Chapter 1
God Is Dead?
“God
is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms.
How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was
holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death
under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us
to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we
have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we
ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”[1]
——
This is a very famous quote that
probably many of you know well. Most people know it as its simplest form, “God
is dead, and we killed him.” This was written by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche in
response to Charles Darwin’s theory of Evolution as explained in his title, “On
the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored
Races in the Struggle for Life.” This theory took the world by storm, never
before had such a compelling argument against the existence of a creator been
leveled at religious believers. Evolution allowed an avenue for mankind to
slither out of the grasp of an almighty God, creator of everything and ruler of
the world. Indeed, it was just a natural response to state that mankind had
indeed killed God.
In the mind of an evolutionist, religion and God
are man-made constructs to explain the universe. When something was not
understand humanity always resorted to exclaiming that it was God that did it
and therefore there was no need to understand further. Rocks fell to the ground
because God made it so, until Galileo discovered the theory of gravity, thus
unifying the cosmos with nature. The seasons came and went because God changed
them to be so, until scientists discovered the tilted axis of the earth’s
rotation. As science advanced God became less and less important to humanity
and our “imaginary” creation became obsolete and only those with limited
understanding of science have a need for God anymore.
In my opinion, the greatest tragedy of our time
is that science has become occupied with disproving the existence of God rather
than just being science. “Science” has been filled with philosophers that teach
for doctrine the theories of science. The theory of evolution is just that, a
theory, it cannot be proved, and it cannot be tested, therefor it remains a
theory to explain the world in a naturalistic way. On the flip side of this
coin is the fact that religion has become so focused on proving the existence
of God to science that they have diminished God Himself. Allow me to explain
this statement.
To steal an analogy from Ty Gibson, suppose our
world is an Iphone. All existence is inside of this phone. We are one tiny
particle in this phone, one piece of this universe. We are able to explore this
universe, to study it, test it, prove it etc. etc. We, as members of this
universe know who created it; Steve Job’s created the Iphone. We look everywhere
throughout this universe searching for Steve Jobs, we find evidences that He
could have created it, but we can’t find Steve Jobs himself. Why can’t we find
him? The answer is obvious to you and me, though Steve Jobs created the Iphone,
we do not expect to find Him actually living inside of it. Why has science,
with all its sophisticated technology and methods not found fool proof of God?
Because of this simple reason, they have been looking in the wrong place.
Evolution is not the problem, evolution is
simply a theory proposed by a few scientists. There is nothing innately wrong
with theories; theories are how science is advanced. The real problem is bad
religion. Religion that has brought God down to our level has made an idol out
of the creator Himself. “Is this possible?” you might ask, to make God into an
idol. I want to put fourth that that is exactly what Religion has done. They
have sought to build God into something we can understand and fathom. The
reason why Science has seemingly found no evidence of God is because they are
searching for a God made into the likeness of human religion. Carl Sagan, when
he turned the telescope Voyager around to take a picture of our world when it
was 3.7 billion (3,700,000,000) miles from earth said these words,
“Our planet is a lonely speck
in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness,
there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”[2]
This statement was said because Carl Sagan was
looking for a God he no doubt remembered from church, a God that is easily
explained and shoved away into our human existence and held captive by our
imaginations. This is the despair that each person must feel as they look into
the vastness of our universe and discover that our tiny planet is but a speck
of dust in a cosmos full of nothing. The vastness of the universe is so great
we cannot even comprehend such distances, and as we look out in all this vast
darkness and empty space we are forced to the conclusion,
mankind
is alone, god does not exist, and we are doomed to destroy ourselves. Even king
David in the Bible wrote of this feeling of insignificance when he wrote,
“What is man, that thou art
mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?”[3]
Science did indeed kill god. Darwin killed god.
The god made into the likeness of humanity. A god that can be understood and
put into the box with the rest of our material object, the sun, moon, stars,
planets, galaxies etc. is dead. We cannot look out into the universe and
believe in the same god we believed in yesterday.
