The Creation of God

One of my favourite paintings in the whole world is a fresco on the Sistine chapel ceiling done by Michelangelo. The painting is called “The Creation of Adam”, and it is a portrayal of the Biblical image of Genesis. The event of God creating man. In one of Aviyal’s other articles we will see why that painting is an artistic masterpiece but today, let’s see why it is scientifically inaccurate. Aviyal will now try to paint “The Creation of God” with words. 

It all starts with a simple question. God created man. Well then who created God? 

Around 70000 years ago during the development of agriculture the archaic humans worshipped the forces of nature: water, fire, mountains and thunder. Because they didn't understand them, and were afraid of them. 

More recently, around 5000 years ago, the first records of fully developed religion appear in ancient Egypt. It is very obvious how the life of the humans affected the characteristics of the gods of Egypt. The goddess of the Nile was portrayed as a motherly figure with occasional anger reflecting the river’s floods, and the god of afterlife was portrayed rich keeping up with the tradition of pharaohs being buried with treasures.

The next religions to evolve were Hinduism and the Greek religion, somewhere around 3000 years ago. Both of these religions deal with gods that are very human-like, powerless on many occasions and succumbing to human emotions, both good and bad. It is fascinating to think whether these characters were written by ancient Greeks and Indians as a type of superhero fantasy fiction, because it is easy to see the resemblance of the style and characterization between the stories of old and the new DC and Marvel stories. (It is also fascinating, although somewhat terrifying, to think that in another 3000 years time our descendants might worship Super Man and Hulk by the same logic, but what the hell, that would be fun to watch).

And then the Greek gods evolved into the Roman gods, and Hinduism gave birth to Buddhism which then became a great religion on its own, and one of the few religions that do not deal with the concept of an absolute god. 

Around the same time Judaism was born in the middle east around modern day Israel, the first of the three Abrahamic religions. Long story short, a bunch of stuff happened, someone got very upset with Babylon for some reason, then one man was born into a Jewish family who said, “Wait, what if everyone was nice to each other?” and got nailed to cross(?!) by his own people, who then declared him as the son of god (a god who most certainly did not advocate being nice to everyone), and a separate religion of Christianity was born.

In 600 AD, a trader in Arabia called Muhammed founded Islam, the third Abrahamic religion. Islam spread throughout the middle east and then to other parts of the world, mostly through conquest and is now the second largest religion.

We have described no less than seven religions, and these are only the major ones. There are countless other religions. Even inside a religion, there are smaller faiths, and in polytheistic religions like Hinduism, there are hundreds of gods. Yet each one of us belongs to one religion. We do not believe in the other six. We are all atheistic with respect to the other six religions. 

2000 years ago, we believed the earth was flat and the sun went around us. That was the science of that day. Today, we have rockets and computers. The progress that science has made is staggering. The reason is, science constantly challenges itself. Science tries to prove itself wrong, and find out more. On the contrary, take religion from 3000 years ago and today. It is pretty much the same. One could argue that is because religion is true, therefore doesn’t change and science is not yet complete. But then again, what about the other six? 

And the most important fact is, science works. If you design a rocket based on the science of gas dynamics, it goes to the moon and mars. If you design a ship based on the physics of buoyancy, it floats and gets you across oceans. Not just once. It does it repeatedly and predictably. Medicines based on science save millions of people. Whereas praying to a runway seldom results in a takeoff.

The God hypothesis (for it is a hypothesis, as it attempts to provide an explanation to natural phenomena) is misleading at best, and willfully ignorant at worst. In Aviyal’s view, it does not even qualify as an explanation, since it raises more questions than it answers.

Historically, god has always lingered on the frontier of scientific knowledge. What is not answerable by science, was termed God. When we could not explain thunder and eclipses, they were said to be done by Gods. When we understood they were just electricity and shadows, there was no need for god. The germ theory of diseases and the invention of vaccines did away with god in the field of medicine. Darwin made God unnecessary in the creation of diverse life. Hubble almost made god unnecessary in the creation of the entire universe. We are not yet there, and in our delay in the finding of knowledge, theists find relief. We do not yet fully understand things like the creation of the universe, singularities in black holes, dark matter and dark energy and quantum mechanics. And today we can see sophisticated theists claiming all of these things to be acts of god. YouTube is full of people who claim that dark matter, or black holes or quantum tunneling are the evidence of god. Science will uncover the mysteries at the root of all of these things. Not with politically corrected, multi-translated, non-chronographically compiled, poorly written works of fiction, but with observable facts, verifiable evidence, and hard math. And when that happens, these theists will have fewer and fewer things to claim as god. 

At this point we know the inevitable. Let’s face it, either science is true, or religion is. Because the scientific theory that space is vastly empty with occasional gas clouds can’t be true if the religious belief of gods living in the sky is also true. I’m not going to tell you which is true and which is not but I’ll just mention that we sent a bunch of rockets to the sky in the last few years and did not run into any fancy dressed, multi limbed people sitting on exotic animals, and let you decide for yourself.  

Thank god for making me an atheist, and I’ll see you next time if I don’t get lynched.

Mozhi, (2 Oct, 2021)