Belief in God

I know I mentioned it in a previous blog, but let me reiterate my approach to belief in God. I believe in God. I do not believe it is necessary or possible to verify God’s existence. The important question is not whether there is a God, but rather why believe in God.

Belief in a deity or deities can be found in most cultures from the most primitive to the most sophisticated. This has occurred even in places where people have been isolated from the rest of humanity for many generations. Why? The reason for the universal belief in God or gods is that once humans began to learn to communicate, they could record events (even verbally before the invention of writing). This allowed them to look at the past (history) and predict the future. That presented them with the realization of the temporary existence of individual life and of the chaotic environment over which they had little control. Religion gave them answers that could not be found elsewhere.

So for me, belief in God is to be able to think about God, to discuss, to hope, to say that life has meaning and is not just chaos. I think the best evidence for God is in logic, mathematics (the most scrupulous logic), and in statistics. The bell curve of statistics is an expression of randomness. But given a population big enough it always appears in a bell shape (for a logical reason). So is random existence really random? Yes and no.

Many of the most hopeful predictions of the Bible could very well come true at some time in the future because they were written by people. As time progresses, we humans come up with advancements that previously had seemed impossible. I believe that anything desirable (like maybe bringing humans back to life “in the end of time”) written by people in the past is possible. Prayer keeps the hope alive, but research and technology might make it happen.

What really counts is consciousness, not the physiology and chemistry that keeps consciousness alive. Our thoughts that continue even after we die (whether continued by speech, writing, electronically, or whatever modality will exist in the future) are our souls and put together perhaps that is what God is. As the Bible says, we are made in the image of God. Some would say God is made in the image of man. I don’t see any necessary difference between the two. We already have artificial body parts. Perhaps one day scientists will figure out how to extract human consciousness from the mind to maintain it separate from the flesh and blood and eventually keep it going forever. We know that light waves keep radiating over long distances for long periods of time. For example, the stars we see in the sky are actually light sent out thousands of years ago. Perhaps there are some kind of as yet unknown waves out somewhere that will give us the information needed to recreate all the humans who ever lived. Then if this were possible, where would we put all the people? Well maybe consciousnesses would not need so much physical space? Or maybe by that time we would have explored and settled the whole universe. All this stuff sounds impossible, and maybe it is impossible, but what would a person living 2000 years ago have thought if told about the possibilities of electricity, computers, automobiles, airplanes, and space travel? Anyway, hope is what religion should be about. We can organize it with structure and prayer, but we should not lose site of its purpose and certainly not subvert it with political and financial secondary gain.