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.    

Now Finding God (Post 8)

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

I have a friend who once recounted to me how he fell so seriously ill that he was at death’s door several years back. His parents took him to lots of doctors who came back with one verdict – they couldn’t find anything wrong with the sick boy. Some of the doctors even ‘kindly’ suggested to the parents that their son’s illness could be the work of juju and that they should try a traditional solution (Smart doctors, wouldn’t you say?)

This friend of mine went on to claim how this is the reason of his undying belief in the supernatural; evil forces exist, he claimed; the supernatural is a real phenomenon. He even claimed that the native doctor who eventually ‘cured’ his illness revealed to his parents and him the person who had brought the illness on the lad; this image was shown them in a mirror. He saw the evil person in the mirror with his own eyes, he claimed (and there I was thinking mirrors only reflect the image in front of them).

Anyway, I’ve heard several narratives like this one. All of them have one thing in common – that the illness of the victim could not be understood by all the doctors consulted. And in some lucky cases, a doctor would refer them to a native doctor!

No disrespect to the NMA, but it is hardly a big deal if Nigerian medicine at its rather undeveloped level (compared with the developed world) either because of a lack of funding, facilities or knowledge is dumbfounded by an illness. Even Western science sometimes encounters its dark areas. But this takes me back to my first point, our idea of science, which is principally catch-up-with-Europe-and-America, based has remained stunted at that primitive level where we only have to find a gap in our knowledge or a problem we can’t solve to refer the case to the supernatural.

I call this ignorance which I define as the soil on which belief in miracles grows. Imagine the concept of scientific ignorance, copycat science lacking in the honourable attribute of a true devotion to the pursuit of knowledge and of solving problems. After all, once upon a time, our ancestors would refer malaria victims to their native doctors and many of those cases would have been diagnosed as having been caused by someone else. The same goes for thyphoid, tetanus, yellow fever and general infections; we didn’t understand them then so we looked for supernatural solutions. This is a very well known stereotype of Africans held by the rest of the world, isn’t it – that in Africa, it is never what caused it but WHO caused it.

I have a parallel to the touching story of my friend who almost died from an ‘unknown’ illness. I got talking with an English woman who also had become ill all of a sudden sometime before. In about twenty-four hours, she had become paralysed down one half of her body. Doctors at the hospital she visited were baffled as they couldn’t explain her condition but unlike us – and you might think unfortunately – they didn’t have the convenient recourse to native doctors or the supernatural. So, they did some research and browsed medical records all over the country. They eventually discovered that there had been a precedent for the lady’s illness back in the fifties, an illness that had to do with the thyroid gland, a very rare condition that the doctors had to go back about five decades to find the information they needed.

Well, isn’t it a good thing, they didn’t have juju or the supernatural to rely on; they have learned to be organised, detailed and so devoted to research and problem solving as any true scientific mind should be.

My Nigerian friend survived his illness but how many others have died while waiting on their native doctors and their juju to provide a cure. I have put this friend’s subjective experience with native doctor and the mirror alongside all the other thousands of subjective individual experiences that can’t be taken as objectively true. It certainly doesn’t help his case that he was very sick at the time; a mind in that condition is open to lots of suggestive possibilities. Even a bad case of malaria can render one delirious.

I am sure every one of you reading this will have a ‘miraculous’ story of yours to tell either from your own experience or as told you by someone you know. Each of us will want to think that we’ve been the beneficiaries of a divine hand, that we are that special, that loved, that looked after. Well, you have a right to think what you want; don’t just expect everyone else to take it as objective truth.

Still Searching For God (Post 7)

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

We know that the Fatima ‘miracle’ was restricted only to the subjective experience of those who claimed to have seen it; that no one else in Europe saw the sun spin. Now, if such a documented miracle by the Catholic Church, from an apparition it has endorsed, a miracle claimed to have been seen by several thousands cannot meet the standards of objective truth, how can we take seriously the subjective claims of anybody else to be really true. It can only be true to them and that is only natural.

The problem humankind have had for many millennia and that we Nigerians still can’t get over, is that of facing a phenomenon we cannot understand or explain. At such a point, the natural inquisitiveness of the human mind is pushed aside by the ignorant majority and all credit for that phenomenon is given to a ‘God’. It is so much easier for us to attribute something beyond our understanding at a particular time to a higher being even if we have no evidence for that being.

