Why the world doesn’t need God

             If I put God out of a job, what would you do? What would you do if I said an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent God surely exists yet He cannot be of any help to you as you work diligently and faithfully towards this “heaven”? God exists indeed; the theory of evolution and the theory of big bang have been reduced to scientifically irrelevant in the recent decades. But His existence brings so much controversy involving pain, grief, and suffering that it forces millions of Christians to doubt their faith and drive away those who are on the brink of conversion. Not a day goes by when a soul on this planet asks “why me?” or “how can a do-gooder God allow this to happen?” The answer is very simple and it’s staring directly at our faces: God is incapable of intervening or meddling with the very gift and the most fundamental basis of humanity-free will. Thus let the questions and the confusions be answered-the world does not need God.

             Excluding those poor kids with the most unfortunate luck of being raised in the radical states, which banned teaching of evolution, every teenager in America has been familiarized with the theory of evolution; one that was first presented by Charles Darwin but first composed by Alfred Wallace. But are the knowledgeable truly fortunate as they appear to be? How can they be fortunate when they are taught from the textbook that one plus one equals three?

Jonathan Wells, having finished doctorate programs from Berkeley in embryology and evolution, points out that the theory of evolution presented by Charles Darwin has been proved wrong in many of its facets. The main beam that holds other aspects of this theory together stems from the common definition of evolution: a process in which organisms go through small, continuous changes in order to adapt to the surrounding environment for the most effective life in its habitat. As we all know, the continuous part of this definition brings about extremely heated controversy, mainly due to gaps in fossil records showing discontinuous changes. The Cambrian Explosion, approximately 540 million years ago, has been dubbed the “biological big bang.” Millions of organisms that exist today have descended from thousands of unexplained, unprecedented phyla of organisms with completely new body structures and organs. This certainly does not look continuous. The Creationists and many Darwinists as well, have concluded that the Cambrian Explosion is inexplicable with modern technology and knowledge and any possible explanations in the near future look very dim.

There is a picture in every high school’s biology textbook, credited to Ernst Haeckel. It is a drawing Haeckel had made, emphasizing the similarity between different organisms at the embryo stage. Wells accentuates that every embryology graduate student in this world knows the drawing is a fake. The real picture, which all embryology graduate students must study, shows the organisms Haeckel presented at the embryo stage look no where near similar to each other. So what’s the story? Haeckel, having only done research on particular “hand-picked” organisms just assumed that the rest will be the same. Embryological research is something I can’t do but making such outlandish assumptions-that’s another story. Since then Haeckel and the theory of evolution have lost substantial amount of credibility.

Stan Miller’s experiment is also very well known. Depending heavily on his advisor’s theory, he created a mechanism that imitates Earth’s atmosphere some fifteen billion years ago. At the time, his experiment proved to be tremendously helpful in supporting creation of life by random chance. The problems were that the gases he chose to make up his imitation atmosphere did not exist way back then. In fact, such atmosphere would have proven itself to be very catastrophic for any life forms.

Final major fall out of this theory is the correlation between homology and common ancestry. Homology compares same body parts of different organisms that have different shapes for different uses, emphasizing at the same time the similar underlying structure that suggests common ancestry. Now imagine if you will a path for a golf cart. After a very long time, a single path for a golf cart could possibly turn into a sidewalk and a street. Both serve different purposes; the street used mainly for automobiles and the sidewalk used mainly for people. They have different purposes thus they must have different designs-they do- but internally their structures are similar. Therefore for those who didn’t get the chance to observe the evolution of the golf cart path to a sidewalk and a street, it is very possible to believe such a process occurred. Now compare if you will, how ridiculous you think of what I’ve just told you and how ridiculous the homology-ancestry correlation sounds to the scientists.

Adding one more piece of puzzle to proving God’s existence, the theory of big bang ultimately points toward an intelligent designer, aka God. Big bang was first proposed by Georges Lemaitre, the theory that attempts to explain the creation of the known and the unknown universes from absolute void. Beyond the articulateness and complexity we’ve observed in life on Earth, big bang seems to have statistics even more stunning. For example, if the creation, or the “big bang”, occurred slower or faster even by the slightest nanosecond, the universe would collapse upon itself and we would not exist. For those of you who have studied astronomy before, you would know that Earth’s position in our galaxy couldn’t be any more favorable for life. Not only that the positions of all the surrounding planets couldn’t possibly be any more favorable for Earth’s existence! So many aspects of the big bang are so favorable for our existence that it’s hard to believe such favoritism happened by mere random chance. Robin Collins, a philosophy professor at Messiah College with three different degrees in physics, mathematics, and philosophy, explains that the probability of all of this by random chance is like flipping fifty heads in a row. In short, it takes a greater leap of faith to believe in fifty-heads-in-a-row than in God. All that’s left is to do what we all do best: assess the value of God.

