I don’t believe in a man made god, though I’m willing to think there’s something, maybe. It’s the staggering unexplainably of consciousness, a thing that has no necessity to the universe, that drives that doubt. If the universe is 6000 years old according to Bible scholars, then it’s easy to imagine a god creator because the complexity of everything observable is not explainable in that time frame without one, but we know now it isn’t that young, it’s 14,000,000,000 + years old, and thinking that the world can be dated by a bronze age book is simply absurd, unless you contend that your god created a backstory?

The first number is a human hair compared to the second, which is a football pitch, many football pitches laid end to end in fact. Given that it is so old, the universe has had time to happen upon staggering complexity from humble beginnings. Scientists tackled the blind watchmaker theory, that all things will fall to entropy rather than complexity, by showing that under certain conditions complexity will be born of happenstance rather than design. There a fissures in the earth’s crust that cause chemical reactions that then cause complexity to arise from simple chemical elements combining, heat and pressure are the watchmaker with no agency involved. All things could have been otherwise than they are, they just happen to be the way they are because that’s how things happened to play out. There is no design.

Theology I can dismiss at this point, it is all quite obviously man made and the case is closed as far as any rational thinker is concerned. Whatever else we know of the deities of books written by bronze age man, we know that they reflect the needs of the writers at the time they were written, and contain only the knowledge that that writer knew at that time. Hardly the book of a deity .. (argue with me if you like).

Deism is the idea that a deity can be proven through reason. I say it cannot, else we would accept that it has been proven by reason. We all use reason, and that which can be proved by it is ordinarily not argued with. As people become more aware, and information has become more abundant to them, they have become less religious, that is not a coincidence. I can only continue to believe that I am the fastest runner in the world in the absence of evidence to the contrary, but as soon as I see Usain Bolt on TV, covering 100 meters in less than ten seconds, I know I have been in error. This is an example of reason, because it is not then reasonable to continue to think what I previously did once it has been disproven. To reason a deity is to solve every postulate and every paradox that reduces that possibility in reasonable terms. Russell’s teapot is just as reasonable and just as imagined as any deity.

Is there something else out there directing our lives and our universe? Of course maybe there is and I cannot say for definite that there isn’t, that would be unreasonable. This, rather than the god of the gaps, is the wish of the gaps. It speaks more about us than it does about the deity we are hopeful for and of course can’t begin to describe. Do I hope there is some life after this existence? Yes I wish to be immortal too, and will I give in to religion just to stop the harsh realisation that is born of existential dread? Maybe I will at some point, but I hope not to.

Paul S Wilson