So, we hear people say things like; ‘How do we explain the beginning of the Universe and the world and life on earth? How do we explain the complexity of living things? How do we explain the harmony in nature and the universe?

There were other things people couldn’t understand in the past; they attributed lightning to being the work of the Devil; lots of diseases were reckoned to be inflicted by the gods; twins were seen as evil and as recent as the nineteenth century, stars in their composition were deemed totally unreachable to our knowledge – why?

We have seen huge advances in science since then and are still being amazed by new discoveries and inventions and still you hold out for God where a gap in knowledge exists. You refuse to see that natural explanations exist for things we would otherwise have called supernatural actions. You wait for the scientists to admit that they (as yet) have no clues to solving a problem and, right away, you bring out the harps and tambourines – ‘To God be the glory,’ is your song.

All of this in no way proves the case for a God; if all you do is claim that God must exist only because a problem exists or a seemingly miraculous event happens is a backward, non-direct and totally non-valid path to a proof. To put it simply, if God exists, let someone show him to us and to the world in an open, objective and totally obvious way. Until then, let all preachers be quiet.

You claim that the world and the Universe in all its design and glory should have a designer. Well, look at it this way, if for something as complex as life on earth and the Universe, there should be a designer, then that designer should be even more complex, intelligent enough to bring about such detailed design in nature.

Your next big question then should be about the origin of the designer. If you claim that the complexity in nature requires a designer, then the (necessary) complexity of God also requires a designer and so on it has to go.

If you believe that nothing complex or designed can come from nothing, where does God come from? Once you admit or accept that a being like God can have no beginning or that God came from nothing even though you have no proof for that, you are either accepting the illogical for no reason or going with an argument that can also be used for the origin of the Universe – that it came from nothing. Why does it make no sense to accept the Universe came from nothing when we are ready to accept that a hypothetical designer came from nothing or, worse, had no beginning? Why do we have to postulate an unthinkable and baffling premise as a being that had no beginning just to explain and defend a ‘God’ we have created for our convenience?

Some other non-direct argument used for God is that all the beauty in nature could not have come from pure chance. Perhaps not, but who said that it did? There is a very popular theory that if God didn’t do it, it happened by chance. Certainly not, all the design and order in the world could not have come from pure chance; there has to be an alternative, one separate from God and from chance. But we’ll get to that another time.

   

EXISTENCE OF GOD (Post 6)

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

I reckon that, given what last week’s article touched on, a lot of us might find it hard to relate to that issue. You do choose all your actions, you’d say; you are aware of what your religions recommend but at the end of the day, your preferences hold sway. Well if that’s the case, then you are hypocrites professing one thing in public and doing another in private. This is what is referred to in religion as sin and for which the religious go to God for forgiveness. No ardent and truly religious person can make a choice for themselves; the choice has already been laid out by their religion.

But nonetheless, you all retain the option to sin – which is the expression of your own free choice – and at the same time, have the safety net of a God who would always take you back and ensure you have eternal life in heaven.

Recognise this? Why yes; your ‘supreme God’ has now quite surely been allotted the same role as those lesser gods of our old traditional religions – a role of utility.

God has simply been made into an object of use by the majority of those who are religious. How?

Well, you need God for success, prosperity, protection from your enemies (everybody seems to have at least one of these) protection from evil powers, good health, and ultimately a guarantee of eternal life. Does this make sense? Of course it does.

It would be a tragedy for an average Nigerian to end up in hell after their first hellish existence on earth. This is the thinking behind the religious fervour of many of us, whether we know it or not; whether we admit it or not; whether we like it or not.

I think it is utterly shameful that we have been so battered that we’ve given up on this life and, instead, look fervently to the next.  

Now, let’s deal with the principal reason why I don’t believe in the existence of God as well as all manner of the supernatural. Look at the whole phenomenon of religion and worship that humans have nurtured for as far back as humans first appeared; it exists as a substantial subjective reality to believers. However, to analyse religion for its truth value, we have to bring it to the realm of objectivity. The ‘reality’ that religious experiences hold for people for instance, the girl who claimed to have witnessed an apparition of the Virgin Mary in Aokpe, Benue State must be put into everybody else’s spotlight.

