'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.
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