The Most Important Truth – Part 1. The most important question of all time is does God exist? Ever since humans looked into the sky and wondered how our world got here, we’ve had a long-time belief in many variations of God. As a long time philosopher, here’s my multi-part take, stating with a fascinating book by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies titled, “God. The Science. The Evidence.”
To summarize the book, it focuses on scientific evidence that leads to the conclusion that our universe and the life within it had to have been started by a being of enormous intelligence and power way beyond anything we can comprehend. For starters, our cosmologists (physicists who study the structure of the universe) have uncovered substantial evidence that the universe is not eternal and static, but is constantly expanding, will one day end, and was started in what’s called the Big Bang.
As these studies have become more sophisticated, furthermore, rather than being a somewhat random event, the Big Bang had to be meticulously structured by an enormous intelligence in order for the universe to form the way it has. It had to be so precise that in the first almost microseconds certain elements had to be formed in a precise order otherwise the universe would have been nothing more than an ever-swirling mass of gases.
Furthermore, as the Universe developed, how life started remains a complete mystery with one exception. It had to be created by someone of unimaginable intelligence. Microbiologists have made remarkable headway in understanding the structure of life at the cellular level and are astonished by its complexity to the point that they believe it is impossible to imagine life somehow starting by accident from a bunch of inanimate chemicals in hospitable waters.
In short, there is widespread agreement amongst today’s microbiologists that life on Earth did not just somehow start from some inanimate watery soup of chemicals perhaps sparked by electrical activity. There was no random accident that formed life. They say that the odds are just too astronomical. It could only have come from some incredibly sophisticated design by a creator.
This creator, furthermore, had to have an intelligence far beyond our ability to comprehend it, along with an immense power to start the Big Bang in such a precise manner. Think about it. Our Milky Way galaxy has billions of stars and even more planets. The Universe has billions of galaxies, which means gazillions of stars and planets. The creator of this universe had to be powerful beyond all imagination.
Now for the sobering news. The stars in the universe are all many light years away, so that even though we know with virtual certainty that the Universe is teeming with life, there’s almost no chance of connecting to it.
Even if we were to encounter an intelligent communication in our SETI program, it would likely take thousands of years or more for our confirmation signal to get back to whoever sent it and then thousands or more to get a return signal, and that’s nearby stars and planets. Most of them would take hundreds of thousands and millions of years for messages to reach them and get back to us.
Basically, we are less than a speck of dust in relationship to the Universe, and we have no scientific proof about the being that created it all, other than to know it had to be an immense intelligence and power. For all we know, the creator may have no idea that there are these creatures who call themselves humans on this less than a spec of dust planet rotating around one if its gazillions of suns.
But then there’s a little piece of evidence that might lead to a different conclusion. We are more than just intelligent. We are wired to be spiritual. Our belief there is a God that created us and loves us is a natural feeling shared by billions of humans. Where did that come from if not from the same creator of the Universe? Nothing else seems to be accidental about the Universe and life itself, so why would our inherent spirituality be an accident?
Unfortunately, however, that’s about as far as we can take it. Just as we don’t really know about the intelligence that created the Big Bang, we don’t know how life was created if it wasn’t by random from non-living chemicals. Did this ultra-intelligence put life directly onto planets or were living elements created as part of the Big Bang, so that they spread randomly throughout the Universe like seeds spread by the wind.
About the only thing we know is that early humans had an inherent curiosity about where we came from and almost universally had a concept of God. Initially, the concept was related to the forces of nature, which were called Gods. As an example, Greek mythology has a series of Gods based on natural phenomenon that are essentially personifications of our own human attributes.
As humankind evolved, however, a few cracks in the polytheist cosmology started to develop. In Persia in the 1,500 BC range, a philosopher named Zoroaster (Zarathustra) taught that there was only one God, Ahura Mazda, who created the world we see. His teachings became a religion called Zoroastrianism and he morphed from a teacher into a prophet.
Maybe 500 or 600 hundred years earlier, in what is now known as Syria or maybe Lebanon, a well-to-do farmer named Avram had a similar revelation, although it was far from as comprehensive. He claimed to have conversed with the real God, who told him that he was the only God and that there was no other. He said this God made a covenant with him that if he followed his teaching, he would become the father of a great nation.
Avram changed his name to Abraham and gave rise to not only Judaism through his son Isaac, but also to Islam through his son Ishmael. Was there really an Abraham? The evidence is inconclusive and numerous scholars believe he was likely a legendary figure who was a composite from a tribe that adopted the concept of monotheism.
In contrast, Jewish rabbis believe that he was quite real as do Islamic imams and mullahs. Rabbis, for example, believe there was a direct lineage from Abraham to his great grandson Joseph, who became a viceroy in Egypt and saved the Egyptians during a period of drought. While there is no evidence that Abraham lived, there just may be archaeological evidence of Joseph.
Muslims believe something similar about Abraham, whom they call Ibrahim. They believe that their prophet Muhammad visited Israel and ascended unto heaven at the very rock where Ibrahim was asked by God to sacrifice his son, who many Muslims believe was Ibrahim’s other son, Ismael, and not Isaac. Today that rock is commemorated in Jerusalem as the Dome of the Rock shrine.
So what’s the bottom line to all of this? We now know with increasing certainty that solid scientific evidence is accumulating that the Universe was created by some incredibly intelligent and powerful force. We also know that at some point around 2,000 BC, the belief was developed that there was only one God, which evolved into today’s great religions. In part 2, we’re going to explore the connection between the two. Is the God who created the Universe and the life within it, the same one who gave birth to our great religions? That has become the question of the century.
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