The Bible: Commentary and Controversy

I’m exhausted from reading all the reasons the atheists (humanists) have for not believing in God, and all the reasons the theists have for believing in one. None of it makes any sense, of course. The atheists say there’s no proof. “By golly, I’m not going to believe in any dratted thing I can’t feel, touch, see, or have scientific evidence of.” Bad grammar, I know, but that’s the way they are. The theists say you’ve got all the proof you need — the perfect earth, the oceans, the human brain, the fact that you can feel God calling you, whatever.” But there’s only one answer, and that’s faith. Which covers a heck of a lot of ground.

Is the big bang theory proven beyond a doubt? If so, why do they still call it a theory? Where’s the proof of the string theory? Where’s the real proof of evolution? The problem is, much of what we “know” today we take on faith. Faith founded on the belief that our science is exact and complete, perhaps, but faith nevertheless. Of course, the theists really don’t have anything that comes close to evidence of God’s existence, so they’re behind the 8-ball right from the git-go.

We all grow up one way or another, believing in God or not. Many, many, many of us believe in God in our youth, then, when we get smart as teenagers and up, we reject that belief, usually as a kind of backlash against some kind of religion, religious practice, or religious authority or morality. Then, ‘way down the road somewhere, many of us turn back to the belief of our youth. Is that any proof that God exists? Of course not.

One of the great things about living in America is the luxury of doubting. I can put up a sign that says God doesn’t exist, and receive no ill effects other than theists scolding me. If I put that same sign up in, let’s say, Iran, I might have a more serious problem. The point is, Iranians and many other people are brought up in a society that literally does not allow disbelief, on pain of death in some extreme cases. Ask an American teenager if he/she believes in God and you might get a philosophical discussion. Ask an Iranian teenager the same question and you might get reported to the secret police.

So who’s to say who or what God is, really? Can the world be, in effect, the physical manifestation of God? That might be what quantum physics is trying to teach us. Bohr’s experiments on the existence of quarks and their relationship to each other recalls a few phrases in my ancient catechism — God is everywhere, always has been, always, will be, etc., etc. Which of course would mean that we ourselves are God, as well as everyone and everything else.

Wow, that’s a mystery. Gotta go. I’ll get back to this later.