by Andrea Nostramo

Created on: July 25, 2008

God is not relevant today, but he WAS relevant thousands of years ago.

Back in the day, early beings thought God was the sun. How could a caveman explain the sun, the moon, stars, death, life, birth? How could the ancients explain things that couldn't be explained? God was used as a basis for human life. How did we get here? Where do we go when we die? Etc. God was the proverbial explanation for that which defied explanation. It is in no way a surprise that God was invented back then. To quote Voltaire, "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."

Then, science came. In the beginning there were philosophers. When Plato writes of Socrates and what is art, he considers God to be all of nature, the all-encompassing growing beauty that is the earth - not some living breathing deity up in the heavens. Philosophers sought to explain things that at some point God was said to only be able to explain. One of the first proofs for the existence of God was that if God is omniscient and omnipotent than he must exist both outside the mind as well as inside the mind, correct? Therefore God exists. These ridiculous primitive forms of reasoning began to unearth the holes in the logic behind biblical reasoning.

Science has done so much over the millennia to dismantle most belief in God and more so the fantasy that exists in the Bible. The problem arises when people use God to fill in where science leaves off. It is true that as of yet, science cannot definitively determine what has created the Universe. It is true that the Big Bang and evolution are only theories, but they are theories based in science, not stories.

In an episode of The O'Reilly Factor, in which renowned atheist Richard Dawkins appeared as a guest, Bill O'Reilly proudly declared that he chose to stay with God and remain a believer because God (and the Bible) could explain what science could not. This brings me back to my previous point. Many people hold belief in God simply because it offers them more comfort than not believing does. Consider Pascal's wager: if there is a God, and you do not believe in him, then upon facing judgment day you will be sorely punished, no? Otherwise, if there is no God, but you DO believe in him, on judgment day you will face nothing because there will be no judgment day. Therefore it is a wager, and the wager is that it is better to believe in God than not to.

These thought experiments are interesting and extremely important in the rational discourse of this subject, but they ignore one important thing: truth. In that same interview on The O'Reilly Factor, O'Reilly tells Dawkins that God - for him - IS the truth, to which Dawkins replies, "How can something be true, only to you?" In other words, there really is only one truth, and this truth must trump comfort, and tradition. There either is a God or there isn't.

In today's society, with the contributions science has made, from disproving the egocentric universe to the proof that the resurrection wasn't real, there is no relevancy for the belief in God. Simply stating, like O'Reilly did, that God cleans up where science leaves off is a logic that falls short. The reason why religion can take on where science leaves off is because religion (God) is fictitious and untrue, and gets made up as it goes along. I could, just as easily, replace the term God with Zeus and any religion with my own made-up religion and say the same thing. The only difference is that God is widely accepted, so it isn't questioned as often as it should be. But it should be. To quote Thomas Jefferson, "Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear."

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