Five Reasons to Believe in God

Here are my five reasons. Not necessarily good reason, but my reasons. The Good, the Bad, the Ugly and the probably Inaccurate and quite probably Incomplete.

Reason #1: The Big Picture. As human beings, we have looked at the complex web of life on Earth and wondered, ‘How did all of this come about? There is no simple answer. So, quick-step to, “God” must have done, created, it. Whatever God is? We will never know the leap of genius in that first human experience of trying to answer a child’s simple “How did....?” question.

Can we reasonably guess from our own experiences as parents? Assume that a lot of it got made up on the spot? That it became more elaborate over the centuries? Parents might have put a lot of effort into their storytelling around the campfires each night. God, and His helpers, seems to be a reasonable start for nighttime entertainment.

“God” must have done, created, it. This is an "a priori" assumption. The web of life, Gaia, or Mother Earth, could not have come about by chance from Chaos. Latterly, this line of thinking goes: DNA was not created by chance, nor was it self created.

Chaos is a possibility. God is a possibility. I prefer God. My first reason is that I simply prefer to believe that God created the Universe. This is opposed to chance. All that the whole Universe needed is one magical genesis moment. After that life takes care of itself. All that remains is the requirement for enough time.

Reason #2: The chance for life spread across the universe are good. The Hubble telescope has shown us millions of billions of galaxies. Each of these galaxy units contains millions or billions of stars. Using one in a million as a factor to reduce the totals. One in a million will have planets. One in a million of these will have solid planets. And so on. It is possible to have millions of stars somewhere in the “known” universe with planets with civilizations with sentient life forms.

The same questions still apply: We look about us at the complex web of the universe. We wonder, ‘How did all of this come about? “God” must have created it.’ This is an a-priori assumption. The web of the universe could not have come about, arisen by chance from Chaos. I think Chance is a possibility. I think God is a possibility. I prefer God. When I look at the results of Hubble, I am reinforced in my belief that God created the Universe.

The bigger it appears now to be, the more I am sure that God would not have wasted so much prime real estate. He would put Life on as much of it as He could. Nor, I am sure, would He have done so, without taking the proper precautions to keep each experiment station separate from the others. This is simple good lab technique.

Reason #3: The complexity question. This has always been the conundrum for me. Could this complexity of life evolve on Earth in only six or seven billion years? Without God to help it along? The sun is a third generation star. Each star generation seems to be about 7 to 10 billion years.

Stars are born, live, and die leaving dust and cinders. From this star dust and cinders new stars are born. The universe is thought to be between 21 and 30 billion years old. Every atom in your body more complex than hydrogen was cooked into existence in the radioactive heart of a star.

You are quite literally made of “star stuff”. Material old enough to have lost its deadly radiation. I believe in a God who may have started the whole thing, ‘she-bam!’, related to The Big Bang Theory. It might have been a silent Little Whisper Theory. My personal solution is a God who is totally disinterested in the progress going on ever since. Perhaps He idly looks in every million years to see how things are going.

A God that noted the fall of every sparrow is not sensible. That would Be Someone with too much time on His hands. One who had to have an odd compulsion for order. God would create a system that will work without constant supervision. That would be more of a God-like Plan. As to the question, is God interested in human affairs? I quite doubt it. How could any “God” be interested in the infinitely boring trivialities of human life? His goal is the result, not the process. An analogy: don’t tell me how they make catsup, or hot dogs, I like it, I enjoy it, and I don’t want to know what went into it.

Why would God intervene, interfere, get involved all the time? Only One who was terribly bored with nothing important to do. The idea feels to me too much like a little boy playing with His action figures, His toy soldiers. Very easy to achieve another level of boredom. Then go away to let the action figures gather dust in the closet. This, by the way, was the ancient Greek idea of Gods and their interactions with humans. They thought that the Gods wandered around looking like regular humans, acting on whims, meddling in human's lives.

People, however, are not insensate play toys. They are complicated. People are rich in differences and intricacies. People are driven by chemical impulses they don’t understand. Peole are stuffed full of good and evil thoughts. People have desires and internal conflicts. People are blessed and cursed with free will decision making powers.

Some folks think that they have a friendly, interested, paternal God. A God who cares of His children type Father in Heaven. A God just above the blue sky or beyond the horizon. A God that pays attention to every tiny act and thought of every second of every day. This idea is nothing more than a childish fairy tale. This is a security blanket for immature, frightened, insecure children.

I prefer a distant, inattentive God. That God matches the facts I observe. God is God. God is a CEO, not a floor cleaner. God is aloof to tiny local human concerns like how much soap to put in the floor mopping solution. My reason number three is that my idea of God seems to fit what I have observed in life, that God does not pay attention to human concerns. There is no proof, one way or another, so I rely on my assumption.

Reason #4: The “creation of life”. We humans now know how to build amino acids from basic chemicals. We have not yet gotten them to self replicate in scientific experiments. We have not yet gotten them to “live”. Not even a simple virus. Perhaps creation did take the “breath of life into the clay” by “God”. If so, I think “God” started by making a simple bacteria, or maybe only a virus. This would establish the DNA molecule structure of a self replicating molecule.

Thereafter He went on vacation, took a trip to the other side of the Universe. Maybe He wanted to “plant life” in a multitude of other planets? He'd gotten the hang of this creating life thing. Perhaps He wanted to practice some more? Possibly He wanted to set up a few more experiments. Back on Earth, He allowed chance, radiation from cosmic rays, and other sources to admit the possibility of diversity. The eventual development of the mechanism of sexual union also admitted the possibility of diversity. This caused more changes over very long periods of time. The rest He left to the forces of the competition to survive. Competition is part of God’s Plan.

