Is There a God?

Last updated 2004-06-28 by Roedy Green ©1999-2004 Canadian Mind Products.
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I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

Introduction

1. Is there a God?
2. If so, is He anything like the descriptions in Christian or Islamic scripture?
I suspect the first question may be well beyond man's intelligence to answer, however, the second is more amenable to reason.

Arguments For The Existence of God

1. The most convincing evidence I have found lies in the fundamental universal physical constants. If the charge on the electron had been different by an almost infinitesimally small amount, the universe would never have developed the structure it did. The expansion and contraction forces of the universe are almost precisely balanced. You could imagine some intelligence calculating the various fundamental constants of the universe to find a set that would create an interesting universe. An alternate explanation is that we just fluked out. There are/were other worlds with the constants set differently, but they just generated boring masses of goo, and intelligent life did not develop in them. Because these worlds would have to be totally isolated from ours, mathematicians dismiss their existence as irrelevant. Physicist Stephen Hawking said that it may also turn out, that for some mathematical reason, the charge on the electron was compelled to be the precise value it was. It was not an arbitrary choice, in which case invoking God to set it would be unnecessary.

   Ree's Six Universal Constants Essential To Life
   Symbol	What it Measures	Comments
   	force that binds atomic nuclei together.	The difficulties if it were too weak are pretty obvious, but I do not know how it being a little stronger would have affected the universe.
   	binding strength of forces that hold atoms together divided by gravitational attraction.	If gravity were not much much weaker than the other forces, only short-lived miniature universes could exist.
   	density of matter in the universe.	If it were larger, the universe would have collapsed long ago. If it were smaller, no galaxies and stars could have formed.
   	the strength of the cosmic antigravity that controls the expansion of the universe.	If it were stronger, no stars could have formed.
   	the size of the ripples in the expanding universe.	If it were smaller, the universe would be a mass of cold gas. If it were larger, great gobs of matter would have collapsed in to black holes.
   	the number of dimensions in our spacial universe, i.e. 3.	If this were different, our universe would be very different from the one we are familiar with, but I see no reason it could not support life or something else equally interesting. This same argument applies in a lesser degree to the other constants.