Now we know that the brain is a sophisticated machine capable of interpreting large amounts of different types of data either that being accumulated or stored in memory simultaneously. Naturally, overlaps and misinterpretations occur in varying degrees of frequency depending on the individual. There are thousands of mentally ill patients in hospitals who have experienced an imaginary friend, thought they were somebody else or seen God, Jesus or some other equally supernatural character. Are we to take their experiences as objectively true then? If we were to put a lot of the Saints of mediaeval Christianity under investigation today, we’d be likely to find a healthy number of them especially someone like Joan of Arc as having had mental health issues. Joan, herself, admitted to hearing voices which were taken then to be spiritual revelations; today, we know different. Today, we call that auditory hallucination, something that may point to the onset of Schizophrenia.

What about the classic miracle the Catholic Church claims to have happened in Portugal at Fatima in 1917. The Virgin Mary made the sun spin and dance in the sky to the horror of all, about 70,000, watching. There, you may say, an event witnessed by a multitude of people.

Well, I’ll say if 70,000 people of one mindset were staring at the sun for any period of time, the sun might spin in their eyes especially if there was a suggestion sweeping through the multitude that such a thing wrought by the Virgin Mary, no less, was happening.

Secondly, if the sun objectively and really did spin – we won’t talk about the damaging pull of gravitational force that might have caused – the Newspapers of Fatima and Portugal should have made a song and dance about it. Everyone in Portugal and most in Europe should have seen it happen; it would have gone down as one of the wonders of the twentieth century and be the object of thousands of documentaries today. After all, Portugal is not that removed from every other country, is it? 

Logic of Choices (Post 5)

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

Please bear with me Nigeria. I will soon come to the one thing I am sure is brewing at the back of your minds – my reason for not believing in the existence of God or the supernatural.

But first, let me thoroughly thrash the issue on choices. I began by imploring us to seek to make informed choices and waded into the likely reason for our current religious choice, a reason which I think is quite warped.

And then, I touched on the God of the Hebrews who has been inherited as the God of the major religions – a God who governs our day to day lives with rules; ten commandments for Christians and whatever else it is for Muslims.

Since this God has also made clear that there will be reward for those who stick to the rules and punishment for those who do not, I’d like to dwell a little on the logic of choices.

A lot of Christians and, perhaps, religious people might be acquainted with the notion of freewill, a quality of all humans. As a matter of fact, this freewill was supposed to have been in play when Adam and Eve (by Christian tradition) chose to disobey God and eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. We will visit this whole story in its literal and metaphorical interpretations later.

Anyway, this is how God set the stage; humans have got freewill, freedom to choose between good and evil – in other words, God’s laws or their own. Whatever choice they make bears its consequences; in fact, the bible clearly states ‘I have set before you life and death. Choose life therefore and live.’ Again, please don’t expect my biblical excerpts to be all set out nicely; this is not a bible study article.

Now, let’s analyse freewill. ‘Will’ refers to the rational ability to make a choice; ‘Free’ refers to freedom from any retribution or reward for that choice from an outside party.

By the logic of choices, therefore, a choice really given to freedom cannot have its consequences outside the choice itself. I’ll explain more clearly.

If I cruelly allow my child the freedom to choose between playing with that sharp knife he loves or that rubber ball he is bored with. I am really saying, ‘I wash my hands off you here; whatever you reap from your choice is your problem.’

I call this cruel because parents, until their children are old enough to lead their own independent lives, are not supposed to give them freedom of choice even though the kids get to possess full powers of will from about the age of seven or eight.

So, parents are more likely to say; ‘You are free to choose between doing what I say which is not to go out after 7pm or not. But if you disobey my rules, there’ll be hell to pay.’ That hell is two-fold; one from the act itself as the child might encounter some danger if they went out after dark and from the parents who would exact severe punishment. Sounds familiar? Yes, this second set of options sounds quite like those offered by the biblical God; it is not a really free choice.

