Motivation
Many of us want God to exist. Life would be so much better under the watchful eye of a caring yet forgiving, generous yet powerful creator who ensures fairness in the world, who rewards good deeds and punishes the evil. But does God exist? What is His nature?
Content
Many religious books claim to have a divine origin. An all-knowing, all-powerful, ever-present God shares the most important know-how for human survival and happiness through these books. Through these books God also tells us how great He is. But what do the contents of these books, indirectly, tell us about God. Is the knowledge shared in these books the most up-to-date or the most important for human survival or even the most clear and well presented? Have you ever come across a book by a human author that was more clear and well presented, had more relevant information for human survival or was more up-to-date in any field as compared to your religious book?
Unfortunately, as much as we want this all-powerful God to exist, the evidence pointing to the existence of such a God has been found severely lacking. On the other hand, scientific explanations have been able to explain many natural phenomena once attributable to God and many more miraculous and extremely useful phenomena that God did not bother to mention in His books. The creator God that is at the center of most religions seems like a figment of imagination of our less knowledgeable ancestors.
If you are still not convinced about this ask yourself the following questions and be honest with yourself.
- Saving Innocent Lives :
- The inventions that have saved the most human lives are Public Sanitation, Antibiotics and Vaccines by preventing and curing cholera, small pox, yellow fever etc. Did the religious books of your religion give humanity the blue-prints or recipes for these inventions? Did God or any of his sons or prophets create the above by miracles?
- With so many children and mothers dying during childbirth, did God reveal the technology we have to today to prevent all this avoidable suffering?
- With so many people dying in famines and droughts, did God reveal Water Desalination technology to create drinkable water from sea water?
- Geographic Isolation:
- Wikipedia was created in 2001 and yet in mere 10 years it could be accessed directly from anywhere in the world. Why did an all-powerful God not create a similar mechanism to access Him directly? Why did the Native Americans had to wait for more than a 1000 years before even hearing about Jesus , Muhammad or Krishna?
- Knowledge:
- Why did none of the revelations reveal that the earth was round and went around the sun and the sun was just one star in the galaxy and our galaxy was just one in a billion galaxies?
As the great Bob Dylan would say, “The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind, the answer is blowin’ in the wind.”
We are far from knowing all there is to know about how the world was created and how it operates. Modern science still has many puzzles to answer. We cannot confirm or deny the role of a creator in creating this universe and the rules that govern it. We can speculate if we are living in a simulation like the movie Matrix depicted, or whether aliens helped create us. But the question of the Ultimate Creator remains unanswered and we should become comfortable with this uncertainty.
References
Sanitation Revolution : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cba7di0eL8I
19th Century Epidemics : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases_and_epidemics_of_the_19th_century
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