2. The laws of the physical universe are simple, elegant and beautiful. The Spartan simplicity of quantum mechanics leads inevitably to the periodic table of elements and from there to chemistry and biology. It can be considered a masterful piece of mathematics/art. We are used to viewing the universe at a macroscopic level where it is very untidy. To discover this underlying order astounds us. We imagine that tidiness could not possibly be an inherent property of existence, and postulate a designer. I wonder if somewhere there are a race of microscopic beings, discovering the macroscopic untidiness of the universe for the first time, and deciding the universe needs a designer to possibly explain this mysterious chaos, so unlike the natural ordered microscopic universe they are used to.
3. People have near death experiences. They report meeting the dead and a variety of religious figures consistent with their religious expectations, and generally experiencing love and bliss. Surely this is a foretaste of life after death. We have discovered you can also create these experiences by starving the brain of oxygen using a centrifuge. Various drugs such as nitrous oxide, cocaine and heroin also stimulate ecstatic states. These experiences are part of dying, not of life after death. I have gone under anaesthesia several times. I just disappeared. I watched myself fade away. I have no problem with the notion that when I die I have no consciousness at all since I have already experienced total lack of consciousness while alive. On the planet earth, billions of animals die every day and billions of tons of vegetable matter dies. What are some possibilities?
   1. Consciousnesses are recycled at the soul level and reincarnate.
   2. Consciousness hang around at the soul level for a while before allowing themselves to be decomposed and recycled in a process analogous to leaves rotting.
   3. Consciousness just stops and disappears.
   4. Consciousness is broken down and reused.
   5. Consciousness is protected for eternity from further change living happily ever after in heaven or in hell in eternal torment.
4. Jesus could heal people and Jesus said there was a God. Unfortunately Christian con artists like Peter Popov and Ernest Angely in our day have convinced people God healed through them. Does this make their pronouncements infallible? We don't even know for sure if Jesus was as actual person. There were no written records about him created until 15 to 30 years after his death. God could easily have provided more solid evidence for His existence for us to examine in this day, but for some reason He elected not to.
5. On the 100 Huntley Street TV show, people come on daily and tell a story how "God told them" to do such and such a thing. It turns out what they meant is they heard a quiet voice inside that urged them to action. They are so puffed with pride they imagine their own internal voices are the Creator of the Universe taking time out to give them special guidance. They ignore 5:37 which claims God does not talk to people. Oddly, not once did one of these voices reveal the chemical formula for a cure for cancer. Oddly, this same quiet voice counsels others to murder, such as the demented Abraham.
6. Some people just know in their bones that God exists. They can't imagine life without that comfort. Obviously, a belief in God is comforting. Your enemies will eventually be punished, you will eventually be exonerated, your pain will eventually be replaced with joy and you will be reunited with those you love who have died. Quite a package! Yet what has comfort to do with truth? The truth often hurts. People who have been conned often refuse to recognize the signs of betrayal simply because they want so badly for the con to be true. Wishful thinking clouds the mind. Just what evidence is there that any of this Christian mumbo jumbo is true? The only "evidence" is repeated assertion. Repeated assertion when a child is very young creates rock-like faith in any arrant nonsense. Just look at the children of cult members. We don't recognise this as a con even though the believer hands over money and unquestioning obedience to another in the promise of a reward which, so far as we can tell, is never delivered.
7. That gut feeling there has to be a God is just a measure of the depth of your existential pain. Do something practical to reduce that pain:
   • Meditate.
   • Read self help books.
   • Get counselling.
   • Learn how to reduce you addictive load using the Keyes techniques.
   • Start your plan to save the world.
8. Many people, myself included, have had OOBEs Out Of Body Experiences. This suggests life may be possible without a body. Mind you, every one who has ever reported an OOBE had a living brain at the time, even if it were so quiet that it appeared dead. In my experiments with dreaming, I have discovered that dreams can be equally vivid in detail as real life. Most OOBEs can be considered like dreams or hallucinations that weave information gleaned from various sources. My brain is perfectly capable of computing what my eyes would see from the rafters of a theater, where I was floating in my own OOBE. Yet some OOBEs glean information by inexplicable means. Buddhist reincarnationist theology is just as compatible with OOBEs as Christian. Questions on ESP and OOBEs could be settled either way, quite independent of the truth of Christian theology or the existence of God.
9. People who are seriously ill sometimes spontaneously recover. Whenever this happens, God is usually given credit for special intervention. Nobody asks why God let all the others die with similar diseases many of whom appeared to be even more deserving. It is a bit like giving God credit when someone wins the lottery, rather than as the natural outcome of the laws of probability. If the odds are 1 in 1000 of surviving, there will be natural survivors from time to time. If there were not, it would be cause for note.
10. People who believe in God have lower blood pressure and they live longer. Some have argued that man's brain is wired to believe in God -- any God. This may well be true, but if anything it just shows we humans are so biased we cannot study the problem objectively. Scientists have even found a God spot in the brain, that when stimulated creates feelings of religious ecstasy and the presence of God, using whatever religious symbolism the subject is familiar with. Bertrand Russell pointed out that the Muggletonians (Flat Earth Society members) are among the happiest people on earth. Their happiness however, has nothing whatsoever to do with the accuracy of their beliefs.
11. Jesus said there is a god named Jehovah. Jesus healed people; therefore everything he says must be true, goes the logic. However, Jesus himself said that people healed themselves through faith. Ernest Angely heals people on TV by the power of faith; therefore everything Mr. Angely says must be true. Really?
12. Mohammed said there is but one god and his name is Allah. Mohammed was the greatest Arabic poet of all time; therefore everything he says must be true, goes the logic. Shakespear was the greatest English language poet; therefore everything Shakespear says must be true. Really?
13. The Bible reports various spectacular divine interventions, such as the parting of the Red Sea, and Lot's wife being turned into a pillar of salt. However, for some reason God does not act like that anymore. The authorship of these tales is not established. Further, these stories had long periods of oral transmission, in which they would be embellished. It sounds to me like they are apocryphal.
14. Monks who fast, pray and meditate for very long hours report states of extreme bliss, deep peace or profound clarity. Some consider this consciousness of God. Obviously, something happens that the monk finds astounding.
15. Sondra Ray. Hanging out with this woman is like entering an alternate reality.
16. Ken Keyes.
17. The incredible life of Captain Paul Watson, head of the Sea Shepherd Society, who scoffs at religions, but who lives a life more charmed than a Star Trek character. He miraculously escapes from predicament after hopeless predicament. He hints that perhaps it is the whales warping the probabilities in his favour.
18. Co-incidences. I have had one in a billion coincidences in my life. One possible explanation is that they are orchestrated by God. I tend to think the explanation will be more mundane, but still astounding. I suspect we humans have some way of warping reality that unconsciously creates these mind-blowing co-incidences. It may be a form of ESP or perhaps some quantum effect. New agers have recently been making reference to the Quantum Field as a new name for God.
19. The argument that Wayne Dyer finds most convincing is the explosion in a print shop. To him looking around at the universe of living things interacting in such complex ways without conscious design is like expecting an explosion in a print shop to spell out the works of Shakespear. How could this possibly happen by pure chance? His is a fallacious argument based on a misunderstanding of the theory of evolution and natural selection. Natural selection is not pure chance. Only the mutations are pure chance. Natural selection is intelligent, not very intelligent, with roughly an IQ of only 1, but when you let it refine and refine its designs over 4 billions years of winnowing out those that don't work and keeping on the best, it can come up with some pretty amazing stuff. If you study the fossil record, it is dithering, inept and meandering, with no hint of foresight or planning. Scientists use genetic algorithms to simulate this mindless, but powerful, winnowing process in computers for solving difficult mathematical problems.

