Why Do You Believe?

Hey guys, it’s the first day of Chinese New Year!

Hope you are having a good time so far. Well, as for me, the morning was as usual, a visit to my grandma’s place and take Angpau la, nothing too fancy :)

But I’m having tons of free time in the afternoon so I reckon I should spend some time writing a blog article.



So, what’s up for this post? As you can see from the title, today I’m going to attempt to tackle one of the most philosophical questions of all time – “Does God exists?”

Now before proceeding to the main text, I should warn you that if you are a religious person and you have total belief in everything your religion teaches you, and you do not like your faith to be challenged or questioned, you ought to turn back and leave now, do this and thus your faith towards your religion shall be kept intact. Otherwise, proceed, read with an unbiased view, think, and you shall see the world differently, maybe not wholly, but you’ll be asking questions that you had not thought of after this.



Ready?
Here we go~



Does God exist?

A simple question with three words, and none of us were able to answer it correctly with the support of provable evidence.

Before trying to answer that question, let us try to define what is “God” in meaningful words.


So what is God to you? What do you know about God?

Well, I’m not going to go too far, again, the usual practice, I’m only going to take examples from the mainstream religions.

To the members of the Abrahamic faith, God is the “One”, the “Perfect”, the “Almighty”, the “(Put a title here)”, etc…

They describe God as an all-loving, kind, omnipresent, omniscient, infinite and perfect being.

And according to Christianity, God looks like human too (well, He looks like man to be precise because He was always depicted as a human with bushy white beards in paintings), that because God created humans based on his own image.

While according to Islam, God takes no form, He is too great to be put in paintings (and peoples say that a picture is worth more than a thousand words, how ironic is the fact that we are describing His being with our lowly languages.)

And the Gods they described is a God that had created the whole known universe, made the Earth, made every living organisms on this planet, and even interacted and interfered with human activities.

Okay, now that we had set the parameters, let’s move on by examining if this God exists.



First of all, I’m going to start with the God that created the known universe. It was said that in the beginning there was nothing, and the God created everything! How cool is that huh?!

This God created everything! Wow, awesome! Hmm… But the question is, does the universe need a creator?

A person with theological perspective would simply say, “If there’s no God, then how can EVERYTHING come from NOTHING?”

Common sense tells us that the second part of this argument is a strong argument, of course, it is beyond the physical laws to create something out of nothing, that’s just impossible, in our universe at least. But do you have to bring a creator into the argument?

Well one thing to consider is that there are many other existing theories on the origin of the universe and all of them were yet to be proven. But let’s say that God created the universe, then who created God? Do you mean to say, God as a being, came from nothing?

That just doesn’t make sense right? The universe must have a cause, and so do God if you were to put Him as part of the explanation. What is it then, that caused the God to exist? Surely it must be something else isn’t it?

Then again, for God to create the universe, He must not be governed by our universe’s law of physics, or else He wouldn’t have had the ability to do so. So there might be a possibility that God came from nothing, because even though it’s not physically possible in OUR universe, it doesn’t mean that it’s impossible outside our universe, as it might have been governed by a whole different set of physical laws.

So yes, I’m saying that there’s a possibility that our universe was created by a creator, which in human context is called “God”.

You might think that I am self-contradicting in my arguments, it doesn’t seem like I’m standing on either side of the argument. Yes, I am taking a neutral stance. The thing is, both the creator theories and the non-creator theories are equally viable, and none of them have more evidence than the other, why should I act like I know everything and decide that one of the MUST be correct and the other MUST be wrong?



Now, that aside, I’m going to talk about the God that seeded Earth with life.

This is a very interesting question, “Did God created Life?”

According to the Abrahamic religions, yes, God did.

In Christianity, God created all lives on Earth and even the first humans, Adam and Eve, in His 7 days of creation. Well I had addressed this topic on my other post Adam, Eve, Noah.

No, I don’t think God created all living creature as described in the Bible or any other religious scriptures, literally or not.

Why?

I’ll say it’s very arrogant of us to think that a God that created this vast universe would want to put some sort of life-forms on this tiny little blue dot in the backdrop of majestic stars and galaxies. Why would He?

You? A tiny little human? Created by God? Do you really think a being that had created this massive universe would even care to waste His time on decorating this small planet that can hardly be seen from the nearest star?

Why?

Because He just wanted peoples to worship Him? Doesn’t that make you a slave? Then don’t you think it’s unfair? To be born in this world, just to be a slave of worship?

