THE GOD ELUSION

The beamishboy has come to a crossroads. Should I continue to hold on to a belief in God?

The Facts

First, God is highly elusive. So elusive is he that there is absolutely no trace of God anywhere. Like the abominable snowman and the Loch Ness monster, God has left no footprint behind. He has left no evidence, answered no prayer, done no miracle, appeared to nobody and he has made no sound at all. Those who claim that God has answered prayers or has done any of the things I've stated are just not thinking right. We know God cannot heal people beyond what doctors with their current medical knowledge can or beyond what nature's healing powers are capable of doing. God will then muscle himself in and say "I healed you!!! Praise me!!!" but any objective guy can see that that's rubbish. It's the doctors who healed me, you may say. But God will insist that it's because he blessed the hands of the surgeons!!! Oh for crying out loud!!!

The same goes with miracles. They don't happen and those who claim they do are just, again, not thinking right. God closed the mouths of the lions in the Book of Daniel you may say. But we also know that when Christian martyrs together with whole families were thrown into the lions' cage, there was not a single case of God shutting the mouths of the lions. We know that the cruel Romans even went to the extent of throwing infants to the lions so that their mothers would put up a fight with the lions and that would give greater entertainment to the crowds who were watching the feeding of Christians in large amphitheatres. We know there was no record of any miracle either by the Roman historians or the early Church Fathers. If there had been even a hint of a single miracle, you can be sure the Church Fathers would have written volumes about the mercy of God and his wondrous miracles. There was none. The Book of Daniel is at best not independent reporting.

If God answers prayers, in the area of healing alone, there should be clear statistics that Christians generally heal better, live longer and fall sick less. Even if only 10% of prayers on healing are answered, there should be a significant and appreciable difference statistically. Not only is there no evidence for such a favourable position for Christians but the fact is most Christians don't even BELIEVE that they have any advantage however small a percentage over non-believers or people at whom no prayers are directed. And yet they believe in the efficacy of prayer. That's internally contradictory. Now, clearly, they are not thinking right.

Then there is the rubbish about the need for a creator. This idea is so demonstrably primitive. From the earliest childhood, everyone knows that building blocks do not arrange themselves into beautiful castles. There's got to be a designer or maker. It's natural for the human mind to extrapolate. So they say there must be a creator for the Earth, nay, for the whole universe. So they say, "Let there be God" and there was God and men saw that God was good and they blessed Him. After that, they decreed that you can't go behind God. He's after all been defined. He's the ultimate. To go behind him would be illogical and invalid. Yes, there are co-religionists of mine who DARE to use the word "logic" in their religion and I assure you they're so hardened they really don't blush as they say it.

So you start with a decree that God is the ultimate Creator behind whom you cannot go. And you decree that since a watch that I've found while walking on a road must have a creator, everything else must have a Creator except for the first rule ie God is the ultimate and only He has no Creator. God exists by human decree.

I'm only speaking of God in general; not the Christian God in particular. Let's say we now pick my God, the triune God of Christianity. We have to look at the Bible, the source book of my religion.

Anyone who thinks the Bible is inerrant and flawless is clearly not thinking right. For as long as I have been a Christian with consciousness (I'm talking about the time I was too young to consciously understand the faith), I have been cooking up excuses for the obvious errors of the Bible. There are books galore that supply excuses for the sometimes shocking errors of the Bible. They are called "apparent errors" because no devout Christian likes to say that the Bible is full of errors.

Recently, I decided to go into the origin of the Bible. I studied the Canon of Scriptures and my Vicar told me that I should have a good balance and since I was reading books written by liberal Christians, I should balance that with evangelical Christian writers. He knew I could not take fundie nonsense and I could not abide Josh McDowell's write-up on the Canon which is so frightfully inaccurate and skewed and so unscholastic. I can counter that guy any time and expose his errors. So he recommended me a REAL scholar (not an apologetist like McDowell who allows his primary function as an apologetist to cloud the evidence) and he suggested FF Bruce - his book The Canon of Scripture. I also read Bruce Metzger's The Canon of the New Testament.

All fundies should read those books. It's IMPOSSIBLE for anyone who fully understands the Canon of Scriptures to defend inerrancy. There is no magic in the Canon. It's as flawed as you would expect any collection of ancient literature to be.

I also read other books on paleography and serious textual criticism and I found that even if there are no problems with the Canon, there are huge problems with the transmission of the books as well as the origin of the books. Most of these books are anonymous and we don't know if our version is indeed the correct version. For example, Papias said in the 1st century that he HEARD that Matthew wrote a gospel in THE HEBREW TONGUE. He also heard that it'd been translated into Greek by different translators. In the ancient world, that's how copying was done. You read the text and you do your own translation. They didn't have official translators. Papias says Matthew was originally in Hebrew. Scholars have confirmed that - if my memory is right, even Leon Morris has confirmed that or at least he says that is one possibility. Who translated OUR Greek version? Was ours the best translation? What if a madman did it? Nobody knows. Oh but the Spirit of God is supposed to hover over the translation and ensure only truth is printed. But rubbish!! We know that some quotations of Jesus from Matthew could not have been said by Jesus because they were meant to be a pun that could only work in Koine Greek and not Aramaic which was what Jesus spoke. We also know that the many Old Testament prophecies mentioned by Matthew were only prophecies because of a mistranslation of the Hebrew OT into the Greek Septuagint.

The more we know, the less likely it is for the Bible to be accurate and I'm not even talking about it being divine.

What am I to do? The human brain is good at dichotomies which is why we are able to multi-task. I accept that religion is very much an integral part of humanity. It's a bequest to us by our genes which, after aeons of evolution, encoded God in us so that we are hardwired to be religious. There are some uses for God in the survival of the human species. For one thing, it takes away our terror for death. Every gene strives to survive. Every living thing strives for survival. But for the human being, there is a further problem. He understands futurity and he has self-consciousness. He KNOWS he's going to die. He's constantly in a fight-or-flight state and the adrenalin pump into his blood tells him he must act. But he IS going to die, whatever he does. Religion affords an outlet. It gives dignity to him even in death. He accepts that he will trust God with his death and afterlife.

I have decided that it's silly to pretend to have knowledge that God exists. Of course I don't know that God exists. In fact, all knowledge points to his non-existence. In other words, I KNOW God does not exist. But my heart tells me I can depend on God. Tennyson expresses this most beautifully in his poem - I can only remember a bit of it - he hopes that knowledge and heart may make one music. I will let knowledge and my heart make one music in my mind - I know there is no God and yet will I believe in Him and when someone I love dies, I will seek God for comfort. I will not spurn what my genes have bequeathed on me. I accept my humanity and I accept my God.

That's the best way I can express my religion. I will never again seek this elusive God for evidence of his existence because I know he doesn't exist. But my heart will cherish the faith I've inherited from my ancestors.