Is there a God?

 

 Is there a God?

On Easter day, a young man from out of town who reads the Simple Raven’s Post blessed me with a visit. He is about forty and educated above a Master’s level. I have been reading your column; he said, and I am surprised. You seem to balance your comments, but there is one group you don’t consider at all. The people who don’t believe in God. You know that there are a lot of us.

That is true, I must admit. I have been studying beliefs in God since before he was born. It has exposed me to the main Abrahamic religions, and I lived in the ruins of the historical places that they built. My high school was in the Galilea mountains where Jesus grew up. As soon as I could, I studied the history of human faith in a supreme deity. We always had one since the days of cave people. We have worshipped the Spirit as a singularity or split into many specialized Gods but always existed in human reality or imagination. Thousands of philosophers over many generations debated what God is like or not. As a matter of fact, I am writing a book about it, if I will ever finish.

Here was an intelligent young man, asking me on Easter day to tell him why I don’t take atheism seriously when writing in the Pass Herald. He left me lost for words. I should serve my whole readers’ community equally and remember the two newest religions, Science and money, or the faith in the Golden Calf. The last is not that new.

Every generation of humans always believed that their science is the greatest. If new scientific discoveries or hoarded riches are their God, I should mention them when I talk about religions. He was demanding of me to provide proof that the biblical God exists or admit that there is no God. He wants material evidence for a spiritual being. Can’t be done. Yet I care about that young man and wouldn’t wish him to feel ignored.

We have surpassed other animals and humans in terms of our culture. Yet we spend a lot of time trying to discover how the world or universe around us is working. We do it with our senses, eyes, ears, and so on. We are also very good at fooling our senses. One only needs to learn how to do some magic tricks to prove it. We can’t build even one human being or any other living animal and make it alive with all that we know.

My friend believes that it all happened by chance. Luck alone. He can easily point at things in the holy books that are factually wrong. He met some people who believe in the bible literally and he thinks that all those who believe in God think that way. We don’t. We have books with stories that demonstrate examples of humanity’s wisdom. Those books were written generations after events happened at times when most people were illiterate and knowledge was passed on by word of mouth. There were many more books that the communities of faith lived by and, over time, wars and other disasters, disappeared. After each great civilization, people destroyed books and past knowledge. The Spaniards destroyed the records of the Incas, for example.  

I can prove that I am a spiritual soul. I was a tiny toddler years ago and now I am a big old man. All the cells in my body and brain died and new ones replaced them, yet I am me. Not my body, but my soul. My scientific conclusion is that if that is the way things happen, it should go on the same way. The body recycles, but the person stays the same. Only at some point the body is no longer changing to get bigger or older but immaterial. Spiritual instead of physical. In games, we reach a point where we go to the next level.

The Bible mentions it in the story of the woman at the well. People, at some point, no longer will worship in an earthly place but in a spiritual way. The early Christians had many arguments about it and eventually solved the argument by force. That is not the Christian way.

My young friend said that perhaps we think God is some more advanced alien that came to Earth in our past. I have books about it. It’s not a new idea. What the ancients called Gods were far more advanced than humans at the time or possibly even now. I asked him if he ever tried to communicate with an amoeba. Perhaps advanced civilizations, or possibly even God, have no reason to communicate with us. God can easily not be visible to us and angels possibly are all around us.

Unless we investigate the dimension, we call “spiritual” we may not get far. Our experience shows that we tend to go one step forward and two steps back.