WHERE IS GOD

            In recent weeks I have seen many postings by Christian believers who affirm their strong belief in God despite facts which you would expect to have caused them to be disillusioned. The local paper asked people’s opinion about the debate between the “Science Guy,” Bill Nye, and the director of the “Creation Museum,” Ken Ham. Numerous people made it clear that regardless of science, they believe that the Bible is right and the Earth is only six thousand years old.

            In other places I saw the same kind of mindset. To these people, it does not matter what facts you show them, they are compelled to believe in God. For them, without God life is meaningless. They are not bothered by the fact that they have never seen God, never talked to him, never seen a picture of him, never heard of anybody on Earth who ever saw or talked to him. Many of them believe that he came to earth in the form of an ancient wandering preacher named Jesus of Nazareth. They are convinced that he exists. They believe that God does act in our lives, and that we should pray to him. It matters not that such prayers never seem to be answered. They are unaffected by the thousands of terrible things that happen every day. They do not blame God for the tsunamis that kill millions of people or the massive loss of life from diseases, earthquakes, volcanoes, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, wars, and other disasters. They give God credit for good things that happen, even though there is never any evidence that God is responsible for them, but never blame him for the bad things of life.

            It is interesting to me that people claim to have a warm, close relationship with God, when, in fact, they have never seen or heard or touched him. Despite the fact that God is a nonexistent being, people act as if they are able to get very close and personal with him. It is interesting to me that our brains are able to perform this trick.
            The other day I was watching a documentary about the large scaffold that collapsed at the State Fair in Indiana killing several people and injuring others. One woman, whose child was caught in the wreck, said she was praying. She said: "Prayer is very powerful." I had to ask myself, "Where did she get that?" How could she say prayer is powerful when in real life it seems to have no power, no strength, no effectiveness at all. I doubt that she felt assured that once she prayed everything would be all right. She said other people were praying. She seemed to believe that with more prayers God would be more likely to take notice of the problem and help. Am I not seeing something, or isn't this pathetic?

              In my book, The Case Against God, A Lawyer Looks at the Evidence, I describe the phenomenon of people being able to read a book or go to a movie and be caught-up in the story. If it is well done, the story has us believing that it is actually happening. Our brain plays a trick on us. I believe that that is similar to what happens to us with God. We let our minds suspend disbelief so that we can have some meaning in life and some hope that we will live on after we die. Perhaps the thought that we die to eternal oblivion is just too much for the human mind to accept.

You hear preachers say that “God told me…” That would seem to be a kind of fraud on his congregation. God does not exist, and therefore he could not tell the preacher or anybody else anything. But we do have ideas pop into our heads, and I believe that most preachers honestly believe that some of these ideas are communications from God. We are often surprised by the ideas that pop into our heads. They may be very good ideas, sometimes brilliant, seemingly inspired. To the preacher, even though he did not speak directly with God, the inspiration seems to have been a message directly from God. Thus, without describing what actually happened, he feels truthful when he says “God talked to me last night.”

There are times when we have powerful feelings of warmth and happiness. When people pray they sometimes are able to go into that state which is experienced by people who meditate. It is a form of total relaxation. No doubt they feel that it is a communication with God. Other people believe that they have seen God because they have had dreams in which they experience his presence. People who have received anesthesia for surgical operations sometimes claim that they died and met God. They deny that it was simply the effect of the anesthesia. Similarly, people who use drugs often claim that they have met God. In every such case, it is the effect of the praying, meditation, dreams, anesthesia, or drugs that have caused the feeling of God’s presence. There simply is no God. We do not ever meet or see or hear him. He does not exist.   

Creationism vs. Evolution

      Recently there was a debate on Creationism vs. Evolution between Bill Nye, the "Science Guy" on television, and Ken Ham, the head of the Creation Museum in Kentucky. Many people were critical of Mr. Nye for debating something which they consider to be non-debatable. I agree with them. Creation vs. Evolution is not a proper subject of debate. It is like arguing whether the Earth is round of flat. The issue was settled a long time ago. The only people who believe in Creationism are extremely ignorant adherents of religion and superstition. It makes no sense to debate with such people because they are intellectually incapable of understanding science.

Several years ago I wrote a column for the newspapers about a visit to the Creation Museum by a group of scientists. Here it is:

NESCIENCE IN NORTHERN KENTUCKY

            In order to get from Dayton to the Creation Museum out near the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport, one has to drive over bedrock of Ordovician and Silurian rocks that were deposited between about 435 and 445 million years ago. World geography was quite different then. North America straddled the equator and Ohio was located south of the equator. The Ohio River did not exist. From a geological standpoint, the Ohio River is quite young. It was formed on a piecemeal basis beginning between 2.5 and 3 million years ago from north-flowing rivers dammed by the early ice ages.

           According to news reports, in late May, 2009, seventy paleontologists took a break from a conference at the University of Cincinnati and drove over Ordovician bedrock to visit the Creation Museum. I’m sure that they were interested in seeing not only the displays at the museum, but also the living fossils of a species that was thought to have become extinct at the time of the European Enlightenment; the irrational,  superstitious, religious believers for whom modern science means nothing. Contrary to popular belief, long after the time of Galileo and Columbus, this kind of people continued to believe that the earth was flat and was the center of the universe. Today, they insist that the earth is 6000 years old. They believe this despite the fact that everybody knows that even Dick Clark is more than 6000 years old.

One display at the museum shows two prehistoric children playing while dinosaurs, which became extinct 63 million years before the human species developed, cavort nearby. The scientists visiting the museum were astonished. "I'm speechless," said Derek E.G. Briggs, director of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale; "It's rather scary.” Jerry Lipps, professor of geology, paleontology, and evolution at University of California, Berkeley, said: “It's sort of a monument to scientific illiteracy, isn't it?” Lisa Park, a University of Akron professor of paleontology, who is an elder in the Presbyterian Church, called it "bad science and even worse theology -- and the theology is far more offensive to me."

Leaving aside the geological evidence, it does not seem likely that the earth began 6000 years ago. There was already a flourishing civilization in Egypt 6000 years ago. British archaeologists have found 30 sites rich in art chiseled into rocks up to 6,000 years ago in the desert east of the Nile. The rock drawings show cattle, boats, ostriches, giraffes, hippos and the men and women who lived in the area in 4,000 BC, long before the first pharaohs or the first pyramids.

“Lucy” was the name given to an early ancestor of the human species discovered by Donald Johanson and Tom Gray in 1974 at Hadar in Ethiopia.  Its age is about 3.2 million years. Lucy was an adult female of about 25 years and was assigned to the species “Australopithecus Afarensis.” There have been hundreds of discoveries of pre-human fossils going back millions of years.

Fossils of the now extinct species of human called Neanderthals have been found in various places in Europe and the Middle East. The first proto-Neanderthal traits appeared in Europe as early as 600,000–350,000 years ago. Fossils of our ancestors, Cro-Magnon men, date back 40,000 years. Archeologists in Oregon have located an ancient trash dump and latrine which was found to contain human DNA linked directly to modern-day Native Americans with Asian roots. The materials found were radiocarbon dated to 14,300 years ago. It is believed that the ancestors of Native Americans came over the land bridge to Alaska around 20,000 years ago.

The universe has been around for about 13.5 billion years, and the earth is over 4 billion years old. They may not believe it at the Creation Museum, but that, my friends, you can take to the bank.