WHY I DON'T BELIEVE IN GOD

“How did you decide you don’t believe in God?” My friend’s question came after reading my recent blog (Cosmic Connections), where I mentioned, in passing, that I don’t believe in aliens, Bigfoot, the Deep State, God, etc.

Bill’s a passionate Christian and, paradoxically, a fan of my (not-infrequently irreligious) writing. So I wasn’t surprised to get his message. As teenagers nearly 60 years ago, we shared an oppressive religious upbringing, attending the same Evangelical church where my father was pastor. Bill kept his faith; me, not so much.

Me & Bill -- First Missionary Church (Flint, MI) -- 1961

Back then, it was natural to try my family’s religion on for size, but it was never a good fit. I didn’t wake up one day and decide I didn’t believe in God. It was more like how you give up on an old suit or dress that once may have been your favorite. It’s hung in the back of your closet for a few years, you’ve added a few pounds, and your taste in fashion has changed. Now and then, you take it out and think about wearing it again, maybe try it on in private, but it never looks right and doesn’t feel right, and finally, it goes out to Goodwill, along with a box of old electronics and kitchen gadgets. If someone else can be happy wearing it, good for them.

One thing I do miss from my God-believing days: the prospect of getting all my questions answered in Heaven. Wouldn’t that be cool, finally having mysteries of the universe explained? Like Google on steroids. Did Oswald act alone? Why is there something rather than nothing? Are UFOs real? Does the world end with a bang or a whimper?

But the thing is, at that point you’re dead, so would you care? Even if you finally got your wildest curiosities satisfied in Heaven, then what would you do with yourself for all the rest of eternity? Learn the harp? Play chess with Jesus?

Honestly, Heaven sounds dreadful (as in my story, When We All Get to Heaven). If you’ve been a proper Christian, after you die you end up in a place in the sky where the streets are paved with gold, to spend forever singing God’s praises. Lots of angels. Pearly gates. No more pain, no more sorrow. 

Some believe Heaven is whatever you imagine it to be. Gardens. Sunshine. Calorie-free ice cream. I heard one hard-scrabble believer explain to a reporter her conception of Heaven: it will have really nice appliances.

Mormons, if they’ve been good, get their own planet after they die, where they will reunite with all their dear, departed kin. Then there are the Muslims with their special reward of 72 virgins.

You have your Rastafarians, Taoists, Scientologists, Buddhists, Wiccans, Baha’i, Hindus, Hopi – 4,000 religions exist on Earth. Before them, thousands more – the pyramid-building Egyptians and Inca, the Mongols, Celts, Visigoths, Hellenists, Aborigines, Mycenaeans, Sumerians. And before them? On it goes in infinite varieties of religious beliefs, back to the beginnings of human consciousness, each culture with its own true image of God (or gods).

Pick a god. Or make up your own. Pick a Holy Book. Or write your own. Believe that God talks to you. Who’s to prove you’re wrong?

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Belief in deity goes hand-in-hand with belief that every human has a soul. Look at the 30,000-year-old cave paintings made by early Homo sapiens in Europe. Their transcendent art suggests that everything in their world, including themselves, had spirits.

“Where did the idea of the soul come from? The truthful answer is that we don’t know. What seems clear, however, is that belief in the soul may be humanity’s first belief.” (God, A Human History, Reza Aslan, 2017)

Worship of multifarious gods is a common humanity we share with the ancients. Something in our evolutionary journey, a quirk in our genes, makes it natural for people to believe in the supernatural. And particularly in Western religious belief, in a soul that lives on after death. Today, nine in ten Americans believe in a monotheistic God or some higher power. 

The popularity of a belief does not, of course, make it true. People believe all sorts of nonsense. At least half of Americans believe the Bible’s version of a paternalistic, all-knowing, all-powerful, personal God. (Presumably, the loving New Testament God, not the spiteful Old Testament God who once had 42 children mauled to death by bears simply because they had teased one of His prophets for being bald. (2 Kings 2:24)) That’s about the same proportion who are convinced that ghosts are real (45%).

