ZachsCast

Over at Twitter, John Rezas brought to my attention a page over at Soul Pancake to which he thought I should respond. A guy named Rainn Wilson challenged all atheists to prove the nonexistence of god. At first I wasn’t gonna bother, cuz how many times can I beat this dead horse? Apparently I discovered, at least one more time. Today’s installment of ZachsCast is my reading my own crapola. I’ll copypaste the original here so you can follow along if you’d like. Notice that there were a couple places where I improvised, particularly early on, but I tried to keep that down to a minimum. Here we go:

“Prove that this endless, incredible explosion of a universe has just always been and that there is no force that imagined it and loved it into being.”

No.

“Prove that there is nothing beyond and behind the chance occasion of molecules that brought us all into consciousness.”

No.

“Prove that a creator does not exist!”

No.

I do not claim these things, so I don’t have to prove them. If you believe these things to be real, then you would need to prove them in order to convince the rest of us.

There was a beginning to this universe, so it hasn’t always been. Science has demonstrated that. We know there was a big bang. We know this universe is expanding. We can observe it. Therefore, it didn’t always exist. We know that much. Science speculates our sun will someday expand & collapse as have others before it, and billions of years from now our universe will cease to be. We don’t know this. We speculate. We could be wrong.

What we do NOT know is that some force imagined this universe and loved it into being. Many people jump to that conclusion, when there are many other possible explanations. Men and women have for thousands of years told each other stories about this presumed creator and what he MUST be like, with absolutely no evidence to support their wild imaginations.

There is what we know. Then there are conclusions that some people jump to from what we know.

This is called going out on a limb. Those of us still clinging to the trunk of the tree of knowledge suggest you climb back over here before you fall like an idiot. We may eventually get to the top, but the direction you’re going is a dead end. We’ve all already been there. Many times.

Stick with the facts. The stories we tell each other are great fun and I don’t wish to stop telling these stories, but there repeatedly comes a point where we must separate the wheat from the chaff. No one worships Gilgamesh, Prospero or Buffy. We can usu tell fiction from fact. Religion blurs that line.

If there ever was some sort of creator, it’s nothing like what any human has ever before or can currently imagine it to be. It may or may not still exist. It probably looks nothing like us, but we don’t know that for certain. There is so much we don’t yet know, but there is admittedly much we do know.

I find it amusing that in the Adam & Eve story, it was The Tree of Knowledge that god did not want them to enjoy. They could have anything else in the garden but they were to remain ignorant. How curious that religion is so afraid of knowledge. The story of the tower of Babel. Lot’s wife looking back at Sodom & Gomorrah. Throughout the Bible, ignorance is awarded while knowledge is punished.

The Abrahamic god has been disproved. Just read the Torah & compare it to actual history, physics, and other fields of knowledge. That theory is wrong. Muslims, Jews, and Christians are all incorrect. That much we do know; those of us not still dangling from that particular limb of the tree of knowledge. Other similar variants on the god theory have also proven to be dead ends. It’s time to crawl back from that dead end limb and move on from what we DO know.

As we accumulate more data, we get a better picture. Perhaps the big bang was caused by a black hole in another universe that spit out matter & energy and made this universe. Perhaps the black holes in our universe are big bangs manufacturing other universes. That’s one theory. One of several. It’s as much a theory as the god concept, and has yet to be disproved.

Perhaps what you imagine to be god is actually just chance and coincidence. Would that really be all that bad? More likely, it’s something no one has even fathomed yet. Is that not all the more exciting than the antiquated god theory?