by Raymond Bilodeau

Created on: December 06, 2008

I don't see how this is possible to debate. God not only, by definition, created all things, God maintains all things in existence and controls all their actions or failures to act. "Free will" in a creature controlled every second is absurd. If you make a defective automobile, it will not avail you as creator of the automobile that it was being driven by somebody with "free will."

God has been used to justify the most evil acts imaginable throughout human existence. If a human was responsible for such evil, most civilized legal systems would charge the person with ciminal acts and punish him if found guilty.

The Bible is replete with stories of God's cruelty, and the Book of Job takes the position that God is responsible for all the good and evil that happens to us, and we can only submit to such arbitrary acts. God is not good, God is not love. God is Yahweh.

Yet we use the threat of God's punishment for our evil acts after we die to attempt to control our evil behavior. Parents and elders and other persons in positions of authority cannot prevent evil acts, indeed, they often commit them and encourage their children to engage in evil acts. If we should hold these persons accountable, why should God not be accountable?

The idea of God or gods arose out of a desire to understand natural phenomena that cause harm to humans. Humans have evolved a highly developed sense of causation, which has allowed us to flourish a lot more than other animals who simply accept what is. Before we developed the scientific method, gods were handy to explain nature's capriciousness as a parallel to human capriciousness. It was a small step from that to trying to propitiate the gods or God by sacrifices, especially of the poor, slaves, captives and others that were handy scapegoats. By sheer luck, sometimes these worked! And just as lotteries use this occasional but powerful reinforcement (you can't win if you don't play!), our ancestors became addicted to the idea of God and appealing in various ways to God to help them with a problem.

There is a small possibility that our early ancestors heard near-death stories similar to what we hear now, and that the idea of God evolved from those experiences. Scientists have begun to produce out-of-body experiences and other experiences similar to near-death experiences with no death in sight. It will be interesting to see if they can get an atheist experimental subject to experience God in the lab.

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