Musings About God

Just some thoughts and looking into my own brain about God and religion in my current mindset.

 

For every religion there are billions who do not adhere it to it. Yet many of these religions claim simultaneously that their idea of God is loving, yet will punish those who do not adhere to it. It would appear to me that the True God has not designed the universe in a way that expects humanity to adhere to a single set of beliefs amoung many sets that are mutually exclusive. If the idea of an exclusive God presented in these religions is the correct one, wouldn't you expect that the choice would be more clearly presented? It is almost by chance that adherents of religions adhere to the religion that they do. In my view, a Sovereign God, and the one that I believe to exist, would not make the "one true path" to him so obscure as the main organized religons present. He would not make the path something that so many people would be deterred from, using their God-given reason.

Many say, if you don't subscribe to any organized religion, why believe in God at all? How can one arrive at the conclusion that God exists using reason? This is a good question, and belief in God does require some degree of faith in something beyond simply reason. Of the classic "proofs of God" the cosmological arguement is my personal favorite. When one thinks about it, there indeed needs to be an uncaused cause of everything. Some time ago the counter to the cosmological arguement would have been "If God is uncaused and eternal couldn't the universe simply have been uncaused and eternal?" This made sense prior to the development of the Big Bang Theory. The expansion of the universe suggests that traced backward through time, the universe began from a singularity and stretched outward. It is now commonly accepted that the universe did indeed have a beginning. The universe could not have been it's own uncaused cause so it would seem that something created the universe. Granted, this cause of the universe could be something else besides God, it could be a multiverse or some impersonal non-living force. However the beauty of Deism is that the power that created the universe doesn't have to be so clearly defined like those of organized religions. Perhaps the Creator is a mind made up of extradimensional membranes or string vibrations. I personally think that since the universe is so intricate in detail and beauty, that the Creator does indeed have a will and thought this whole thing called the universe out pretty well, on a level we could never hope to grasp.

So what is Deism? 

1. The belief in the existence of a supreme being, specifically of a creator who does not intervene in the universe. The term is used chiefly of an intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries that accepted the existence of a creator on the basis of reason but rejected belief in a supernatural deity who interacts with humankind.

   
   

   The very fact that there are 4,200 religions in the world ought to make one extremely suspicious. We can assume there isn’t one single doctrine (no, not even the bare existence of God) that they all agree on.

   So lots and lots of religions must be wrong.

   It used to be simple. For so many centuries, you would be completely indoctrinated in one religion from birth. Its absolute truth was presupposed by the entire society you knew, and other religions were at best distant rumours of some weird superstitions that remote “heathens” might indulge in. Nothing to take seriously or worry about.

   But the world is so much smaller now. Now the motley multitude of religious ideas across the globe stands revealed, and one very plausible hypothesis pretty much has to pop up in the head of any well-informed observer: It’s all human fantasies! If there were any deeper truths here, like a realdeity revealing itself to many different peoples down the ages, there should have been far more agreement in doctrine.

   As for “billions” believing so and so, let it be recalled that for most of history, nearly all humans thought the earth was flat. I’m pretty sure it was a sphere all along. Yet it seemed reasonable to uninformed humans to think that it was flat. That was what their senses, as well as “common sense”, seemed to be telling them.

   The belief in gods may seem to be due to a basic tendency (some would say flaw) in human psychology, promiscuous teleology, i.e. a tendency to assign “purpose” where there is really none. When people start to imagine a purposing mind behind (say) the weather, wondering why they are being “punished” with less than ideal conditions, the notion of gods is essentially already there. Is there any reason to think that there is something deep and profound going on here? It is pre-scientific people desperately trying to make sense of the world, that is all.

   Human belief in gods technically has no bearing on whether gods really exist, either way. What we can say is that any real gods that may be out there either don’t intervene in human affairs at all, or they do so in a manner so capricious, irregular and low-key that no one can ever tell the supposed divine interventions apart from sheer coincidence. And then the scientifically-minded person would probably have to opt for the latter interpretation.

   The question presupposes that there are 4,200 religions.

   Irrespective of different branches and competing hypotheses, why aren’t there 4,200 “sciences”?

   Could it be that folklore and empiricism will produce very different results, and that one approach is grounded in reality while the other is free to take off into unbridled flights of fantasy?

   We may truly never know the truth of this matter!