God
The way I’m feeling this may or may not be your bonus post for today. There may be more, way more.
One of the times I got up in the middle of the night I wandered over to the PC, and looked over my Google News feed for distractions. After scanning the headlines and looking at all of the crap that is going on here, there and everywhere it caused me to think of God. Your God, his God, their God. There are a lot of different religions in this world with their own corresponding deity. How the heck does that work? Is there a God Boardroom where they gather and divvy up all the creatures of Earth?1
But a God Collective can’t work, because there has got to be some being making sure nobody gets out of hand with the plagues and pestilence stuff. And all the religions I know about, the one big Tennent is I’m the ONE God, don’t be worshiping anyone else. Hey, maybe that is the way this whole thing works, all the little individual Gods can’t let anyone outside the board in on the secret. Kind of like Fight Club: Both rules #1 & #2 are: You do not talk about Fight Club. But I digress.2
Why would a benevolent god let all this bad crap happen? And from there I spent the next indeterminate minutes discussing God in my head. Well, today on my lunchtime perusal of my Google News feed I came across a headline that got me to click on it: Creationist Ken Ham Blames Atheists For Ark Park Failure. You can click on the link to read the actual article if you want, I found it entertaining in that this fellow is blaming the lack of success on the 3% of America’s Atheists teaming up with America’s new Enemy of the People (mainstream media) to damage the reputation of his big ol’ boat, the Ark Encounter.
I then wandered to the bottom of the article to read the comment section because this is almost always where the fun stuff really resides. It didn’t take long either. Four or five views down the line someone takes a slight dig at atheists and claims he, a mainstream Christian, is the harmed party by being lumped in with the Ark Encounter charlatan3 And then proceeds to state emphatically that the universe we all live in “is just not possible that universes don’t exist that have a ‘God’ of some sort.” And the reply to this is, which I’m going to copy below, is the sort of answer I would like to memorize so I could spout it at the opportune time when confronted with someone making that kind of statement to me.4
i don’t rely on science to justify not believing in god, just as i don’t rely on science to justify not believing in thor or my disbelief that hitler and elvis are living on the dark side of the moon planning an invasion. Your comment seems to suggest that ‘the existence of a universe’ has one of a set of answers in a multiple choice scenario – a. god b. aliens. c. science. d. computer simulation. The correct answer may not be in that set, it may not be something you could even understand at this point – but that does not mean you get to make up an answer or run with one these when the correct answer is “i don’t know, and neither do you”. You’re running with a god of the gaps explanation. The god concept is refutable because there is no evidence to support the claim – if there was, you’d have a fact, not faith. trying to support it by claiming it is ‘the only answer “that makes sense” to you’ regarding ‘why is stuff here instead of not stuff not here?’ no more supports your version of god than it supports thor or magic beans. So, i doubt anyone is “relying on science to justify not believing in god”, if they are that isn’t a very good reason. We don’t believe in god(s) because there is no evidence to back up that claim
For the record, I’m not a believer, nor am I a disbeliever, I consider myself an agnostic.