At the heart of Darwin’s search for a universe
devoid of god was a great desire to be rid, once and for all of the god
problem. Darwin attended the University of Cambridge hoping to obtain his
degree in theology and become an Anglican clergyman. While there, he became so
disturbed about the doctrine of hell that he later wrote,
“I do not myself feel that any
person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment. .
. I must say that I think all this doctrine, that hell-fire is a punishment for
sin, is a doctrine of cruelty. It is a doctrine that put cruelty into the world
and gave the world generations of cruel torture: and the Christ of the Gospels,
if you could take Him as His chroniclers represent Him, would certainly have to
be considered partly responsible for that.”[4]
This train of thought led Darwin down a road of
Theodicy, to remove God, once and for all, from reality and the natural world.
Darwin explained away the existence of God and put the God of his Anglican
religion out of a job. I agree with
Darwin on this point, I do not believe that god exists. I have no desire to be ruled by such a god, a god that would burn
people in hell for ever and ever. Indeed,
when you look out into the universe, you do not find any evidence of such a
god. No such god exists or we would certainly find evidence of him. A god
capable of the bassist moral instinct to punish people for failure would be a
god in the likeness of humanity. If that god existed he would have to be like
us and since we see absolutely zero evidence for the existence of a
naturalistic god, he must not exist.
Darwin did not seek to say that god did not exist;
only that he had no interaction with nature. This is the idea of Theodicy which
will be covered in the next chapter. In short, evolution is not qualified to
destroy the existence of god because it is not a broad enough science.
Evolution looks purely at the natural world. Our day to day existence, what we
can experience, what we can see, and what we can do. Darwin prematurely ruled
out the existence of god because the god Darwin was getting rid of was purely a
naturalistic super human. Once Darwin had come up with a viable theory that
bypassed the need for god to create us or have any hand in our existence at
all, it was easy to finally just say, “What is the use of believing in a god
that does absolutely nothing in the first place?” Who needs a god that does
absolutely nothing good?
Job put this idea in a magnificent way when he
wrote his statement,
“Canst thou by searching find
out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is as high as
heaven; what canst thou do? deeper than hell; what canst thou know? The measure
thereof is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea. If he cut off, and
shut up, or gather together, then who can hinder him? “[5]
The
Bible writers understood this fact about God. He is so great we cannot possibly
Find Him out. Our science is totally inadequate to describe the ability of God
to exist, just as science cannot explain the idea of eternity and something
coming from nothing.
I want to propose the identity
of a God, so great that we have no way of really speaking of His existence, a
God so great that His existence transcends our own. God resides in another
dimension than you or I. Just as theoretical physics goes beyond the realm of
everyday experience and understanding of space and time, so God transcends
space and time. Yet, even though God transcends our puny understanding of the
universe, He is still a personal God who takes note of this world, who visits
this world and indeed loves this world. Whose very nature is that of love and
compassion, only desiring good for everything in the universe. A God who wrote
the laws of physics and set the stars in heaven, and created gravity and
inertia to hold it together, who wrote the genetic code with His own thought and
created diversity because He thought it was good. If such a God existed, would
you want to believe in Him?
This God would not be subject
to human impulses such as hate, revenge, and cruelty. His primary goal would be
for everything in creation to be filled with life, joy, happiness and freewill.
We would not expect to actually find such a god because his existence is not
tied up with our own naturalistic existence. I would expect however to find
evidence of him in science, because he would be the creator of it.
I want to ask you to put aside your previously
held ideas about God, the universe, earth, and reality as you read this book,
and step into a theoretical world with me. I am asking you to join Nietzsche in
killing the god of contemporary religion and science. Set aside every
preconceived idea you have of the existence of God and open your mind to a new
reality. Join me as we explore the God I would believe in if He existed. Step
into my brain and imagine the possibilities that arise from this make believe
and see if you wouldn’t enjoy the God I have created.
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