Thursday 12 March 2015

Of God and Reality and Especially Both

Do you ever just find yourself completely consumed with the afterlife? I do quite often I am sad to say, and often my conversations with God would force some around me to question my sanity. As with anything else in our lives, the micro management of what time we do or do not have left on earth has got to enter into it now and again. Of course I do believe in a God of my own understanding, and probably more for scientific reasons than purely faith. I do have faith that there is something beyond all this, but on the other side of the coin I just don’t like a lot of scientific theory either.

When I was a child for example I was fed the company line of “the rain-forest will be gone in twenty years” and nearly forty years later the last Greenpeace mission to survey the Amazon rain-forests have yielded that about 3% are gone. It also yielded the founder of Greenpeace to quit, because he felt stupid over it all. This was “settled science” though when I was a kid and my children got the same load pressed on them. By pointing out to them that it had been more than twenty years since I had been told this only reinforced what the teachers are trying to get across. Daddy lies and he’s an idiot. That’s modern science for you folks.

There was that big bang theory that I was taught somewhere between 8 and 12 years old. It was also a fact and the only reason I don’t remember exactly what grade I was first taught this was because it was also the first time I really sat down and thought about scientific theory. It got lost in those years because I realized that it sounded stupid, and I was just going to stick to my guns on that one. I could even relate to some of the scientific reasoning for it but after it was all said and done, I wasn't going to proclaim Christians, idiots for having a theory which was equally as provable. See what I did there? I took something that someone else called science and then I turned it into what it really is, faith, and compared it to something else that we call faith, but at the same time can call impossible.

I really don’t know. To be honest with you there are a lot of holes in science that are either filled by a zealot, or left to be dis-proven over time. The big bang theory is one of these things, so now if you cling to the big bang theory you are officially in the same boat as monotheists. Theoretically they could both be right or wrong, but the only way that science can be settled is when you have proven with 100% certainty that all other possibilities are false. Good luck with that one on the really big issues like climate, the universe, or even the presence of God. If you can eliminate all other possibilities to any of these things with 100% certainty you are on another plain of science. Most of the time the person who claims settled science is merely lying, which would prove a scientific theorem that the most possible answer to any problem is also the most probable.

In the end if you take a person like Bill Maher or Richard Dawkins who are so sure of their knowledge that there is no God that they can mock those that believe in God, then you would have to place them in the category of “faith” based theory as well. Their “faith” just makes them feel better about themselves in the here and now just as my faith is a God makes me feel better in the here and now. I would like to say that if you live your life as a good person who believes in God, just to find out that there is no God in the end, have you suffered any? There are people out there that would say you have but in many cases it is some form of their own failings that they are projecting onto others. If you live your entire life as a good person who doesn't believe in God and find out in the end that there is one, have you suffered any? Probably not, but you didn't get to live your life believing that those that deserve to go to Hell actually do, like I did. I wonder if God hates that about me?

1 comment:

sapphoq said...


An eloquent description of Pascal's wager!

I haven't heard the phrase "settled science" before so now I shall have to investigate that one.

I appreciate you.