To God, or not to God
My good friend’s blog has a lively discussion regarding Pascal’s Wager and one’s belief in God.
While I understand the premise of the Wager, I dismiss the conclusion because Pascal was only considering his idea of God. There are many other reasons to dismiss such a simplistic argument for the existance of God.
For instance, it does beg the question as to what is used as a measuring stick to one’s worthiness for entry into heaven. Is one that lives a moral and well-intentioned life, but lacks faith in the “right” God somehow less worthy of salvation, than one who lives a somewhat immoral life but professes belief in what happens to be the correct deity. To read the Christian bible, one would tend to believe that those who are not baptized into the body of Christ, are doomed. This hardly seems fair.
If God does exist, and blessed us with “free will” at our creation. And, this God then provides no scientific provable evidence of His existence. Is it just to damn one simply for examining the evidence, and using free will to decide not to believe due to lack of evidence? If God is “good” and has no evil, then why does he allow evil to exist? Or, if some evil is needed as is commonly argued, why so much evil? Wouldn’t a bit less evil be enough to remind us? How about a lot less evil, in a proportionally more good world? Wouldn’t a little evil then, be more than enough to remind and deter us from pursuing more evil?
The bottom line for me is this, until there is substantially more proof that a God was needed for our universe to exist, than one was not needed, I remain far less than convinced in God’s existance.
I’m open to more data and observation, but so far..Science wins.
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The remark of “Why so much evil?” is obviously subjective and relative. “So much” compared to what? The absence of evil entirely? Minor miracles happen around us all the time, every day, as we reach out, help each other, and touch the lives of people around us. All of these minor acts of kindness, which mainly go unnoticed and unheralded far outweigh the acts of evil that achieve so much attention.
As for me, I read about the scientific origins of our universe, and instead of coming away thinking “this disproves God”, I find myself thinking the exact opposite. A singularity explodes into the universe in a blinding instance? The very existence of the singularity and the universe which resulted from its instant of creation fortify my belief in a higher power.
But… that’s just me. I have also witnessed the miracle of birth several times, and I just can’t get my arms around this event without some divine intervention.
December 7th, 2004 at 3:51 pm