Free choices must find their consequences within the choices themselves, for instance, the child cuts himself with the sharp knife or has a boring but safe play with the rubber ball. Or better still, in a democratic election, people should reap the consequences of their vote from the conduct of the elected rather than from a terrorist gang who punish or reward them for their choices.  

Once the consequences arise from outside the action like from the parents punishing the child or from God sending people to hell, it ceases to be a free choice.

So there is really no freewill in religion. There is will, no doubt but it is meant to be directed without question at an already determined path carved out by the God of that religion.

Now, if will is not free, it is not really will, is it? If I have the ability to choose but I can’t really choose freely but, instead, am expected to pick what has already been chosen as the way by God or face his wrath in hell, then I don’t really have the ability to choose, do I? In essence, I am not really living and acting in a fully human capacity since I lack freewill.

Shameless Proliferation (Post 4)

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

Last week’s article has reminded me of something else, something that is the most irritating of my grievances with the religions that plague our country today – that they are foreign.

We surely wouldn’t have been any better off if we were still worshipping natural entities like trees, lightning, rivers – no, but it would have been us deluding ourselves. Now, what we’ve got is the West deluding us. This does not refer to Islamic North whose adaptation of Islam from contact with desert traders and travellers is quite more honourable than the colonial emasculation of Africa through which the South received Christianity.

So we happily swapped one fairy tale for another. We tell ourselves that Christianity offers us the true God; some even go so far as to narrate how Christianity wasn’t the sole preserve of Europe and how it had come to Europe too from outside. Yes, but guess how Christianity spread throughout much of the known world then – via the influence of the Roman Empire which was also a form of colonialism.

But maybe we could excuse ourselves and say, we are simply human. What has happened with the spread of Christianity to our country is something that’s happened all through Europe and to other races as well. Yes, we can say that but remember, Europe never had a precedent to learn any lessons from; they were in history as it was happening. We, however, have refused to learn from what we know is the history of Christianity – the political tyranny of Church and State in the middle ages; the crusades against Islam; persecution of minorities like the Jews; the inquisitions and burnings and finally apartheid and colonialism.

We may say that these have nothing to do with the message of Christianity, no but the white men who brought that message to us relied on our observance of the Christian tenets to exploit us. This is how it is expressed in jest: When the white men came to Africa, we had the land. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed; when we opened our eyes, they had the land.

I am sure most of us have heard this before but we take it as a very sophisticated joke, we laugh heartily and go attend to our personal Jesus.

The most gratingly annoying thing I find, however, are people who talk of us Africans having to re-evangelise the West. The Pope has, patronisingly, in one of his many letters lent support to that same fact. But, of course, he would; Africa and the third world as it happens, are fast becoming a major source of the Church’s income; oh yes, he would.

I am amazed that we would presume to think that we know better than Europeans about the religion they introduced to us in the first place. If they have dumped religion in the bin of history, why would we think we can revive it? If anything, we make ourselves out to be fools doubly, and that’s how proponents of this stupefying view are seen in the West - trying to sell a typewriter to a person who has got a computer.

I was actually told by a friend once that the only reason why the West is as advanced as they are now is because of the faith they had in the past, that God is rewarding them now. I needn’t mention that I let them know that that was the dumbest thing I ever heard, not even from fools. The exact opposite is clearly the case; when God died in Europe, they moved on.

Not that the Pope and the Catholic Church do not have competition in Nigeria South; they sure do. Has any industry been more vigorously developed in our country’s history than that of the search for God? Our cities and towns are packed with churches of every kind, size and strength; from ramshackle makeshift structures to magnificent cathedrals, pastors, preachers and priests let out thunder promising the masses miracles or favour in return for their membership and fees either as tithes or regular offering.

And how does this mammoth industry sustain its revenues? Simple – by making sure people understand the penalties for not belonging, for not believing, for not giving to God. God will abandon such people as they chart this hard life on earth, the pastors say, and even worse bar them in heaven.

And this is the clincher, Nigeria; there is no way to prove them wrong. You have to die to find out if the pastor and the bible are right or wrong. And if we are wrong, these men of deception say, the consequences would be dire – eternal punishment. Who wants to take such a chance? Not many, not especially a suffering people like we are. Therefore, like lambs we are led meekly to the slaughter.