On a nice Sunday morning a very sleepy, young boy wakes up to a bright sunshine through his windows, the beautiful chirping of the birds, and a screeching noise that seems to be, as far as he can figure out, his mother’s cursing, aka wake-up call. After an excruciatingly distasteful yet edible breakfast, his mother shouts to his father about how late they are going to be for church as she fastens tight the boy’s yellow-stripped tie, making sure his appearances are “church-acceptable.” The topic of discussion when this young boy attended the Sunday school was about hell. The teacher talked about great fires and how there are countless sinners screaming for help at the mercy of the devil. Patrick, the young boy’s name, was frightened and swore never to sin again. Now as much as I like fire however, hell is neither the place of fire nor the screams. Hell is just simply a place where God’s presence is no where to be found. As a person regrets breaking up with his ex-lover and grieving over the permanent, irreversible loss, according to Christian theologians hell is a place where we realize and grieve over the permanent and irreversible loss of God, and such grief is suggested to be undeniably painful. Frankly speaking, I’m not quite sure if I’ll miss God at all. After reading this paper, I don’t think you will either.

For over centuries, especially during the recent decades, God’s goodness and worthiness for praise have been questioned and tested, without any conclusive findings from either end, until today. Pain, suffering, and injustice are the front runners in helping us convince ourselves that God is neither good nor just. There was a photograph of an African woman in Life magazine, grieving over her lifeless, dead baby, held tightly in her arms as she looked into the heavens with tears thicker than blood running down both of her dusty cheeks. It wasn’t until after I’ve read the caption and the main story in the magazine that I realized that the poor baby died of hunger, caused by a drought that plagued the local lands in Northern Africa. Is there a sin in this world that justifies a baby’s death? Something that I casually tell others in a conversation as one of my dislikes happened to be something that could’ve saved that baby his life and his mother a life time of grief and agony. Who runs the rain? I don’t; you don’t, and even George W. Bush and his cabinet which has been plagued by “early retirements” don’t either. God runs the rain. Wouldn’t an omnipotent God be able to bring rain with a flick of his finger? What good is gained by this tragedy?

             “I hear outcries for a savior everyday,” says Superman from the recent superhero movie, Superman Returns. However, not all outcries are answered as Superman think they should be. Although God is omnipotent, He is bounded by the same law He created and has been enforcing since the beginning of humanity: He is only allowed to show just the slightest hints of His existence in order to give the humanity a choice. I would not deny the existence of Superman if he bluntly showed up in front of my door steps displaying all of his super powers right before my eyes. On the other hand, such concrete evidence gives me no other choice than to believe Superman truly exists. Many will tell me during my lifetime that a life without the freedom of choice is not a life at all. But without life, there is no such thing as the freedom of choice. God put freedom of choice before that baby’s life; God with mixed priorities can’t possibly be worthy of praise and worship-at least not mine.

             Humanity has been based on different kinds of relationships since the beginning of civilization. Whether the relationship may be some kind of intimate one between a man and a woman, or a friendly, trusting one between persons of the same sex, humanity is defined by relationships, hence they are a necessity for our existence. Let me remind you that God cannot meddle with our free will. Relationships branch from our free-flowing feelings and our free wills are based on those feelings. If God can’t involve Himself in our free wills, hence our feelings and ultimately our relationships, why should humanity pray for His guidance and support? If I pray to God, asking of Him to let that gorgeous girl across the room to notice me, can He truly help me if He decided He would? What if I was at an end of a long, committed, and loving relationship and in a seemingly endless heartache because I can’t stop loving that significant other, can God help me forget if I prayed so? Can God change my heart?

             For the longest time I pretended there had to be something good awaiting for so much bad in the world, especially in my personal life. As the cliché that says “there is a reason for everything,” I indulged myself with fabricated reasons in order to believe God was good-no, in order to stabilize my sanity rather. I gave into the thought that He is the reason for all the good in the world. If so, what amount of good can or could justify another’s sacrifice, particularly death? What exactly are the reasons for the many gruesome, more often than not, deaths and the pain of those who were loved ones of the deceased virtually being killed by the experience? No amount of good will ever justify even a single death, despite what God says. If saving “many as possible” is all that God can do for the humanity, there is no need for such deity when we can do that “many as possible” ourselves.

It’s been explained by the highly respected Christians, with degrees from the most prestigious seminaries of course, that God could not create a world in which every person was genuinely good and at the same time had the freedom of choice. Because humanity is based on relationships, by human contact there is always a possibility that a choice made by one person may affect another to turn away from God or in more simple terms, “go bad.” Thus on the expense of those who walk the plank to bottomless hell, few will have the privilege to enter the kingdom of heaven. Ask your conscience, ask your heart, ask whatever shred of emotion or feeling you have inside you, whether you can smile, laugh, and enjoy an eternal bliss while a person, who you might have possibly made “go bad,” condemns in hell. At that point, you won’t be able to distinguish what is hell and what is heaven-and soon enough you won’t be able to distinguish a world with God from a world without God.