One in four Americans thinks the Sun revolves around the Earth. Three in four say that Jesus was born of a virgin. 

There are otherwise-normal-appearing Americans alive at this very moment who believe with all their heart that the Earth is flat. They’re oblivious to the lunacy of their contorted explanations and futile attempts to make the irrational sound rational. They have faith that everything they can’t see with their own eyes or read about in the Bible is fake. The Earth looks flat and nothing in the Bible says it’s not. Their conviction is based on faith, the ultimate defense against skeptics.

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1)

At least half of us believe the story of Noah’s ark and a global flood. Never mind that the Bible’s version is adapted from a 4,000-year-old Babylonian myth, invented on the fertile, flood-prone lowlands of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, a fable the Jews learned of during their exile in Babylon, 2,700 years ago. Today in Kentucky you can visit a “life-sized” version of the phantasmal Biblical ark just off I-75 (Exit 154). 

Some true believers take raft trips through the Grand Canyon to confirm their fantasy of a young Earth. In their figment, they condense a geologic tableau spanning billions of years of Earth history into a few thousand years of Biblical mythology. That’s the kind of thing that religious faith can get you: certainty that Noah’s flood created the Grand Canyon. 

Of course, the Grand Canyon was carved over the last six million years, not a few thousand years ago. And the Earth isn’t flat, no matter how much faith the nutty Flat Earthers have.

Now, it may be an awkward question, but where on the crazy scale do you rank Flat Earthers compared to faith-filled, young-Earth-believing, Bible literalists? Sure, these Christians know the Earth isn’t flat. Since Galileo’s time, they’ve even conceded that the Earth isn’t the center of the Solar System. But because of what they read in the Bible, they’re stuck with believing that the universe was created in seven days, 6,000 years ago, and that Adam & Eve and a talking snake started all this.

Two out of every five people you see driving down the highway believe the Garden of Eden story is true. Millions of years of evolution? People descended from apes? Phooey! It’s all lies. Like the fake news.

I understand some kinds of faith. I have faith that the sun will come up tomorrow. Faith that it’s just a matter of time before the Big One hits the Pacific Northwest. Faith in my family. Faith that the beep means my car door is locked. But faith in God? Nope.

* * *

Our universe had a beginning, 13.8 billion years ago, and it is expanding. That means some parts of the universe are so far away that they can never be seen from Earth because light hasn’t had time to reach us during the finite age of the universe. Beyond that impenetrable cosmic horizon,

“...lies a region containing at least 23 orders of magnitude as many galaxies as those inside... It is likely to be many orders of magnitude greater. Our visible universe can be likened to a grain of sand in the Sahara Desert.” (God and the Multiverse, Humanity’s Expanding View of the Cosmos, Victor J. Stenger, 2014)

Our existence is a mystery. Consider that the atoms making up our bodies were created from nuclear fusion in the hot cores of stars that died and scattered their elements across space, billions of years ago. That’s what we’re made of. Star dust.

“Again and again across the centuries, cosmic discoveries have demoted our self-image. Earth was once assumed to be astronomically unique, until astronomers learned that Earth is just another planet orbiting the Sun. Then we presumed the Sun was unique, until we learned that the countless stars of the night sky are suns themselves. Then we presumed that our galaxy, the Milky Way, was the entire known universe, until we established that the countless fuzzy things in the sky are other galaxies, dotting the landscape of our known universe.” (Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, Neil deGrasse Tyson, 2017)

Numbers describing our known universe are so immense as to be essentially meaningless to a human mind. An estimated 150 billion galaxies are within sight of Earth, each with some 100 billion stars. Scientists estimate that there exist sextillions (with 21 zeroes) of planets capable of supporting some form of life.