Yes, I do think Darwin got it mostly right, at least the general theory of evolution. We’ve learned a lot since Darwin’s time, as we have better statistical tools and computers to digest all the data, and have improved the theory in certain areas. God created evolution. Darwin just named it.

I find that the arrogance of those that believe that God’s timetable is the same as the human timetable very irritating. This arrogance carries egocentric anthropomorphism to an extreme point of stupidity. Evolution over time added the decorations to the basic “life” cake, so to speak. That still does not mean that God follows every one of us around all the time. Not like a Homeland Security internal intelligence “spy” squad, a.k.a. the CIA. Informing on us, videotaping our every thought and behavior. God does not write down every little action in our life. There is no giant book for which we must be accountable at the end of our life.

So much for the importance of your childhood "sins" of spitting on the sidewalk, or looking up a girl’s skirt on the playground monkey bars during third grade recess.

I’d always thought that perhaps that there might be some level of connection with God. Perhaps on the order of the connection I have with my individual cells of my tissues. Nothing more elaborate than that. The concept that we “record our lives and report them back to God” interests me quite a lot. This seems logical. I am sure the data are recorded with broad brush strokes, rather than a fine line pen. This idea also obviously has connections to the concept of a Judgment Day at the Pearly Gates.

Can’t you imagine an attendant at the Pearly Gates saying, “O.K., Get in line there. No pushing. God, or one of His Angels will take you in turn for your Interview and Final Judgment. You can easily wait for Heaven for a few more minutes. And if you think that you’re heading to Purgatory, or Hell, why are you in a hurry?”

I prefer to believe in a God that is scarcely aware of time. My reason number four is simply a primitive awe at the Mystery of Mysteries: Life. If you have watched death come ( one moment there is life, the next moment there is none ) as I have, there is no greater Mystery unsolved, and I am willing to assume the answer here is God.

Reason #5: I think God is seeking out intelligence. He looks utside of Himself, trying to create and develop self-awareness and intelligence. The concept of self-awareness is much more difficult for me to deal with intelligently. My lifetime of contacts with animals tells me that animals like dogs, horses, cows, and cats are self aware and intelligent. However, my personal estimate of a cow’s intelligence is fairly low. I know that humans have been breeding cows, sheep and goats for stupidity for three to six thousand years. We the simple process of selection for desired characteristics. Intelligent, experimenting, troublesome cows, and bulls, of every generation were culled, that is - killed and eaten, early in every generation, while still tender.

Only the stupid, complacent, stolid, grass eating cows and bulls were allowed to breed. Fat beef packing cows and bulls were allowed to breed. High butter-fat content, big volume milk producing cows and bulls were allowed to breed. Selective breeding is also known as deliberately planned “dumbing down”, and getting a "better" result. I had a “fence jumper” calf myself once, and he went into the freezer quickly. That was a much better result than my chasing him every morning.

Dogs and horses, on the other hand, have been bred for intelligence. Humans have seen that intelligence for these animals could be useful in war and in hunting. Check out Lipizzan stallions and the history of dressage. Today more people are familiar with Guide Dogs for the Blind, companion dogs, and hunting and working dogs. I think the smartest breed of dog is the Newfoundland. Others may choose another breed.

Think about how many animals manipulate objects to deal more effectively with them. The squirrel turning the nut to the thinnest part of the shell to chew through. A dog holding a bone between his paws to more easily chew away at the flesh. Birds building nests. I don’t think it is all instinct. It is not all “hard-wired” into the DNA.

Many animals “learn” through experience, or accident, and change their behavior, and “teach” it to their young. Two examples: the snow apes of Japan which have learned to use warm springs to better deal with winter weather and domesticated pigs. Once I taught a pig how to get a drink from a special self watering spigot in one lesson. When grown and with a litter at weaning stage, she taught her pigs to get their own drinks. They were smart enough to learn how.

Even technological intelligence, using and making tools, has now been observed in other species: chimps, birds, sea otters, etc. Chimps even modify the basic material to “make a tool”.

I believe in God. I believe God is seeking out intelligence. If you find the section above a bit, well, confused, then you are still with me! Religion is always confusing. Man who creates it is confused. Man who writes about it is the most confused of all. It is the sorting out of all the details that is difficult.

In many ways, self-awareness is one of the keys to an understanding of God. God created life on Earth. God left evolution to do its thing over an enormous span of time. And the result? An ever increasing movement toward self-awareness. I think that perhaps despite His best efforts, God was unable to keep some level of bias out of His handiwork. Life struggles to achieve an ever greater self-awareness in all strands of life.

We primates were simply the first to achieve our current level. All this despite the obvious and numerous stupidities that are a part of the process: war, genocide, soiling our own nest, and many others. My reason number five for a belief in God, includes the experience that you observe when you look in a mirror. You looking back at you. You knowing who you are seeing. That is self-awareness.

God's Plan created you. It took Him a while to make you. All your ancestors had to go first, and now you are here. Make the most of God's creation, you.

All of the above, together, leads me to believe in the existence of a God that created us in His own way as intelligent beings and all that is around us.

Of course, the problems are in the details...

(c) Copyright 2006: George Wallace recently published a book on religion which lashes out at nearly all of the comfortable ideas about God, the trappings of organized religion, and the priesthood. His pithy comments and suggestions for a return to a God-centered personal religion will interest everyone. This article may be freely reprinted so long as all copyright attributions, and the full content of this resource box are included. www.OhGodIsThatYou.com

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