Arguments Against the Existence of God

1. Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe has not been hit by lightning. He is possibly the most evil man to ever walk the planet.
2. The Norse took Wotan seriously, the Romans worshipped Jupiter and killed those who failed to show sufficient respect. How is it that every society's ideas of God but our own are preposterous? What a strange co-incidence! I explored the Roman ruins an Bath England. In particular, when I saw a bronze mask of Minerva, I felt an even greater sense of dignity and religious awe than I felt in the nearby Christian Cathedrals. I was quite convinced these ancient peoples took these Gods even more seriously than we take the Christian god today. As Robert Anton Wilson put it, "Nearly 300 years after the Age of Reason was prematurely announced, most people, in most nations, most of the time, are mentally in total bondage to religious leader who operate on sheer bluff, i.e. on the basis of claims that cannot be proven and appear clearly insane to everybody who hasn't been raised within their frameworks."
3. An A&E special on Scientology asked "Is Scientology a legitimate religion?" I find the question absurd. No religion is legitimate! All religions depend on belief in some unsubstantiated silly story. All use that story to take power over others to convince them to behave a certain way. (Granted, in many cases this way is more moral than the people would have naturally chosen, but it is all still based on a lie.) All use that story to convince others to give money to some special priest class in return for special favour from the deity. The story is obviously preposterous to everyone but those who belong to that particular cult/religion. There is no essential difference between a cult and a religion other than vintage and popularity. We put up with the most blatant of con games the instant the con men throw in bit of religious hocus pocus into the mix. The con men may even seriously believe their own malarkey. That is why they are so convincing.
4. Had Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, tried to pass off his cock and bull story today he would be diagnosed with schizophrenia or dismissed as a charlatan. His followers are considered sane even though they believe the same delusions. They enjoy this status simply because there are so many of them. All religions are based on stories just as outlandish. They don't seem so to the believers because of familiarity.
5. Various scriptures of the world were purportedly written by God. If anyone should know how the universe is constructed, it should be God. How come then these scriptures show no understanding of medicine, chemistry or even basic physics? However, this does not show there is no God, only that God did not write all the scripture.
6. Some people are astounded at the complexity of the universe and thus insist it must not have been self creating. They imagine that postulating a God simplifies things. It just muddies them further. You now have an even more mysterious, sourceless God plus a complicated universe. An astounding universe by itself is quite sufficiently amazing to swallow all on its own. It is intellectual laziness to claim whatever you don't know is unknowable. Hiding the mystery of the universe behind an unknowable God is like sweeping dirt under the rug that you are too lazy to deal with. Why is an amazing invisible God more palatable than an amazing visible/invisible universe? The universe is by definition e v e r y  t h i n g, so surely that should include God -- the creator of the universe (whatever/whoever that is). So by definition, the universe is self-creating. Q.E.D.

7. Christians often go their whole lives without doubting the childhood stories of Santa Claus or his older brother Jesus, despite ample empirical evidence that praying for a pony does not work.
   ~ Roedy Green

