I’m constantly amazed by the attitude of Science and Scientists towards
the question of God. Capital ‘S’ for Science and Scientists because
that’s the way they see themselves: as, ironically, Godlike Gurus.
But their childish attitude is that ‘There is No God’. End of story. And
they delight in mocking and deriding various believers and faiths.
Instead of looking to see what these beliefs signify they pick them
apart like strands of a fabric and deride each one.
They look into history and find many religions, many gods and take this as ‘scientific proof’ that there therefore is No God. They look into pre-history and find pre-religious rituals and sympathetic magic and such take this as
proof that religion grew from primitive fears and magic and monotheism
grew from the pantheism and that therefore, somehow, it is all proven to
be a sham and this ‘fact’ proves there is No God.
They say all of this can be seen as growing from a natural reaction of primitive, ignorant, almost pro-human beings to the reality of their life on this earth – and that therefore it follows there’s No God and therefore all faiths and all believers are in error and ridiculous and nonsensical.
So they devote all their scientific expertise to finding historical ‘facts’ of religious history and disproving them, to disproving religious documents, historical entities…
They devote all their science to ripping apart stories, stories of religion – in particular, of course, the Christian religion. And for every story they rip apart they claim further proof ‘there’s no god’. But they never seem to take time out to define the God that they are insisting doesn’t exist.
Sort of a basic scientific thing, isn’t it, to define your terms? But they don’t. Not that I ever saw.
At a guess I’d say it goes something like this, the God they say ‘doesn’t exist’: “A God that cares for human beings and to which you can pray and get special consideration.”
And it gets more and more involved but I guess that’s about the core of it. A core closely wrapped in the afterlife bit, I’d suppose:
“A God to whom one goes after death in the body and with whom one lives a continuing life after death.” But isn’t it obvious, to anyone but a ‘science-less scientist’, that there certainly is a God?
That the first reactions of primitive pro-humans to their existence was in fact a reaction to God? That to them, quite clearly, there was nothing but their own selves, their own lives, and the forces surrounding them and the events coming out of the future that both helped and hindered them?
That they quite clearly discerned a difference between self and other? And recognised that ‘man proposes, god disposes’ – i.e. they could only hope and plan and try, but ‘the fates’ decided what would exactly happen.
‘The Fates’ being manifestations of ‘God’ or ‘the other’.
Seeing ‘the other’ as manifold was easy because that’s how nature presents to us, that’s how nature is: fire, flood, wind, sun, war… So it was easy enough for primitive people to populate their worlds with many gods: a god of fire, a god of water, a god of lightning, a god of war… Not fictions, but merely sensible appreciations of facts of nature. Where’s the silliness? The untruth?
In believing you could appease this God? Yes. To us this is plainly a silliness, a misconception, a stupidity, a nonsense. But why? When cause and effect are not clearly understood. When it seems plain that only sentience causes things to happen. Then doesn’t it follow that all things that happen have sentience behind them somewhere?
And that therefore it might be wise to appeal to this sentience?
Yes. Why not? Be on the safe side. And then practice will seem to demonstrate success at some times and failures at others. And the failures can always be explained by the presence of some other factor which has corrupted the validity of the transaction.
But that’s not the real point: the real
point is that it is all a VALID interaction with a reality. The reality is there. Manifesting, to these people, as many ‘gods’. They are reacting to this reality. The reality is there. It IS.
Do not lose the reality. Do not fail to see it. The scientist says this was/is an invalid reaction and interaction with reality because it is a misapprehension of the nature of reality.
It is wrong to sacrifice on an altar or make an offering to god to achieve something because the nature of reality is such that there is no god to see this sacrifice, to accept this offering and respond.
No. Perhaps not. (‘Perhaps’ for we have no proof there is not somewhere, somehow, sometimes, some efficacy in sacrifice, offering, prayer). BUT there was the people, there is the people. The efficacy of this operation may largely subsist in what it did for the people – and that’s not something nothing.
This was the way people interacted with their reality. This was how they expressed their hopes for the future, their lamentations and/or joy for the past. This was the interface between humanity and the reality within which it finds itself.
And the scientist today says it is invalid because there is no God. And so don’t do it. And so the interface is closed. The interaction is ended. The communication is gone.
You interact with reality, the scientist would say, by doing things like touching it, making sounds – mechanically, you interact with reality by observing it, looking at it, taking notes about it and by mechanically manipulating it. And this kind of interaction is ‘scientific’ and you can amass a vast body of scientific principle, rules, laws, facts, observations and gain a great deal of power, ability and be able to do very much.
And that’s just what we have done. Do. We take the humanity out of reality and stand apart from it and observe it, learn about it, discover the physical ‘laws’ of it and work on it. And having separated the two – the warm, living, breathing, pulsating humanity from the inert, cold, dead, mechanical, atomistic physical ‘reality’ of the world, the reality within which we find ourselves we find ourselves alone, cut off, estranged .
I don’t know if the human condition is any better now than ‘before’ – i.e. before God was ‘killed’ by ‘scientific rationalism’ to (perhaps) coin a term – or any worse but it does seem to me that a world which believes in nothing except scientific observation and calculation, that sees itself as separate
from all reality is a world that has seriously diminished its own opportunities.
And is, in fact, living in an error, living in a misbelief, living in a mistaken attitude. For in fact we are part of the whole, inextricably. Not as in discrete components being part of a group, we are not ‘discrete components’, but as areas of the cloud being part of the cloud. Areas of the soup being part of the soup.
That ‘soup’ is the whole of reality. The nature of which is something to do with atoms which divide into sub-atomic particles, which divide into entities
that continually pop in and out of existence. The is the essence of it all.
According to scientists. A seething mass of nothingness continually popping into existence and out of existence and governed by ‘quantum’ laws which state such things as nothing can really be measured without changing it and two things can be connected instantaneously (‘entanglement’) over a distance. A seething mass of madness.
Now that seething mass of madness IS God. “God” is a name for IT. And who knows IT? No one. Who knows what IT is capable of? Consists of? No one. This is why the scientist does not define the God he claims ‘doesn’t exist’.
Because the God he is claiming not to exist is not a god anyone IS claiming exists. He is referring to some God that is ‘smaller’, ‘lesser’, than this God that is it ALL, Everying, the whole. If he were to define this lesser God he’d be laughed out of court, with everyone claiming ‘That’s not MY God, not OUR God”. He is childish in this. He is actually lamenting the loss to himself of some lesser God that he wanted to believe in.