Why would God need people to worship Him anyway? Does He have some self-esteem issues?  Has He been bullied by other Gods lately and needs assurance from us that He is Awesome?

Humans outlawed slavery a few centuries ago but yet they do not find this religious binding with God offensive against human rights?

I don’t know, you think for yourself.

But I can tell you, no matter how you would like to defend the theory that God created life as described in the religious scriptures, you’ll find that the burden of prove is on you.

How did you know God did it? Because that’s what the book said? How did you know what the book said was real? Because peoples that wrote the book said God told them? How did you know God told them at all? Because they insist God really told them even though they cannot prove it? WTF? Come on, children can tell better lies.

Anyway, back to the topic, did God really gave life universe, but not literally as the religious scriptures claimed?

Is it even possible for God to enter our universe, given that He cannot be expressed physically since He is infinite and timeless, and therefore incompatible with our universe?

It’s quite tempting to say God gave life, since scientists weren’t able to explain the origin of life, yet! But does that mean science cannot explain at all and that you really had no choice but to put God into the equation? Science is making progress, and there are new findings towards the ultimate explanation of the origin of life daily. The Earth was once “flat” too until someone proved it to be round and globular, what makes you think science will not find the explanation to origin of life?

I hope I had stimulated enough thoughts here so far…



Now, let’s move on to the “All-powerful, all-loving, just, perfect, omnipotent, omniscient” God that the Abrahamic religions have been talking about.

Take a look around the world, what do you see?

Billions of peoples suffering from famine and poverty.

What do you see?

Natural disasters creating more and more refugees.

What do you see?

Diseases, inherited, contracted, deadly, millions dead.

What do you see?

Wars, conflicts, religious crusades, threatening world peace.

What do you see?

Climate changes, humans on the brink of extinction.

What do you see?

Just tell me…

Do you see an all-loving God? Do you see a just God? Do you see an omnipotent, all-powerful God?

If God is all-loving, why are there still billions of kids of Africa suffering hunger? Does God love them not?

If God is just and treat all man equally, why are there billions of people who died undeservingly while we have mass murderers roaming around killing in the name of their religions? Why do peoples suffer diseases at all while most don’t? Is that fair at all? There were devoted Christians and Muslims that had cancers and died, is it fair for them that they had worship God for all their lives and suffer immense pain in return?

If God is all-powerful, why doesn’t He use His powers to help those in need? Why doesn’t He give enough food to everyone on Earth so that the word “famine” may be removed from the dictionary? Why doesn’t He stop earthquakes and volcanic eruptions from hurting peoples? Why?

What is really happening? Is God on vacation?

There are only two possible explanations:

One, God is evil, unjust, maybe still all-powerful, but He doesn’t care, likes to incur natural disasters for fun, zaps you with lightning occasionally, puncture your car tires while you are in a rush, sends robbers to rob you even though you need the money more than the robbers do, makes your girlfriend breakup with you because she wanna date a hot guy she just met.

Two, there is no God.


Which one is more comfortable? The belief that there is a God that is looking at us laughing at our sufferings? Or the belief that there is no God and everything happens because it needed to?

I don’t know what you’d think, but let me ask you this…

If you had a religious family, and your family goes to church every weekend, make donations to the church, do services, and all the sudden one day your parents died in a car accident. What would you do?

Do you blame God? They were the nicest people around, and yet they had to die in this manner, was God out of His mind? Maybe you’d say God had a plan for them, but what about that little brother that is still lying in that cradle? Who’s gonna look after him? Did God planned him to be an orphan so that he may live His whole live not experiencing the love of a family? Is this fair for him? Why the special treatment? Why not make all of us orphans so that it is fair for that baby?

More questions than answer it seems…

So tell me, why do I have to believe that there is a God willing to offer us a hand when in need, when He can’t even help the other few billions people that deserves better out there?





So, there you go, that’s all I have to say for today. I apologize if you can’t agree with me, maybe you need to talk to me more, then you’ll understand. What I hope to achieve in this thing I’m doing is that, I want you to think.

What does that mean? Does that mean I think you’re not using your brain? No, of course not. But I want you to do is that I want you to think of what you believed in, and why do you believe it? Do you believe it just because you were brought up to believe it? Or do you believe it because there are sufficient reasons to believe in it?

Do you eat vege because your mom told you to eat it? Or do you eat vege because it’s good for you? That’s the question.



Till next time, cheers~