God Or Chance 2 (Post 11)

'The fool who has said in his heart, there's no God above.'

Well, if it isn't God responsible for all things and it isn't chance, then what is it? Well, I say, evolution is - and it is not the same as chance. But before I begin on evolution which is purely biological, let us look at a far bigger problem, the origin of the universe. The allure of believing in a designer for the universe is in the fact that it provides us with the satisfaction that there was some intention in our creation and, therefore, some purpose in our existence, that is – we were destined to be beforehand. This is also declared in the bible - "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you," God said to either Jeremiah or Ezekiel. 

I will cut to the chase and say that it is a well known fact that our planet is so delicately fine tuned in location, atmospheric conditions and composing elements that if a there'd been a most infinitesimally small alteration, there would have been no life ever on Earth. This is one thing that simply just happened - yes, by chance. Our planet just happened to be formed with the Big Bang in exactly the right location and with all the right conditions for life. Some clever folk have snorted at this and expressed their dissatisfaction in the metaphor - "Saying that nature with all its order happened by chance is like saying if we gave chimps typewriters, they could produce the works of Shakespeare by chance!" 

Yes, yes, the chances of a planet like ours occurring by chance are very small indeed; it would be like winning the lottery jackpot ten days in a row. But what people fail to see is that we are dealing with infinite time here. Mathematically, as long as something is possible by however small a margin even if it is one chance out of several billions, if given infinite time, it will definitely happen. What's the proof? The proof is we would have to get to the end of eternity to claim that it hadn't happened! So, if I have infinite time to play with, I will at some point win the lottery jackpot ten days in a row! This is basic Mathematics. 

Space out there had infinite time to play with; it was therefore possible for anything, however unlikely, to happen. And so, our universe and our planet were formed and here we are. I cannot tell you what caused the Big Bang; that is beyond my knowledge. Read up on what scientists are up to today; I hear they've recently discovered the 'God Particle' or Higgs Boson. But I can tell you that if you cannot subscribe to a Universe that came from 'nothing' because you think that that is ridiculous, then you cannot and should not subscribe to a creating God because, it is even more ridiculous on two counts – one, it is an unseen, unobserved and unverified entity and two, God who would be even more complex than the universe would also need an origin. And if you say that God, for which there is no evidence, had no beginning or came from nothing, then you admit that it is possible for something to have no beginning or come from nothing. So why not the universe which, at least, we can see and we have verified as real. In a nutshell it is more difficult to 'create' God than to create the Universe.

Science claims that all reality (everything that actually exists) is knowable and within reach of the human experience. Science can make this claim because before we can say something cannot be known, we would have to know that thing first and know that it cannot be known. 

In essence, I did reach some conclusion that could be labelled as the five A’s:

All reality is knowable   

All precise reality is known, deductible and obvious

All general reality is elusive

All general unknown ‘reality’ is object of research

All precise unknown ‘reality’ is imagination

Until it is known or deductible and/or obvious, it cannot be categorically termed ‘real’; of course, that is no claim that it is certainly unreal but a claim that it is the object of research as long as no precise definition of its attributes, traits or functions has been arrived at before the results of research show it to be so.

Therefore the only precisely defined reality we know should have been made explicit by research; any other is simply imagination. Every unknown reality under research such as the cure for some illness cannot have a precise enclosed definition and, thus remains a general reality – elusive. No general reality can be known; any known reality has to be precise. And as naturally follows, there can't be a precise but unknown reality; if it is precise, it is ipso facto known; any precise but unknown reality is imagination. 

To explain, if we know a lot about it - its attributes, qualities, likes, dislikes, feelings, actions, commands and yet, it is not readily reachable by objective human scrutiny or science nor is it openly observable to research, then it is imagination. 

God Or Chance (Post 10)

                                                                'The fool who has said in his heart, there's no God above.'

This article is the start of a breakdown of the reasons why I don’t believe in a God or even in the supernatural and it is an attempt (successful for some people) to answer those questions that many of us pose for the existence of God.

My education both formal and informal through the years and especially on the history of humankind has unravelled the very peculiar nature of the human mind – that of enquiry. At first, we began with unfounded theories on almost every aspect of human existence – birth, death, sex, relationships, disease, community, nature and the human person. These theories are beliefs, so named because they hadn’t been based on hard evidence, simply on association, subjective feeling and often times, helplessness. 

So, people concluded, therefore, that since we humans who were at the head of visible creation were not responsible for the origin of the world and nature, that it had to be something else, more powerful and much smarter than us. And simply because this being could not be seen, this being was a spirit. Naturally, we endowed this being with all our own characteristics – of thought, rationality, will, emotions, but we bulked these qualities in this being to perfection. We called the being God and then gave it a few more absolute qualities – all powerful, all knowing, all present, absolutely perfect, eternal, infinite. This was the easiest and quick fix answer our brains could find to the question of the origin of all things. And this trait is useful. We needed a platform to build our knowledge from and this is why we form theories. The destructive thing though is to go on to accept these theories as fact without testing them out and rigorously studying them to eke out the objective truth.