   From a practical point of view, what people are really interested in when they talk about the existence of God, is can He be persuaded to bend the normal rules of the universe to provide special beneficence for ourselves and special punishment for our enemies. Despite all the wild claims to the contrary, there is no statistical evidence that God plays any favourites. He rains on the just and unjust equally. Christians die in plane crashes the same as anyone else. Little boys with cancer die whether the congregation prays or not. He pays absolutely no attention to prayers. Whether you pray or not, both unexpected good and bad things happen to people. Prayer may give people courage to do what needs to be done. It may encourage others to help. However, it won't bend God's ear. That is the Big Lie that churches have repeated so often that most people believe it. As Gypsy Rose Lee put it "Praying is like a rocking chair -- it'll give you something to do, but it won't get you anywhere." Here are two exceptions:
   1. When an alcoholic prays for deliverance, by submitting to any "higher power" the prayer sometimes changes him.
   2. Quantum Miracles.
   (1) may be a special case of (2).
8. Keep in mind that if you pray and a good thing happens, that is not evidence that God answered your prayer. If you put a cherry pit up your nose and a good thing happened, that is not evidence putting the cherry pit you your nose in any way caused the good thing to happen. If you put a cherry pit up your nose four times a day and nice things continue to happen to you, it is still no evidence. You must keep track of all the nice and bad things that happen, and when and when you do not put a cherry pit up your nose, and look for correlations. Further, you must get hundreds of other people to keep track as well before you can scientifically claim cherry pits/prayer works. Much as we would like it to, prayer does not pass this test any better than poking a cherry pit up your nose. Though we have had thousands of years to accumulate such evidence, we still don't have anything but anecdotes of the occasional fluke success.
9. Gautama Buddha observed the first noble truth, all is suffering. Why would a kind loving god create a universe where all its inhabitants continuously suffer? Even birth implies old age and decay. Our lives begin in screaming agony.
10. Prayer simply does not work. Consider how many millions of people prayed desperately for President Kennedy, Lady Diana and Mother Theresa. Nothing out the ordinary happened at all. If prayer had power, well known public figures would all live forever in perfect health and happiness. God either has a heart of stone or simply does not or cannot make exceptions.
11. God is supposedly unchanging, however, He has not done anything to show himself for two thousand years. He sat on His thumbs through two world wars and atrocities in Germany, Viet Nam, Uganda, Cambodia and Kosovo. Where did He go? It makes you wonder if those stories handed down from years past where God actively intervened in human history were fables, not actual accounts. Sadly, God must live in the hearts of the people or there can be no Quantum Miracles.
12. Women who win music awards invariably thank God for their trophies. Similarly football players give credit to God when their team wins. I find this blasphemous, as if God were so petty as to take sides in such unimportant contests.
13. Despite the condemnation of armed conflict in most of the world's scripture, leaders of armies confidently proclaim that the Almighty has taken their side, and therefore they cannot lose. Even in the case of Adolph Hitler, God made not even a token appearance nor made any overt attempt to protect the devout from the Nazis. If God refuses to ever act, for all practical purposes, He does not exist. Napolean observed that God always seemed to be on the side of the biggest army, hardly a ringing endorsement of His moral character.
14. Buddhists and Hindus claim that after death, instead of resting for eternity in an excruciatingly dull heaven or hell, you reincarnate back on earth. There are many stories of young children reporting details of their former lives, and often these check out with reality. The children mysteriously know intimate details of lives of people who have died. The 14th Dalai Lama's web page describes the process by which he was selected as the reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama. There is no similar evidence to back up the Christian theology. I have a friend who went to a renaissance town in Italy and had a very strong feeling of deja vu. He recalled events that occurred in the town hundreds of years ago, and was able to check some of them out, such as the location of his favourite pub which was still standing but had been converted to some other use. Buddhists claim that if you meditate and release your attachments sufficiently, you will be able to recall details of your previous lives, just as did the Buddha at his enlightenment under the Bodhi tree. Christian theology is so constructed no conceivable test could check if it were true. Usually in science we automatically discard any such untestable theories as bogus. Only those that could potentially be disproved are considered potentially legit.
15. The best behaved political/religious leader on the planet is the Dalai Lama. He makes no claims about the existence of a God. If you are supposed to judge a tree by its fruit, Christianity does not rank very well. Christians carve Christians in Ireland. Christians and Muslims kill each other in Indonesia. Racism and sexism flourish under the banner of Christianity in the USA.
16. The Gödel argument argument probably won't be very convincing to Christians, but it may alleviate some deep seated doubts in non-believers. The universe seems so incredibly complex. Surely some intelligence must have designed it, then created it, argue the theists. Not necessarily. There is a mathematical theorem called the Gödel incompleteness theorem that very roughly says a tiny part of a system can't possibly understand the whole. Analogously, man is such a tiny tiny fraction of the universe that it is preposterous to imagine his relatively nanoscopic brain could glimpse but even a inkling of the totality or the inate intelligence of the totality. So naturally the universe seems incredible and miraculous to him. The universe necessarily appears that way because we humans are such a tiny tiny part of it. It appears that way because we compare the entire universe with our own mundane little limited existences. We don't have an absolute yardstick for how wonderful our universe is. We have only have one to admire. If there are parallel universes, perhaps ours may turn out to be comparatively shabby, obviously lacking the ultra-intelligent design of the usual universe, (where all the women are beautiful, all the men are strong and all the children are above average) proving a true God had nothing to do with ours.
17. People tell me they could not bare it if there were no God. I think this is rubbish. If there is a God, he is clearly a rather cruel or uncaring or ineffective bastard. There is not much hope. God made things the way they are. He must want them that way despite his protestations. How can things change with a great lunk like that in charge? There is no hope. So it is less pessistic to assume their is no one in charge. It means things could get better. You are merely fighting chaos, not a deity, to improve man's lot.

Holy Blackmail

Let's assume that it is very unlikely that God exists, say 1%. You should still believe in Him anyway and follow Christian dogma for purely practical reasons. There are four cases:

1. If you believe in Him and He does not exist, what do you lose? You just die and nothing happens.
2. If you believe in Him and He does exist, you have eternity in Heaven.
3. If you don't believe in Him and He does not exist, you just die and nothing happens.
4. If you don't believe in Him and He does exist, you will rot in Hell for eternity.

