to avoid eternal damnation, they must believe in something they are completely hardwired against believing in…Something that doesn’t physically exist and cannot be proven. This is completely sadistic. I cannot believe that such a horrible creature would be God. And if such a horrible creature is God, I choose Satan. At least he is honest about being evil, so I have some idea what I am dealing with. “
    I don’t know that I have an answer that will satisfy you. For me and my faith, I’ll say that love is not logical. The kind of love a parent typically has for his or her child is beyond comprehension, flies in the face of self-preservation, and beyond what makes sense for a human being to logically do. I can’t logically explain why I love my children as much as I do, but I know in my heart that they make my heart overflow and I can’t imagine not doing everything I can for them that will still be the best way to teach them how to be happy, self-sufficient adults. For my faith, I know that Jesus loves me the same way. He loves me even if I screw up, when I ask for forgiveness, when I do stupid things or say stupid things. He loves me and cries with me when I hurt. He carries me spiritually when I have to go through situations that I can’t imagine a way out of, or are so dark and dim that I just want to give up.

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  4. #4 by Jennifer on April 29, 2011 - 4:17 am

    “However, before shooting me a million links to kooky websites, please read that previous sentence well – The evidence must be solid. I refuse to debate circumstantial evidence with circumstantial evidence, and in general, I’m not going to waste any time on someone else’s view of one or more holy books. In short, regardless of the arguments you bring to me, it is unlikely to completely convince me unless it is unequivocal. “
    Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, I think if this kind of evidence existed, it would have come to light already  If that kind of evidence existed, faith would not be necessary. Choice and belief would not be necessary, as it could be proved by a scientific theorem. The best I can say is that well, love is not logical.
    “To fully understand my disbelief, ask yourself the following question: If the God of Christianity – an all-powerful, all knowing, benevolent creature who loves us and wants a personal relationship with us – exists, why hasn’t He shown up on my doorstep and spent 20 minutes talking to me? An all powerful creator can do anything: Spawn a copy of Himself to personally materialize in front of every living creature, stop time, ANYTHING. He has no limits and no boundaries. So why is He not physically in front of us talking to each and every one of us right now? When you find an answer to that question and the thousands of questions that your answer generates that makes logical, coherent sense, you will have something worth listening to. Until then, I see no choice but to continue to disbelieve in an all-powerful creator that loves and needs us. “
    I am not an eloquent theologian. I can’t explain all of this, but I hear your yearning to have something concrete to hold onto, and something proven to believe in. I haven’t experienced God physically in front of me, in one form or another (like George Burns in those movies). Again, this is just my personal faith and belief, but I believe that God works in this world through his believers that allow Him into their hearts. I believe that when I get an urging to call someone that I haven’t talked to in a while, or to donate something to someone that needs it, or to share a word or thought that I wouldn’t have done otherwise, that God is trying to tell me something or encourage me to help someone in His name. I try to listen, because that’s what I believe.
    You are right. It’s not logical to think that Somebody loves us and cares about us but won’t give us concrete evidence on which to base our beliefs, so that we can just make it about our brain and not our hearts. That Somebody can forgive people that have done horrible things and turned their lives around. That Somebody can even love people that are determined to live in hate. I can’t explain it, but I’m glad.
    Mike and I care about you and Beth and love you as great friends. What can I say? Love isn’t always logical  LOL But I’m glad for it.

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