Ben's Blog

Feb ’25

I will now prove once and for all that God does not exist.

Well, God does exist actually, but only in the minds of his followers. The idea of God began to take shape long ago in the mists of time, a natural part of the blossoming of human consciousness, something that is still developing. God has resided inside our heads ever since, except when he gets evicted from time to time if he does not perform to the high standards we have come to expect, but we soon relent and let him back in until he fails us once more. In the olden days, just about everyone believed in some sort of God or another.  That makes me wonder, now why is that? What is going on here? We must have felt a need for Gods to help us navigate our way through life.

I am no historian or theologian, nor even a lowly  scholar, so what you are about to read may not be erudite, but at least it’s original. I have deduced my conclusions via pure reason alone. I get the impression that we humans began our religious journey explaining the inexplicable in very imaginative ways, often relying heavily on magic when no other plausible explanation presented itself. We had no qualms about assigning magical powers to a wide variety of things we come across in our daily lives: wild beasts of the forest, sacred places, special objects and revered ancestors, volcanos, rivers, rocks, celestial bodies, you name it, we worshiped it! Apparently these entities are all alive and getting up to mischief behind our backs, especially after dark. We tended to give these deities human traits. This anthropomorphism comes naturally, along with giving humans animal traits ( anamorphism perhaps?)

In time these deities came to represent the collective conscience of the clan or group, then the whole tribe and then nations of tribes. As time continued to go on…and on, as it does, the characters of these characters became more and more complex and the tales of their exploits grew and grew, and grew more fabulous and grew more gruesome, and then they grew some more. As time goes by we keep ourselves amused by the light of the campfire, telling and  retelling these epic tales in dance and song and art and theatre. We now call this culture, and culture is at the very core of who we are, is it not?

After a while, all the good traits coalesced into one almighty being, appropriately named God Almighty. All the bad traits were unceremoniously dumped on another poor fellow known as Satan – evil personified.

We have always been a curious lot, us humans. Becoming curioser and courioser as time goes on. Our unbridled inquisitivity has lead us to the discovery of how the world works. The more we learn, the more we have come to realize that God is a bit of an anomaly in the scheme of things, a red-herring, an aberration. It’s like we are building a giant jigsaw puzzle and God has such an odd shape that we cannot find a spot for him no matter how hard we try, and we have tried very hard indeed. As we fill in the puzzle there are less and less spots to fit God in. So he remains a lonely figure on the side of the board, (the grand puzzle of life, you might say) despite there being legions that would dearly love to find him a place to dwell unmolested here in the real world. So He is left imprisoned in our minds, unable to escape!  As time goes by, he is even being banished from our minds, his last refuge on earth. He is cast out to wander in the wilderness, lost and abandoned, forlorn and forsaken. Eventually the day may come when he ceases to exist at all, heaven forbid!

So why is God, who has served us so well throughout our formative years, being abandoned in his hour of need? A vexed question indeed. The reason is reason. Reason and God cannot reside comfortably in the same realm, they are  contradictory. This contradiction can be overlooked if you can live your life without resort to reason, but that is a simple life that is becoming rarer each passing day. Here in the modern world God is confronted by reason at every turn, and at every turn he turns away. In his prime God roamed the earth unchallenged, performing spectacular miracles hither and thither. He lived in splendour on the very top of Mount Olympus, until some spoil-sport climbed up the mountain and could find no sign of him. Then he fled up into the heavens, until some bright spark ventured to the heavens in a tin can, and could find no sign of him there. In fact they could find no sign of ‘the heavens’ either. These adventurers were of course doing the biding of scientists, mortal enemies of God, one and all.(almost)

Every time his faithful followers find a sign of God’s work here on earth, those pesky science types go and prove it to be fanciful. They push God out of every nook and cranny where he seeks shelter from their forensic investigations, until he is forced to abandon this realm altogether and disappear into the darkest recesses of our minds, populated by a motley crew of other phantasmagorical characters we have dreamed up to keep ourselves amused over the epochs, and there they have languished ever since, mostly forgotten, unloved and forsaken. Sitting in silence for all eternity, or at least until the scientists are banished from this realm.

