Is there a God?

As it's a Bank Holiday and it ain't too sunny, I thought I'd post something nice and thought provoking. Here's a question for you. If you were offered the chance of a flip of the coin to win £100 million pounds if you won and get immediately executed by a firing squad if you lost, would you take it?

Just think - what a choice - an end to all your problems? Either way you'd never have any financial worries ever again. So who would go for it? I guess anyone who is feeling suicidal due to financial woes would jump at the chance. Problem solved. Who else might go for it. I wondered whether a believer or an athiest might be more prone to try their luck? A believer may think that a few well placed prayers might tip the balance in their favour. If they survived it would be proof of divine intervention. As to an athiest? Would they be less or more likely to go for it? Would a person's faith make any difference to the decision? I suppose that a Muslim is forbidden from gambling, so may decline as a matter of principle.

How many people would go for the chance just to feel the buzz of such high stakes? Just suppose you got 50 atheists and 50 believers who were prepared to give it a go? Statistically 25 of each should become very rich and 25 of each should get their brains blown out. Just suppose all 50 atheists lost and all 50 believers won? Would that persuade you that God exists. What about if all 50 atheists survived and all 50 believers got the bullet? Would that persuade you that God exists and has a sense of humour? So what has all of this got to do with whether there is a God?

Well what is the first question people ask when tragedy befalls them? "Why me?" they ask. "What did I do to deserve this?". I pondered all of this and it occurred to me that it is strange that despite the billions of believers in God, no one seems to have the slightest idea of the true nature of God. Does God really intervene in the events on Planet Earth. Being of the Roman Catholic tradition, there are many logged "miracles" that people take as evidence. The problem with such miracles is they are extremely random and extremely rare, in a planet of billions of people. Any statistician will tell you that such oddities can prove nothing. What about the other side of the coin? The assumption of athiests is that there is nothing before/after/beyond this existence. All we experience is as dust. Life started as a result of random chemical reactions (which as yet are even more elusive than the search for God). Athiests strike out the religious argument as "unscientific", without being able to provide a provable scientific answer as to how life actually started. If it was as simple as passing a lightning strike through a soup of mud and water, it would have been recreated in a laboratory years ago.

The big problem for athiests is that there is a great big chunk of the jigsaw missing and you can't legitimately claim that others are basing their arguments on superstition and stupidity when you don't actually have scientific proof yourself. It got me thinking to what is the nature of God. I suppose there are two theories :-

1) A superbig megageezer in who's image and likeness we are all made

or

2) Somerthing else completely, which we are unable to fully comprehend and understand


I personally subscribe to 2). Look at how scientific knowledge and progress has changed us. Take the cleverest person alive 2,000 years ago (if we exclude people who may or may not be the son of God, based on your personal beliefs). If you gave that person a couple of hours in todays world, how would they rationalise TV, The Internet, air travel, electricity, X-rays, nuclear weapons, Taser guns?

My guess is they'd struggle to explain any of it. If we can develop so much knowledge in 2,000 years (most of it in the last 200), how far will we progress mentally in the next 2,000 years. I have a little theory that 95% of what we understand to be God is just enlightenment. I don't think religious belief changes bad things or alters bad things. I think it just gives us the enlightenment to deal with the consequences. I believe that this world is mans realm and as such we are left to get on with it. Does God have a personal relationship with us? Yes in as much as we can experience enlightenment. Does God perform miracles? I see these as opening the window to somewhere else and a little light shining in. When we draw the curtains and we see the sun, the sun warms us and lights up the room. It changes the way we see things, but the sun is 93 million miles away. Sunliht makes plants grow and our skin change colour, but we can't really get anywhere near the sun. We need the sun to survive but we need the sun to be 93 million miles away otherwise it will burn us up.

For this world to work and life to exist, you need a planet this size to be 93 million miles from a star the size of the sun (too small not enough gravity for an atmosphere, too large and the gravity would squash us). To have life on dry land, you need a moon the size of the moon to exert tidal pressures and have a marginal area between land and sea. You need the right mixture of C02, Oxygen and Nitrogen. Now I've no idea if it's true, but I was told we only have the proportion of Oxygen in the atmosphere because we have plant life. Plants can't survive in the dark in a pure C02 environment, so the earth has the atmosphere because of the plant life on it. If you want to know what sort of a planet you have without life, a moon, the wrong size and the wrong place, look at Venus or Mars.

So back to the question. Is there a God. Well if you say no, then you believe in a massive load of enormous coincidences, a massively complex chain of chemical reactions to initiate the process of life, with hugely complex bio-chemical chains being built that cannot be replicated under any conditions in any laboratory and which then have to completely change the planet  to get us where we are today.

I have my views and beliefs. I'm quite happy to discuss it and to have the flaws in my logic pointed out, but what really disturbs me is that many atheists use science and reason as a weapon against religion, when there just isn't the evidence there to support their hypothesis. I'd be perfectly happy for an atheist to say "I don't believe in God, because God doesn't fit my view of how the Universe operates" That is a perfectly vaild viewpoint. I have a problem when they say "Science, reason and logic supports the hypothesis that God doesn't exist", because as far as I can see it doesn't.

In short, theories such as evolution are not a problem for me. It is fairly easy to demonstrate evolution. The AIDS virus has evolved to be drug resistant in a very short period of time. Flu viruses mutate and kill millions of us, but to extrapolate this rock solid evidence of Darwinian evolution into an explanation for every form of life on earth (and possibly beyond) is to me pushing it. Given the distinctive genetic differences between men and dogs, how long would that process have to take. If a dog had a puppy that was a cat, the cat would not survive as it would need another cat to procreate with, to establish genus Felix. The chances of two dogs having two cats at the same time are beyond the statistical probability that is possible of feasable. To apply the same logic to every genus is, even more tenuous. You can completely change the temperament and appearance of a dog in 50 generations of selective breeding, from a wolf to a pug. You can't change the genome of a dog to a cat in a hundred times that.

Now I'm not seeking to convert you to my beliefs or my way of thinking. I'm just asking you to think about these things as if you come up with some better arguments than mine, we'll both end up a little more enlightened and that will bring us both a little closer to God, regardless of whether you believe or not. For my God, the only enemies are lies and ignorance. Hope you've enjoyed your bank holiday weekend as much as I have.