Poetry for Palestine

10- September

The case for Intelligent Design

Why God?

But… why not God?

Dear Sam

My intention in writing this is NOT to prove beyond any shadow of doubt that God exists; rather I want to refute the atheistic claim that they dearly hold with a 100% certainty that God doesn’t exists, further I will try to put a logically valid and a scientifically sound case for the former.

We -as believers- never claim that we hold “The Scientific Proof” of God’s existence; we say: “we only have faith”, “we believe”, we simply say: we have noticeable, accumulative, and logical verifications that support our faith.

 But it might come to your as a shock and a surprise that I can confidently claim that we have logic, rationality, maths, commonsense, and scientific evidence leaning heavier towards our hypothesis than they are towards yours!!!

Now, I will try to tackle the above issues and questions by breaking the topic into small (hopefully manageable) sections.

From a philosophical viewpoint:

 The very intriguing thought here is that if there was no Creator why are we as conscious species obsessed with this concept; either by adamantly denying it or passionately believing in it!

Why should this concept exist at all in our minds? Why should the question arise in the first place?

If there was no elephant in your living room would you ever question the possibility of the existence of one? Would you ever bother to try to prove that it exists? Would you bother –ever- denying its existence? Would such a question ever come to mind?

If there is no hot tea pot revolving around our planet would philosophers (apparently they are humans with the highest IQ) throughout the ages spend their lives debating the existence of a tea pot; some trying to prove and others refuting its existence?

Dear San, unless there is a reasonable possibility that God exists such question would have never occurred.

In purely mathematical/ logical sense:

There are only two possibilities in relation to the question: does God exist?

Either that God exists or God doesn’t exist, the probability of either case is ½.

Logically speaking, can you affirm without a shadow of doubt that the probability of the existence of a Creator, a Designer is zero?

Dear Sam, no one with the least amount of rationality, the minimum reasoning ability, or the tiniest logical capacity would do this.

Dear Sam, in terms of common sense alone; you can never produce any Absolute Final Proof of the non-existence of a Creator (proving a negative is almost impossible), nor can you ever refute the possibility of the existence of God.

So if a secular says that: I can affirm with 100% conviction that there is no God, what he/she is saying is no science, it is mere wishful thinking.

 It is nothing but blind faith, a belief, a mathematically invalid statement and an unscientific declaration!

Here, and at this very point I can say that we both stand at almost equal footing to each other; it’s like sitting at two opposite ends of a seesaw in a state of equilibrium.

 What we both have in hand is nothing but FAITH.

However the seesaw leans downwards -ever so slightly- towards my side as a believer, because right from the beginning I never claimed having The Absolute Truth.

At least we are honest about our ideology, all we claim is that we believe, we have faith; yet on the other hand you start at a disadvantaged position by claiming that your ideology is more scientifically based, you claim that it has nothing to do with faith. It is all about facts and knowledge.

Yet I showed earlier that so far all you have is nothing but faith, and all what you’ll ever have is nothing but faith; you can call it a non-faith if you like; nevertheless it is NOT science. It can never be verified.

From a scientific point of view:

Starting with physics;

One of the first questions that hits us in the face us as we embark on the journey of studying our physical universe is:

 How did our universe came to be?

There are three possibilities that could answer the question:

1) It is eternal; it could’ve existed from -∞ and it will continue to exist forever, it has neither beginning nor end.

2) It has a beginning, a starting point before which it was nothing.

3) It doesn’t exist at all; all is an illusion, all is in the mind of the observer –man who is an illusion too.

If we start with the third possibility as the true explanation we might as well stop here, we need to go no further; as this whole dialogue is nonsense. It’s all part of the illusion. If you lean towards this possibility you might as well stop reading.

The first possibility doesn’t hold for long in the light of our present knowledge of astronomy and physics, the theory most accepted by theoretical physicists today is that of the big bang, we are told by experts that the universe did not exist from -∞ but in fact it has a starting point, scientists even have calculated the age of our universe.

They also confirm that with available data today we know that our universe is expanding; the unanswered question today still is; will our universe continue to expand forever or will it reach a critical point where the gravity will eventually slow it down to a point where it will cause to collapse upon itself in a big crunch?

The answer depends very much on us finding out the accurate mass of the universe; whether it is big enough to pull it back under its own gravity.

In other words if data evidence showed us that the universe will expand forever (smaller mass); what we get is a universe with a beginning and no end, but if the evidence showed that it is heavy enough and it will eventually stop expanding what we get is a universe with a beginning and an end.

Now back to our three possibilities; and with process of logical elimination we are left with the second explanation as the one most likely to coincide with our common sense; yet within that explanation there are three new possibilities; to explain further:

1) The universe has a beginning but no end and it will continue to expand forever.

2) The universe has a beginning and an end (if it stops expanding)

3) Another plausible thought is the universe exists in an infinite number of cycles of big bangs and big crunches, a never ending dance fluctuating between existence and annihilation in a span of infinite time period.

But from the above possibilities we know that -at least- at one point in time (may be infinite number of times) the universe did not exist, i.e. it was nothing.

 Trying to make sense of the above information, which is that the universe did not exist; and then it came into being; we could consider two possibilities:

1)     That the physical (matter/energy) universe has spontaneously sprung itself from nothingness into being; i.e. it is the Creator and destroyer of its self.

2)   Or that it has being created by a separate entity (a Creator) that Itself is infinite in time (unlike the universe It has neither beginning nor end).

With my limited ability to think and comprehend I can’t see any other possibilities.

I stop here just to say it’s up to you to go with what ever makes more sense to you, as for me I go with the latter, as my common sense and my conscious defies the notion that I have anything to do with the creation of the universe; yet I know that I am one of its “aware” components! Its true that I exist, I am also aware of my existence and that of the universe, but “I didn’t do it”!

to be continued…