The greatest enemy of God is of course, is The Weather Bureau. Before that broadcaster of heresy on a global scale turned up, uninvited, you could tell the flock thunderstorms were caused by them fornicating with their livestock. When the bureau pointed out where the weather really came from, the church lost its most awesome weapon. At that point they had to change tack before they became a laughing stock.  So they came up with the novel idea that God actually lives deep inside us where no one can question his abilities. It is considered a fine thing to ask him favours, but if he answers you out loud, it’s off to the shrink for you, my friend. The days of sitting an a hill in your loincloth, receiving visions sent from the Lord himself, is long gone. He now does his work in secret and in silence. He has given up performing miracles, knowing that his miracles would have to conform with the laws of nature, and then they would not be miracles, would they?

The most important law of nature is that if you have no physical presence and you have no measurable effect on the universe, you do not exist. (or it doesn’t matter whether you exist or not) Every single phenomena we know of appears to conform with this law.

But lo and behold, there IS one thing, and only one thing only, in all the known universe, that has neither of these qualities, yet millions of people the world over swear on the bible it exists. That thing of course, is  God!

The church is not foolish enough to claim that God has some sort of physical form. Nor do they claim that he is capable of performing any act that we could see, hear, smell, touch or perceive in any other way yet they still claim that He is omnipotent. But for all his avowed omniscience he is manifestly incapable of giving us one single measly  little sign that proves his existence. Or maybe he doesn’t want to. His followers certainly don’t want him to any more. It is along time since they have claimed he has done anything out of the ordinary, that Mother nature could not do by raising her little pinky. His followers, oddly enough seem quite comfortable with their God residing outside the laws of nature that govern the lives of every living thing on earth except him. We not only live according to the laws of nature, we believe in them, if we did not we would not hop on an airplane. We trust the laws of nature with our lives and the lives of our loved ones every single day! Yet at the very same time we are capable of believing in something that does not conform to any of those laws.

That is no doubt why we don’t hear much these days about your interventionist Gods anymore. Simply because it is impossible to prove of his intervention if he leaves no trace of his actions.

If some unsuspecting innocent does happen to claim that their particular God is capable of intervening in the laws of nature, that opens a Pandora’s box of rather awkward questions for the believer, I believe. Questions that have been mulled over and over, over a bottle of mulled wine, since Methuselah was a lad. The most obvious being, if your God can intervene to stop abominable  calamities before they happen, why doesn’t he? Of course your orthodox theologian always trots out the handy argument that God doesn’t intervene in man-made calamities, because he is trying to teach us to manage them on our own. A likely story! I can’t see us learning that any time soon, can you?. As for your natural disasters caused by Mother Nature, why does your God sit idle while floods and droughts and famines rage unchecked. It begs the question, is your God really as omnipotent as you claim, or is he impotent against her indomitable might?

So your true believer must live with 2 conflicting and irreconcilable beliefs living side by side in their brains: A belief in the laws of nature, and a belief in an interventionist God. That is not healthy, nor is it rational. While it is obviously possible to accommodate both, we have done it ever since we discovered science, it negates the possibility of ever having a unified cosmology, a wholistic view of the world. It makes one bifurcated. It acts like a wedge for a whole host of contradictory ideas, ideas that soon lead to the mind becoming segmented like an orange, with all these separate compartments that must not communicate with the other because they are contradictory and would require a herculean feet of mental gymnastics to reconcile. That is not a healthy mind. That is the mind of someone with a serious mental illness.

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If there are elements of this article that you find disturbing please contact our psychologist qualified in the treatment of addiction, obsession and  phantasmagorical delusion.

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Ben Boyang February ’25