“Who knows how many and which other extraordinary complexities exist, in forms perhaps impossible for us to imagine, in the endless spaces of the cosmos? There is so much space up there that it is childish to think that in a peripheral corner of an ordinary galaxy there should be something uniquely special. Life on Earth gives only a small taste of what can happen in the universe.” (Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Carol Rovelli, 2016)

Pick up any random rock, and think of how many lives it has lived. Its elements came from space, after eons of travel through the universe, to form the earth and be cycled and recycled through the building and breaking of continents and oceans, to survive and end up in your hand. That rock, like every atom in our bodies, has a mind-boggling history, and will be recycled in unimaginable ways throughout a future stretching beyond time.

There are questions with answers transcending human comprehension. At least for now. What came before the Big Bang? Is “before” even a valid concept? What’s inside a black hole? Does “inside” even make sense where time, itself, ceases to exist? What is dark matter? Is it possible that our known universe is but a speck in a multiverse? What is human consciousness?

Could it be that the existence of such unanswerable cosmological and metaphysical questions, the staggering scale and complexities of the universe, is the very proof that God exists? The ultimate demonstration that all of this never could have happened by chance? Since we can’t explain the universe and where it came from, does that mean there must be a God who set it all in motion? A micro-manager who decreed the laws of physics, but who also appreciates being thanked for all things good, has his eye on the sparrow, and picks which team should win, based, presumably, on who has prayed to Him the hardest? If you ask God to “bless this food,” but then choke on a fishbone, did He just get distracted for a moment?

“To accept the substantial uncertainty of our knowledge is to accept living immersed in ignorance, and therefore in mystery. To live with questions to which we do not know the answers. Perhaps we don’t know them yet or, who knows, we never will. 

“To live with uncertainty may be difficult. There are those who prefer any certainty, even if unfounded, to the uncertainty that comes from recognizing our own limits. There are some who prefer to believe in a story just because it was believed by the tribe’s ancestors, rather than bravely accept uncertainty.

“Ignorance can be scary. Out of fear, we can tell ourselves calming stories: up there beyond the stars there is an enchanted garden, with a gentle father who will welcome us into his arms. It doesn’t matter if this is true – it is reassuring.

“There is always, in this world, someone who pretends to tell us the ultimate answers. The world is full of people who say that they have The Truth. Because they have got it from the fathers; they have read it in a Great Book; they have received it directly from a god; they have found it in the depths of themselves... There is always some prophet dressed in white, uttering the words: ‘Follow me, I am the true way.’” (Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity, Carlo Rovelli, 2017)

* * *

As I approach what is definitely starting to look like old age, questions of mortality, God, and the afterlife become more poignant.

“Is God the animating force that connects all living things, as our prehistoric ancestors seemed to believe? Or nature deified, as the early Mesopotamians thought? Or an abstract force that permeates the universe, the way some Greek philosophers described it? Or a personalized deity who looks and acts just like a human being? Or is God literally a human being?

“Creation may very well have originated purely through physical processes that reflect nothing more than the articulation of the most basic properties of matter and energy – without cause, value, or purpose. That is a perfectly plausible explanation for the existence of the universe and everything in it. It is, in fact, just as plausible – and just as impossible to prove – as the existence of an animating spirit that underlies the universe, that binds together the souls of you and me and everyone else – perhaps everything else – that is or was or has ever been.” (God, A Human History, Reza Aslan, 2017)

Brilliant minds have found creative ways to explain their belief in God, like Medieval scholars debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Their books could fill a Costco warehouse. Is it, in the end, arbitrary what a person believes about a creator-god?

“A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think.” (Seven Types of Atheism, John Gray, 2018)

Do I really believe in a godless, indifferent universe? Believe that life ends in a soulless nothingness? Do I think I’m right and the vast majority of humans, including all manner of geniuses and morons who believe in a Supreme Being, are wrong? After all, even Albert Einstein had his religious side: 

“Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion”  Einstein, quoted in Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, 2018.

And so, back to my friend’s question about why I don’t believe in God. My short answer: I can’t see any reason why I should. As for an afterlife:

“Being dead is like being stupid. It’s only painful for others.” (Ricky Gervais)

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