There have been many such theories held up by our religion that Science – the arm of human enquiry that does this testing – has shown to be untrue. A notable one was the belief in the middle- ages that the earth was at the centre of the universe and that the planets and the sun revolved around us. This belief was drawn simply from the other belief that we humans were specially created by God as written in the bible. Therefore, all of the universe must have been created around us! Furthermore, Joshua had commanded the sun to stand still during a battle to crush the enemies of God, therefore, the sun must move! As at then, these were enough evidence for a geocentric universe. Religion was so sure that these beliefs were fact that when the scientist Galileo proved otherwise, he was persecuted by the religious.

But the biggest uproar by religious people came when Charles Darwin formulated the (then) theory of the evolution of species by natural selection. And to this day, there are many countries, including Nigeria, where evolution is not taught properly in schools leaving us in a very dark place, stuck two centuries behind the rest of the advanced world. Many of us still erroneously see evolution as synonymous with chance. Some still ask questions like: ‘Why haven’t we seen any monkeys, chimps and gorillas change into humans or something else? These questions show our very poor depth of knowledge in a scientific fact as solid as that of gravity. Imagine, if we knew as little of gravity as we do of evolution. How embarrassing would that be and how disgraceful of our education system? And it is disgraceful that we have neglected and still neglect to instruct our children in true science because we hang on to our religious beliefs that have no foundation whatsoever in fact.

Our Selfishness (Post 9)

                                                                   'The fool who has said in his heart, there's no God above.'

Once more, I must assure you that I have not forgotten my assertion that there is another alternative to the two options we often give for the origin of things – God or Chance. It doesn't have to be between these two and I will definitely revisit this topic at a later date.

From where I left off last week, it is evident that our religiousness is more to do with a selfish outlook on life. We expect a lot from God or the supernatural especially against the backdrop of a nation that offers us nothing but turmoil, danger and death. It is only natural therefore that we are very quick to see any odd event in our favour as the hand of some God who is out to take care of us. We stay worshipping, waiting for this sign of personal favour and when we have desperately interpreted some occurrence as that sign, we stay worshipping excitedly expecting some more – Alleluia! God is on our side; He definitely watches over us; we are favoured!

Don’t get me wrong; I must always remind you Nigeria that this is not an anti-Christian write-up. I only use Christianity that I am well familiar with as an example to show how religion can be inherently empty and should be handled with cynicism. This is especially necessary in our country where our religions have formed a huge divide among us that has been exploited by politicians time and time again to fatal, devastating ends.

Like I said previously, ignorance is the soil on which belief in miracles grows and this in turn breeds superstition. Such a concoction provides a very fertile environment for all kinds of unspeakable atrocities by humans who have reverted to base animal instincts as we Nigerians have often demonstrated in despicable outbreaks of violence between Northerners and Southerners.

So when we have shirked all kinds of religious adherence, not only would we have moved one step closer to a more unified nation but we would be of a higher level of thinking, one that would, in itself, make us more humane and give us the ability to actually see the advantages of co-operation in developing our country.

You see, when we can accept that there almost definitely is no God out there who watches over us, that it makes no sense that we would survive the death of our brains in any kind of afterlife, that the only life we can realistically expect to live is this one here, then we would be being intelligent enough to actually begin to live in the present and perhaps, that would be a giant step into our true liberation.

Back to this selfishness of ours in our religiousness, I once had the horrifying experience of being in an armed robbery attack. I was staying with a family living at the top of a four storey building in a very Christian neighbourhood, full of Igbo traders. A forty man robbery team were assembled outside the walls of the compound and were taking their time in boring holes in the walls for access. They stayed for four hours pillaging homes and beating up their victims. They even took time out to shush a Church nearby at prayer before carrying on with their business.

I was a Christian at the time and joined the family in hysterical prayer as we waited for the thieves to get to us. Thankfully, the robbers didn’t and in the morning, we began giving thanks to God as Christians would. So what was the difference between my host family and the others who were attacked? They were all Christians. Were my host family any holier? Some Christians would claim so in a fit of self-righteousness but how can you prove that for sure? Has there not been even one good worshipping Christian in the millions of people who have died in the preventable disasters we experience – road accidents, robbery attacks, violent ethnic clashes?

And what do the survivors say? Well their prayer is a template that has etched itself in the fabric of Christian prayer all over the country. It begins with thanking God for every good thing that’s happened – ‘we are alive and healthy Lord; many are in hospitals, many have nothing to eat, many are dead. Thank you Lord.’

Apparently, God has paid more attention to those praying people than he did to the others in hospitals or the ones dead. This is false consolation.

Wake up Nigeria; it is only a matter of time before, in all likelihood, someone else might make that same prayer about us. We are all going to be ill, in hospital and dead someday.