I counter this argument by saying:

1. I am interested in the truth, not toadying to some imaginary despot. This argument is roughly the moral equivalent of a scientist falsifying his findings in hopes of receiving a bribe from a tobacco company. It is intellectual dishonesty. Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) in his Aids To Reflection put it this way; "He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all."
2. If this argument persuades you, then you should become a Muslim. Islam offers far greater after death rewards to the faithful and far more terrifying tortures for the non-believer than Christianity does. Jehovah is a wimp compared with Allah. Read the Qur'an if you are skeptical. I did and had nightmares for months.
3. The Greek philosopher Epicurus (circa. 341-270 BC) put it this matter-of-fact way: "Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?"
4. Every religion offers these punishments and rewards to its rejectors and adherents, including the worship of Wotan and Zeus and the religions of the Indians of the Amazon. How do you decide which is the true religion? They all sound equally improbable, bogus and silly.
5. If you follow the tenets of Christianity as it is practiced you would probably lead a more evil life than you would otherwise. You would be judgemental. You would discriminate against gays and probably blacks. You would lie to people about the best ways to cure disease. You would spread superstition and lies that are part of the Christian faith. You would indirectly kill children by blocking sex education about AIDS and birth control.For a more detailed list of the evils of Christianity, see the essay 2004-06-28 on why Christianity should be combatted. As an extreme example, Jeff Dahmer said grace before consuming his murder victims.
6. If you believe in God, you life will actually be more miserable than if you do not. Why? If you believe in God, you will tend to mope around praying -- wondering why God is ignoring you. You will waste time waiting for God to do things only you can do for yourself. If you don't believe in God, you will be much more practical and self reliant. You won't be saddled with an unrealistic sense of entitlement. You cannot very well be angry with God for disappointing you if you don't believe in Him.

Preferences

In Isaiah 45:7 God admits he creates the evil in the world. God then gave your father a brain tumor, fanned the hatred that boiled over into a gang rape of an eight year old Albanian girl, etc. If this is true, you are dealing with an immensely powerful, evil, cruel, heartless, arbitrary adversary. What hope do you have? In the story of Job, it is clear God does not even spare the just from his sadistic torments.

Would you not prefer to deal instead with nature? These negative happenings are essentially random events, but with some pattern behind them. There are laws physical or psychological. Eventually they may be understood and the evils averted. I certainly would prefer to deal with nature than a quixotic, slippery, tyrant God.

What Is God Like?

Beware the man of one book.
-- St. Thomas Aquinas

The God of scripture is petty, cruel, jealous, inconsistent, prudish, partisan and foolish. He is fanatically concerned with controlling every thought and action of humans with a set of insanely arbitrary rules. He desperately wants to be loved. He is willing to bribe his subjects with unimaginable largess or torment after death, but refuses to offer even the tiniest foretaste to prove he is not bluffing. Earth and man are the center of His existence. He is oddly partial to the Jewish people at the expense of all others.

To me, that description sounds like a Roman Caesar -- how a human behaves when given absolute power. The Old Testament was composed by people imagining what they thought God would say if He spoke. Unfortunately, they projected their failings onto Him. They described how they would behave if given absolute power. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely does not apply to God, only to people.

In contrast,look at the universe. See the stupendous variety and stupendous quantity. Earth is just a tiny backwater planet on the edge of a backwater galaxy. There are trillions of stars and trillions of planets. Even on earth, the variety of animal and plant life is utterly amazing.

No prude created the sexually-daisy-chaining periwinkle. As Blake put it, "The lust of the goat is the glory of God".

If there is a creator, He is the consumate mathematician, physicist and biologist. He is not some narrow cleric afraid to look at the earth as it is.

The world is full of beauty and cruelty. Birds and fish are dazzling colours and patterns for no apparent reason other than exuberant beauty. The whole web of life is built on the principle that animals eat plants and kill and eat each other. This is the fundamental cruelty of our existence. A frog may have a million young, yet only two on average will survive to adulthood. This is true of all species, including humans. Does that seriously sound like the handiwork of an infinitely merciful deity?

God likes using small simple building blocks to construct a bewildering variety of forms. Consider atoms, DNA and cells, in particular brain cells.

If there is a God, He looks after the big picture. He has no more interest in individual humans than a child would have in the individual ants in his ant farm. He works with general principles and allows their consequences to work out logically.

God likes subtle asymmetry.

The bewildering intricate beauty of the Mandelbrot set springs forth from the simplest of mathematical equations. Even these lowly equations can help themselves from strutting like peacocks.

Life After Death

1. No god. no afterlife, (materialist)
2. No god, with afterlife (Buddhist)
3. God, no afterlife (hippy)
4. God, with afterlife (Christian, Muslim)

