Why < I > Believe
*the following post contains religious views, reader discretion is advised
I spend a relatively good amount of time on Yahoo Answers for a student who frequently stays up to finish homework. And frankly, I have learned a lot about how atheists/agnostics perceive God. The major themes that revolve around the God figure are
- Man in the sky who directs people's lives
- Merciless being who doesn't care about his creation
- Scientifically unproven superstition that only illogical people believe
People are entitled to their own opinions and I respect them but I have my own opinions and I demand respect for them. If we lived in a utopian world, I don’t think anybody would believe in God. If everything happened perfectly, and we never struggled, we would not contemplate about our lives.
The sun exists despite people who claim it doesn't. Different people have different views of the sun, some people close their eyes and ignore the sun, but they can’t ever change the reality of the sun.
I
believe
this is the same with the concept of God. People fabricate their own gods, people believe in different types of gods, people believe god doesn't
exist, but the reality of God doesn't
change.
Our location in space is just the right place for us to be. The scientific argument says we evolved here because our planet is the only planet to support life, but that is true only from a human perspective. Humans cannot live without water, oxygen and vitamin D. Science says we evolved from a single-cell organism into photosynthesizing plants, into vertebrates, into fishes, into amphibians, and finally into mammals. Venus’s atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, why didn’t photosynthesizing plants that could endure high temperatures evolve there, and go through a complex evolutionary process to finally arrive at a being equivalent to a human who could maybe photosynthesize, or not be affected by high carbon dioxide levels and temperatures?
Coincidences are miracles in disguise. We are presented a vast amount of bounties yet we ignore them because we use them regularly. We can start listing everything that science claims to be the product of complete chance in our body and see how it cannot all be by mere chance. For me, life in itself is a miracle. Modern technology envies our heart, a machine that keeps working for decades. Fancy iPhones and brand new cars only last a few years, and they require constant repair, while your heart creates enough energy to drive a truck for 20 miles in one day, and in your whole life, you could go to the moon and back with that energy. Our brain can hold approximately a million gigabytes of information. That’s the same as leaving the TV open for 300 years and absorbing everything on the screen. Our stomach acids are strong enough to dissolve metal. Our noses can differentiate between 50,000 different scents. Our eyelashes curl outward instead of inward and don’t stab us in our eyes.
We have everything we have now, and we can still say it has all happened by itself. How did the world originate in the first place? The Big Bang Theory states that it all begun with an infinitesimally small and hot singularity. The singularity exploded and now it is still expanding. Where it came from and why it came, science cannot answer, and when science cannot answer a question, humans do not delve into that topic too deeply. Mathematically, everything happening by coincidence is impossible. Although, computer scientists code programs to test probabilities, life isn’t a computer simulation.
I believe, because the world I live in is too intricate to be the doing of a nonentity. There are of course popular questions I am asked at school about my belief in God, and here are some answers I give:
"There is simply too much bad in the world for me to believe in a higher power…"
Evil roots from humans. People credit nature and chance for the existence of themselves and the world, but it must be the doing of God if it is negative. If you don’t believe in him for the good then don’t blame him for the bad.
"I pray and I pray, but God doesn’t answer me."
Because God didn’t answer your prayer doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist. You might be praying for something not beneficial for yourself, and you might not be praying enough. God hears all prayers, but doesn’t necessarily grant all your wishes. Plus, if all our prayers were answered, what would be the point of living in this world? The whole purpose is to find God and believe in him without seeing him, so we can be rewarded in the afterlife. When we are tested at school, teachers don’t give us the answer sheets already filled in with the right answers.
"If there is a God, why did he let the Holocaust to happen? Why does he let people in Africa starve?"
Why did humans let the Holocaust to happen? 6 billion people on Earth, why do we still let wars take place? Why don’t we act in the face of social injustice? Why are we by-standers? Why are we lounging in our sofas, eating chips, watching movies while homeless shelters go weeks without heating and proper meals? When we want an apple, does it integrate right out of the thin air and materialize in our hands? No. The apple grows on a tree, is picked by a worker, travels to a grocery store, and then we buy it. The processes that bring the apple to us represent our role in the society. If God rained down food and clothing in Africa, what would be the point of us living? God is merciful, but his mercy is manifested through us.
Lots of roses
-Belle