God, the Universe and The Meaning of Life

This post is a pretty wide ranging philosophical/religious one I wrote for this thread on The Deep Freeze blog, which I read occasionally. While my own blog tends to be pretty mundane journalism of my pretty mundane daily life, I like surfing other people's – particularly the more outspoken ones – as I enjoy the debates I can have with their authors through the comments sections. I thought, as I’d gone to the effort of preparing this summary of my beliefs, that I would post it here too to see if there was any interesting debate to be had with my own readers.

So here goes. The post is essentially my answer to the questions: “What do you think about God? What do you think about the Universe? Why are we here? Where do we go when we die?”

My basic principal is trust in rational thought rather than faith. I cannot believe in something just because somebody else says it is so. I will believe in something if it can be demonstrated to me, or (for the pedants among you) if sufficient hard-science, peer-reviewed literature states that it is true. (Although I would allow there should always be a small element of doubt; always keep an open mind. Major thoughtquakes can rearrange the scientific landscape dramatically; Galileo said that the world was a globe orbiting the Sun, in contradiction to the accepted thinking of his day; Relativity and Quantum Mechanics upset the belief that the Newtonian Laws of Motion were absolute.)

My view on God is different from the mainstream religions. I think it lies somewhere between atheist and spiritualist. Does any god exist? My most simple answer is; I don’t know.

God has never been demonstrated to me and I find the beliefs of most people in this regard highly unlikely when you consider, amongst other things, the sheer amount of time and space in the universe which is not occupied by mankind, the supposed pinnacle of creation. An anthropomorphic god simply does not make sense to me. Even the biblical stories portray inconsistent versions of God. In the early books, he is simply a being with power over the world, which he uses inexplicably in the cause of one particular tribe (why only one tribe when the whole of humanity is his creation?) against other tribes and their (different!) gods. Yet in the later books he is the only god – there are no other gods now!? – and he is all-knowing and all-present, which begs the question; why bother with all the earlier mucking about? Why not just arrange things to your liking in the first place – you are, after all, the one and only god?!?!

And I know that all the believers out there are currently exclaiming ‘God moves in mysterious ways’ but I’m sorry guys and gals, Occam’s razor tells me that a being who is omniscient and omnipotent would not be inconsistent. Thank you for playing but ‘no cigar.’

If there is any kind of higher power above us, I believe it is a totally impersonal power which either has no interest in humanity at all or would possibly see us as microbes on a pinhead. That is the scale of our place in the universe – and even that I think is a generous allowance.

As for the Universe itself, I don’t believe in the Genesis story; I do not believe that a biblical God created the world. I believe that the world evolved over billions of years and that all life on earth is the product of evolution.

(A side note on Intelligent Design: As far as I can see believers in ‘Intelligent Design’ tend to avoid the question of who designed the designer. The so-called theory isn’t internally consistent as it claims that all complex things must be the product of an intelligent designer. If the world was created by such a designer then surely that designer is the most complex thing around and so must himself (itself?) have been designed by a higher designer. This leads to an infinite chain of ever more complex designers being required. Evolution on the other hand explains how complexity can arise from simplicity over time without any such ‘design’ intervention being required; a simpler and more internally consistent theory is, to me far more believable.)

Where my atheism wavers into spiritualism is at the very start of the universe; at the Big Bang. I am quite happy with the scientific explanations of events after the Big Bang, but the event itself is something which science has yet to satisfactorily explain to me. I can conceive of everything in the entire universe being compressed into a super-dense singularity but what I cannot conceive is what might have caused it to explode. What was the ‘prime mover’ which tweaked this state of absolute stasis and resulted in the creation of time and space? As far as I can see, the singularity itself is too dense to have any internal inconsistency, so the prime mover must have been external to it which, in my understanding, is contradictory.

At the moment, science has to put up its hands and say ‘I don’t know’. One of the reasons why I prefer science to religion though, is that science is still looking for the answer whereas in an equivalent situation religion just makes a statement true ‘because I say so.’

So, that is my view on God and the Universe. As for why we are here and where we go when we die, well as you might expect, my disbelief in the main organised religions results in pretty simple answers to those questions: I don’t believe mankind is here to achieve anything particular. We should set our own goals to strive for. I believe death is the end of life, full-stop. There is no Heaven to strive towards or Hell to fear. If the worthiness of our lives is to be judged at all, it should be by our peers on the basis of what we have contributed to humanity during our lifetimes.

Humanity constantly strives to better itself. We are trying our best to outgrow the species’ selfish, pack-based animal past of survival of the fittest. Human civilisation is something we can be proud of and work towards improving. We can aim for ever greater compassion for our fellow men. That is what I believe we should be doing here.

What do you think?