Pro

• Almost every culture has some sort of life-after-death myth. The details of what actually happens vary considerably. There is usually some form of adjudication of how well you did in your life, and some form of punishment or reward. If the myth is so common, maybe there is something to it other than just wishful thinking.
• People who die on the operating table and are later revived report very similar stories about traveling down a tunnel toward a bright light, often meeting dead relatives, and often meeting some loving religious figure. These experiences can also be induced using a centrifuge to reduce the flow of blood to the brain. This may well just be the standard hallucination the brain kicks into when blood flow is reduced. It explains the origin of the belief in life after death. The extreme euphoria is caused by an excess of nitrous oxide, (a natural brain transmitter) in the brain. Yet people don't just dream of tunnels, they dream specifically of death. If the after death experience is in some other dimension, people will inevitably map this unfamiliar experience back onto their ordinary world with its expectations, created by religious conditioning. If the cause were simply an oxygen-starved brain, I would expect much greater variety in the hallucinations. It also seems odd that people rarely have ordinary dreams of after-death experiences. In near death experiences, people often report rapidly reviewing their whole life, only with the ability to sense the emotions of others around them. It seems strange man would evolve to reserve this very useful review only for the last minutes of life.
• People have hellish near death experiences. People are typically reluctant to talk about them. I had an operation requiring general anaesthesia to remove an impacted wisdom tooth. I partially woke up in the middle of the operation. Several people had to be called in to restrain me and put me back under. From my point of view, I was in hell, falling endlessly through a gray fog in excruciating pain. I assumed I was dead and this was indeed hell. The experience was much more vivid than a dream. Ironically, fundamentalists (who in theory should have the least to fear from hellfire) have these experiences much more frequently than other people. Most people have entirely positive near death experiences. In the middle ages people typically reported a negative experience that transformed into a positive one.
• In Buddhist countries children reportedly remember their previous lives and the people in them. I don't know the care to which the children are shielded from hearing stories of their supposed previous lives, or just how accurate the descriptions the children provide actually are. I saw one documentary where a child simply reached out to play with various objects belonging to a dead person, and the onlookers read a great deal into this.
• Anecdotal ghost stories. If even one ghost story is true, that would be evidence for some sort of existence after death.
• I have had an out of body experience, as have many other people. It appears your consciousness is floating outside your body able to look down on it. This sounds very similar to what is supposed to happen to you after death. However, with an OOBE your brain is still functioning, so perhaps it is a hallucination where you project what the world would look like from up on the ceiling.
• Australian aborigines have a form of consciousness they call "dream time". From the little I can find out about it, it appears to be as different from ordinary consciousness as death.
• One day I was sitting under a tree at the University Of BC. A group of Hare Krishna devotees were chanting nearby. A little girl from the group walked over and gave me a small bag of nuts. I experienced the event in a miraculous way. It was as if I were everything at once, not just confined to my limited body. Perhaps it is just an illusion that I am Roedy Green. In actuality I may be the whole ball of wax. As such, it seems unlikely I would disappear when Roedy Green's body dies.
• In a very mundane sense, there is only one being living on planet earth. Consider the amoeba. They reproduce by splitting in two. If you look at any amoeba today it is billions of years old. You might in theory trace all the amoebae alive in the world today to a single ancestor. Thus in one sense there is only one amoeba, living in many bodies. If an amoeba dies, has the amoeba died? no. It is much like single blood cell in a human dying. If you follow back further you would probably find that other one celled animals all share a common ancestor with the amoeba too. There is only one "life" living in many bodies. Multicelled humans too are part of this single life tree. Our cells too grow only by splitting, but in more specialised ways, going through a minimalist stage periodically as sperm and egg cells. However, each of a human's cells is similarly billions of years old, with an unbroken chain of cell divisions going all the way back through the generations of humanity. Oddly, even though the cells are billions of years old, the cells die within 100 years of birth, if they stay part of human's body i.e. if they don't leave it as sperm or as a completed baby. They have a built-in death count-down mechanism called telomeres. If there is only one life, living in many bodies in many forms, you, the primordial life, lives on even if your little human body dies.

Con

• If a person sustains brain damage, his mental capacities are correspondingly impaired. If the mind were separate from the brain, it should remain undamaged. Similarly for the effects of diseases such as Alzheimer and schizophrenia. It thus appears if a brain is totally damaged, so is the corresponding mind. Thus it appears a mind (consciousness) dies when the corresponding brain dies. There is now evidence that consciousness is brain activity. You are only conscious of something once a certain threshold of neurons start firing.
• I have experienced anaesthesia several times in my life. I felt myself totally disappear. I awoke with the sensation no time had passed. It appeared my consciousness did not exist for the duration of the operation. Consciousness does not thus have to go somewhere when you die. It can just stop.
• Nobody can give reasonable explanation for how anyone would know if the after-death myth of their culture could be true. Usually some shaman figure (e.g. Buddha, Jesus, Mohammad) simply announces it is, and people take his word for it based on his reputation as a moral figure. He just knows by some mysterious process not available to ordinary humans.
• The after-death myths are very man-centred. I have a rough time imagining a God that did not value dolphins, whales and many other species as equally important to man.
• When the Spanish came to America, the indigenous peoples mistook them for Gods. If beings from other parts of the galaxy ever send their technology to earth, surely the technology gap would be even greater. We would mistake it for magic or acts of God. The universe is an unimaginably huge place. We have just begun to explore just one tiny solar system. If life could happen once, surely it would happen over and over. It is mind boggling to contemplate the possibility that there is other intelligent life in the cosmos, but even more mind boggling to contemplate the possibility there is not, and we are utterly alone and utterly unique.

Omnipotence

Clearly toothaches, bad breath and fungus infections exist. How to explain that?

We presume that God created a Devil who then created these things. God gets off the hook by one level of indirection. That makes about as much sense as a Mafia don claiming innocence because he hired a hitman.

