Every now and then it’s good for me to go back to the question as to whether to believe in God or not. I recently revisited the question, and I still come down on the side of belief (if not by a landslide). Around the same time, I noticed an interesting article in the current Atlantic Magazine about comedian Bill Maher and his atheist beliefs (or anti-beliefs, as atheism is belief in non-belief). Mr. Maher has made a film documentary about religion (called \u201cReligulous\u201d), and the believers he talks with provide enough comic material as to render Mr. Maher’s jokes unnecessary. Since much of the faithful has not rethought their belief since childhood, they often don’t do very well with Maher’s signature question, i.e. \u201cwhat is the difference between believing in God and Santa Claus\u201d. <\/p>\n
I won’t claim that my beliefs are ready for a Maher interview, but I just had some interesting thoughts regarding the more troubling challenges to belief; i.e., the problem of pain, the prevalence of randomness in the quantum world and in the process of evolution, the \u201ctrial-and-error\u201d aspect of evolution and possibly of the reality behind the Big Bang, and the incredible hugeness of the Universe compared with the tiny specs in it where sentient life might exist. In sum, it hardly looks like there is an intelligent designer behind all this, despite Aquinas and his various rationales. It looks like something mostly accidental. <\/p>\n
But then again \u2013 perhaps it depends on how you look at it. Pain, death, randomness, inefficiency and wastefulness; what would be the point of all that? Well \u2013 these things certainly would set a benchmark as to what God and the ultimate principal of being, goodness and awareness are NOT. What if we are somehow in a process of becoming more and more like God? If so, the stakes would be huge, the lessons involved enormous. And they could not be learned without pain, huge and mindless pain, terribly dark and crushing pain. Perhaps we have to be pushed to not-being, in order to fully appreciate being. We certainly do take our existence for granted too often. Perhaps God-ness is the ultimate awareness and appreciation of being. Most of us are hardly ready for that.<\/p>\n
If we assume that we will always be human, even if there is life after death \u2013 which is what most religions teach \u2013 then the atheists will have a good argument. I.e., consider those ideas of heaven as a huge country club where we will be continually pampered and never bored, with God up in the head office running the place. Maher could certainly take that apart on SNL or the Comedy Channel. But if we, in our messy lives, are somehow in training to become part of God \u2013 if that’s what the stakes are \u2013 and if there is an after-life process whereby we consolidate and contextualize all of the pains and defeats and disappointments from our earthly life; then perhaps the God argument makes more sense. Perhaps one could then answer Maher’s \u201cSanta Claus\u201d question by saying that old St. Nick leaves temporary delights that soon break or are eventually stored in the attic and forgotten; but God is the Santa Claus of eternal being, a being that can be attained only by giving up all of the imperfect ways of being that we know, an ultimate being that is something like sex without end. Only so much more. Amen. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Every now and then it’s good for me to go back to the question as to whether to believe in God or not. I recently revisited the question, and I still come down on the side of belief (if not by a landslide). Around the same time, I noticed an interesting article in the current […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,6,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=239"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4718,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239\/revisions\/4718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}