God Gets All the Breaks
I have issues with god, that is not news, after all I don’t believe in any form of god. I have had issues with god since my parents put me in Catholic school in 5th grade. I remember being told in as many words that if you weren’t a Roman Catholic you would not go to heaven. That struck me as completely unfair even at the tender age of eleven. Imagine being born six centuries ago in the Americas, far away from any church or any missionaries. You had no choice where you where born, who your parents were or what god they worshipped. You had no way to know anything about the Christian god, Jesus or the bible. How could a fair god keep you out of heaven for having the wrong religion? Didn’t he put you in a lose-lose position? That kind of cruelty, for what else could you call it, is one of the things that made me start to question the existence of god in the 5th grade.
Religious people like to think that God is omnipotent and omniscient, that is all powerful and all knowing. They don’t seem to have given any though to what that means. Omnipotence is the ability to do anything. God can control everything in the universe from the tiniest sub atomic particle to every galaxy in this and other universes. The amount of energy required for such power is beyond mind boggling. Such an expenditure of energy should be easily detected and apparent. An entity complex enough to exert such force should be detectable with the naked eye, never mind telescopes or microscopes or any other scientific apparatus. The amount of energy required for such control may rival the amount of energy available in all universes. That kind of footprint could hardly be overlooked by science. An entity that powerful would have to leave a huge trail. Some might claim that being omnipotent god could be hiding his tracks. So let me get this, an entity so powerful and complex as to be able to control every aspect of all possible universes would care to hide its tracks from the beings in one tiny planet in a dusty corner of an uninteresting galaxy? What possible reason could such an entity have to hide itself from us? That is an entirely ridiculous concept. The human gut is populated by billions of bacteria. We go by our daily lives oblivious to their presence. To god we would be less significant than our intestinal flora is to us, yet we think that god would care to hide from us? Do you go around worrying what your bacteria believe? Would it make any sense to do so? To an omnipotent god there would be little difference between us and our intestinal bacteria. Why would such a complex entity care what we or our intestinal bacteria think, do or believe?
Another skill in god’s vast resume is omniscience. God knows everything that is happening everywhere to everything, from subatomic particles to galaxies and universes. That is an astonishingly large amount of data. That goes way beyond the largest libraries on earth or the entirety of human knowledge since there have been humans on earth. That amount of data is so inconceivably large that it would require hugely massive storage. We are talking galaxy or even universe sized storage devices perhaps even larger than a single universe. In order to store and comprehend such amount of data god would have to be more complex than all the possible universes past present and future. All that just to hold the raw data. Raw data is useless by itself, it needs to be organized and interpreted. Being omniscient god would therefore be able to make all possible connections for all the possible combinations of raw and processed data. Imagine knowing all the infinite numbers, positive, negative and imaginary and all the possible combinations and formulae that can be generated will all such numbers. The size of a device or entity complex enough to process all that data is likely to exceed the size of the possible universes, and that is just for the math.
Despite being so powerfully endowed religious people cut god a lot of slack. When something bad happens, god never gets the blame. No matter how devastating a hurricane, tornado or earthquake, no matter how many innocents suffer and die in the most horrible ways, God is never to blame. But if you win the bet, if your nails don’t break or your cancer goes into remission god gets all the credit. Never mind that this same omnipotent and omniscient god is in control of everything and knows all. He created the universe and earth and everything on earth. God had a hand in creating and placing on earth every rock, every tree and every animal. God not only created butterflies, song birds, dolphins, humming birds and kittens. He also created such lovely life forms as the ones that cause the common cold, the Spanish flu, HIV, Ebola, malaria, river blindness, parasites like intestinal worms, ticks and fleas, and deadly animals like sharks, cone shells, box jellyfish, cobra snakes, killer bees, giant hornets, black widow spiders, blue ringed octopi, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And that’s just the deadly living things, presumably god is also responsible for lightning, forest fires, earthquakes, tornadoes, tsunamis, etcetera. Why then is god allowed such slack? How can god who can do all and knows all get away without being blamed for all the death, suffering and general mayhem caused on earth by all these disasters? Some blame all these bad events on the devil, that red skinned, horned demon is responsible for all human suffering. But wait a second, how can the devil operate without god’s permission if not god’s direct control? God cannot claim that he doesn’t know what the devil is doing, or that he can’t control the devil, after all he is all knowing and all powerful. Then if the devil exists at all, he must be an agent of god, carrying out his wishes. If god cannot control the devil, he is not omnipotent. If god does not know what the devil is up to, he isn’t all knowing. Since god is both omnipotent and omniscient god is either controlling the devil, or he is the devil himself. Therefore god must be directly responsible for all the death and suffering of man.
But wait, religious folk exclaim, god is a benevolent god who acts in mysterious ways. We cannot hope to comprehend his plan. God must be testing us as he tested Abraham. Yeah maybe, but wasn’t god all knowing? What is the point of testing us puny humans when he knows the outcome before hand? Why not just give us a revelation? How can a loving, benevolent god ask Abraham to sacrifice his son at the altar? What kind of god would torture a man in such a despicable manner when he knows the outcome of the test beforehand?
Instead of extricating themselves from the logic traps created by their religious beliefs, by endowing their gods with omnipotence and omniscience religious people have dug a deeper pit. You cannot have it both ways, either god is in control of the universe and everything in it or he isn’t. If god is responsible for the good things that happen to us, he is to blame for all our suffering as well. You cannot claim that god knows all and is all powerful and then expect us to believe we have independent will. God put us where and when we are, he set up the world we live in, he is responsible for the situation we are in. How then can anyone claim we have free will? If you breed a mouse and you train it, put it in a maze and prod it with a sharp stick, does the mouse have free will? If god exists and he is all knowing and all powerful, we have as much free will as laboratory mice do.
This is the tragedy of religion; it makes you oblivious to reality. If you are devout and believe the religious dogma as good little sheep do, you have to ignore reality. No matter how many facts prove your beliefs are mistaken you have to stand your ground and have faith. The reason that religions require faith is that they don’t survive close examination. If you looked at religion without faith, you’d see it for what it really is, superstition and delusion.