Perhaps it would be simpler to just say God created the best universe he could at the time. Perhaps it is impossible to create a logically consistent universe any better than this. This may be the best of all possible worlds.

We keep imagining the universe was created for the personal pleasure of man. We may well prove to be one of the least important species in the galaxy. From God's point of view, we may well be a cancer on planet earth, destroying its carefully planned biological diversity, about as well-loved as rose blight.

The one thing we have discovered is the creation is logically consistent. Scripture is anything but. If there is a creator, the best way to understand Him is to study His creation.

Finally have a read of what some of the history's most famous thinkers had to say on the subject in this list of quotations.

Advantages of Believing in God

• You can console yourself when a loved one dies with the thought you will see them again.
• If it turns out my some fluke you picked the one true religion (if there indeed is one), and the one true sect within that religion, this gives you brownie points rewarding you in the afterlife for your acuity. You go to the head of the heavenly chow line. Lot's of luck picking the right one from this list.
• It can give you hope in a hopeless situation, such as a fatal illness. God might set aside the usual rules of the universe or arrange some co-incidences to rescue you.
• It can give you fellowship.
• It can help you feel superior to others.
• It can erase doubt and let you stop thinking. You can relax. Others will spoon feed you all the answers to life's problems. The answers might not make any sense, but you know they must be valid since they came direct from God.
• If you are addicted to drugs, it may help you become unaddicted.
• If you tend to spend much of your time worrying, it can train you to take your mind off your troubles and think more optimistically. Emmet Fox suggests that casting your troubles on God, then contemplating the nature of God instead will change your consciousness, and hence your reality will improve. This technique could work whether or not God actually exists.
• It gives you extra motivation to treat others well and to avoid criminal activity.
• It can let you fearlessly tackle dangerous activities. The worst that can happen is you will end up in heaven early.

Disadvantages of Believing in God

• You tend to sit twiddling your thumbs praying rather than doing something useful about a problem.
• You fall in the ditch or run out of money because you expect God to look out for you.
• You look like an idiot with your rigid illogical opinions to those studying how nature actually works.
• Other people will avoid you socially because of your utterly predictable endless babblings about God.
• You have to worry about eternal punishment. The Bible and Qu'ran imply only a tiny fraction of people make the grade.
• It makes you an intolerant pain in the ass since you are under the delusion you are in exclusive possession of the word of God on every matter.
• You may kill your children (by refusing medical attention), ignore facts right under your nose, and justify all manner of wickedness (such as tormenting homosexuals) using your holy book for justification.
• Because your Bible is purportedly the word of God, you don't worry if the advice it gives is inconsistent, illogical or wicked.
• You must play lawyer to defend your holy books which were written by men thousands of years ago. Of course they are not consistent with what we know now. You have to disingenuously twist words to pretend they do.
• You can't use compassion and logic to determine you ethical choices. You must use rigid rules composed thousands of years ago when women were treated as slaves, it was considered proper to own slaves, and people believed disease was caused by unclean spirits.

How To Find God

	Around The Year With Emmet Fox
	0-06-250408-8
	Emmet Fox

• Forgive everyone including yourself.
• For a period of a month, every time you have a trouble, no matter how personal, embarrassing, unholy or trifling, instead of worrying about it, give the problem to God to deal with. Then spend the time you would have spent worrying contemplating God, e.g. unbounded power, unbounded intelligence, unbounded love, unbounded wisdom, perfect humour, omnipresence (Don't you think it a bit rude of humanity to create garbage dumps, which God because of his omnipresence must inhabit.), joy, truth, spirit, principle etc. You are on a fast from negative thoughts.
• Here is the hard part. Have faith that God will actually take care of all these problems in a much more intelligent and pleasing way than you could ever come up with yourself. If you don't have faith, you are at least supposed to act as if you did. This should suffice.
• Don't dictate to God how to solve the problem. God may come up with some very indirect solution that you may not even recognise as a solution.
• Don't look for results. They may come at the 13th hour.
• Don't tell anyone during the month about your experiment. You can talk about it afterward.
• If it does not work, according to Fox, chances are you failed to be 100% unconditionally loving to everyone. Since no one can attain that perfection, there is always an excuse why this won't work. It requires God's reputed mercy to have any hope of working.

To me it would seem prudent to act normally during your experiment. Pay your bills. Look both ways before crossing the street. You don't want to get yourself in too much trouble if God decides to ignore you for not having enough faith. On the other hand, you want to go at it seriously. After a failure, you will have even more evidence that God will ignore your pleas, and so it will be even harder to whip up the requisite faith for a second attempt.

I'd be interested in hearing from people who have performed this experiment. Tell me what happened and how you interpreted it.

I tried the experiment for the month of 2000 June. I spent three weeks taking ganciclovir IVs to clear up my nausea where nearly everything went wrong. At first, it looked like the treatment did not work. I met a strikingly handsome young guy who came over twice for massages. I worried less than usual, and it became clear that worry does little to improve most situations. There was nothing sufficiently out of the ordinary to require divine explanation. However, the following month something unusual did happen. A long standing friend asked if she could become my lover, and I accepted, even though she was of the "wrong " sex. Life has been unusually pleasant and eventful ever since.

How Can You Tell When You Have Found God?

I once heard the voice of God. It said "Vrrrrmmmmm." Unless it was just a lawn mower.
-- Age 11

1. When my friend Phil was a child he shinnied up a pole and had an orgasm. He assumed the pleasant sensations were caused by being "closer to God" near the top of the pole. We laugh at Phil, but grown people act just as foolishly.
2. These intense feelings can be created on cue. Preachers have been perfecting the techniques for centuries. In modern days there is a whole new arsenal of ways of fooling people into thinking they have truly found God. See Dick Sutphen's article on how it is done.
3. People who rely on pleasant sensations for their spiritual barometer can find themselves bound to the gods of cocaine or heroin.

I think more reliable signs would be how you had changed for the better or how your life had turned around. These effects may take years to become apparent. Other people would probably tell you they thought your life was touched by God.

Alternate Definitions of God

• God as cosmic body guard: God protects you from harm and disease. Actually the top banana is not really necessay, a guardian angel or a friendly alien would suffice.
• God as cosmic Santa Claus: God is that which answers prayers. You can petition God to grant you exciting sexual partners, good health, material goods, and the esteem of your fellow man, all without effort. He could be considered as a sort of Star Trek replicator.
• God as sadistic Master: God gives you cancer or makes you lose your lover to teach you some mysterious spiritual lesson so you will grow. The curriculum is never explained.
• God as cosmic snake oil: God is good for whatever ails you. God is the solution to every problem. Just join my religion and you can have all the God you want, for a small monthly fee.
• God as cosmic teddy bear: God is a companion with you all the time. He says nothing, but he is a Good Listener.
• God as cosmic hit man: If anyone ever does you wrong, you can rest assured God will torment him for eternity in the afterlife. Unfortuately, we all have done somebody wrong, so we will all have to console ourselves as we are tortured knowing everyone else is being tormented too.
• I am God: This is not quite a whacko as is first sounds. Usually people mean by this there is some common spirit or consciousness that inhabits all humans that we experience as the sense of I amness.
• God as ideal lover: God looks absolutely fabulous, and for some reason he thinks you too look absolutely fabulous, even if you are overweight with bad breath.
• God as cosmic tripper: God sees everything as perfect. Even suffering is beautiful. Even a dead fish in a polluted river has a deep mysterious perfection. Even Microsoft Windows is perfect. God is completely out of touch with how the rest of us experience reality.
• God is Love: This definition has Biblical support. 1 John 4:8 He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.
• God as the creator of the universe: Even atheists can believe in God with this sort of definition.
• God as the thing you most fear that won't hurt you: That puts extra meaning into the no other gods before me clause.

Pascal's Wager

1. If you don't believe in God and you are wrong, after you die, you are in deep trouble.
2. If you believe in God and you are wrong, nothing too terrible will happen, other than the consequences of silly superstitious actions you may have engaged in as a result, e.g. wasted time praying, or failing to take appropriate action expecting God to bail you out.
3. If you don't believe in God and you are right nothing special happens, other than living a fearless life.
4. If you believe in God and you are right, you hit the jackpot.

Bedford's Wager

The Riddle of Epicurus
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

1. If you don't believe in God and you are wrong, after you die, so long as you have lead a moral life you should have nothing to fear. A compassionate god would not punish you for guessing which religion had an exclusive handle on the truth.
2. If you believe in God and you are wrong, you will have done foolish things such as wasting time praying when you should have taken effective action. You will have lived your life as if it did not matter because you erroneously thought it was merely a trial, preparatory to your real life after death. You would have lived an overly safe conventional life, keeping your nose clean and avoiding all adventure. You would have let evil thrive, because you felt dealing with that was God's responsibility, not yours. You would have done irrational things just because some hoary old book tricked you into it, like mistreating blacks or gays. You would have wasted much of your life in fear of the imaginary divine meat axe.
3. If you don't believe in God and you are right, you live a zestful life. Every second counts. It is all you have got. You don't fritter your time in ritualistic activities. You take responsibility for the planet. You make a difference. You made your decisions rationally, not based on fear of some lunatic bogeyman in the sky. You behave well not because you fear punishment, but because you know that such behaviour is globally and locally optimal, good for everyone and also for you. You are a blessing to the planet.
4. If you believe in God and you are right, you are more likely than not to be an insufferably smug hypocrite, looking down your nose at others and judging incessantly just as Jesus told you not to do. God judges your actions, not your beliefs. In Luke 13:25, Jesus warned you that mere praying would not get you into heaven; only good deeds would. You get punished doubly since you ought to have known better.

Suicide

Links

• Combating Kristianity.
• suicide.
• The Nature of the Real God.
• Quantum Miracles
• reader feedback on this essay.
• Positive Atheism

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