h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

If there is a god

Posted Feb 20, 2003

I was brought up as a Christian and sent to a church school (Moordown St.Johns) and attended Sunday school every week.
The school was the worst, we were fed Christianity all the time and had to attend church every Monday (this has given me a true hatred against Christianity). It truly was brain washing (especially for children). We were never taught about other religions but we were told that they were all wrong and Christianity is the one and only true thing. When I first went to Winton (a bog standard secondary school) I was still a believer but I had started to think about it a lot more. It wasn’t till I got a better understanding of other religions I came to the conclusion that Christianity was complete ball shit but I still felt there was a higher order.

According to pretty much every religion (but not Greek or Egyptian and probably some others) God(s) are omnipotent, and God is everywhere and always.
Now think about Space-time.. if something occupies space it must exist with in a time and visa versa (good old Einstein)
God is both timeless and spaceless. There fore god cannot exist.. in the Christian philosophy books I have read they all have the same answer to something that disproves the existence of god and that is ‘He is Omnipotent there fore he exists’.. God has this funny thing where he only exists with faith and you can only have faith if you can because it is imposible to prove his existence. if you can defiantly prove that he exists then you destroy the need for faith and without faith god is nothing so he doesn’t exist.. god only exists because it is impossible to prove the he defiantly exists. This is just stupid and seems to be opposite of every thing else. God and things that don’t exist seem to have a lot in common.

I have a love for Greek mythology the stories are just ace and the Gods all have physical forms, they do not exist everywhere (they are not spaceless), they are not omnipotent, they make mistakes and they are both evil as well as good. they are very much like us but immortal, they even feel pain. Within Greek mythology the part on creation isn’t that different to big bang theory. When thinking about it the Greek (well Greek mythology is almost a direct copy of Egyptian) gods seem so much more plausible then one true all powerful all knowing god an omnipotent god is just silly.. The Greek religion is long dead (killed of by the Roman Catholics) but some of the basic beliefs still exist within paganism. For example Wicca has many god but they manly worship the Greek goddess Dina. Giaiane also has many gods but they manly worship Giai (the earth). I came across pagan beliefs by accident about 2 year ago when surfing the net and found them very interesting (if I had to choose a religion it would defiantly be Wicca or Giaiane. However I have no interest in the occult stuff that goes on with in.. Magik is all bollocks).

It wasn’t till a few months ago I became Atheist, what put the nail in the coffin was part of a speech by Douglas Adams as shown bellow, the guy is easily in my top 10 people that have ever walked this planet a true genius. If you only read one more book in your life make sure it is the Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy series (ok 4 books but you can get them all in one).

I don not believe-that-there-is-no-god (double negatives are funny)
I am now certain that there isn't a god

Isn’t it funny that the only drug that is ok according to the church is a drug that is very potent, makes you go all dumb and kills thought. That’s also the reason why it is probably legal (stupid alcohol)


Taken from a speech by Douglas Adams (novelist, atheist and genius)
‘Where does the idea of God come from? Well, I think we have a very skewed point of view on an awful lot of things, but let’s try and see where our point of view comes from. Imagine early man. Early man is, like everything else, an evolved creature and he finds himself in a world that he’s begun to take a little charge of; he’s begun to be a tool-maker, a changer of his environment with the tools that he’s made and he makes tools, when he does, in order to make changes in his environment. To give an example of the way man operates compared to other animals, consider speciation, which, as we know, tends to occur when a small group of animals gets separated from the rest of the herd by some geological upheaval, population pressure, food shortage or whatever and finds itself in a new environment with maybe something different going on. Take a very simple example; maybe a bunch of animals suddenly finds itself in a place where the weather is rather colder. We know that in a few generations those genes which favour a thicker coat will have come to the fore and we’ll come and we’ll find that the animals have now got thicker coats. Early man, who’s a tool maker, doesn’t have to do this: he can inhabit an extraordinarily wide range of habitats on earth, from tundra to the Gobi Desert—he even manages to live in New York for heaven’s sake—and the reason is that when he arrives in a new environment he doesn’t have to wait for several generations; if he arrives in a colder environment and sees an animal that has those genes which favour a thicker coat, he says “I’ll have it off him”. Tools have enabled us to think intentionally, to make things and to do things to create a world that fits us better. Now imagine an early man surveying his surroundings at the end of a happy day’s tool making. He looks around and he sees a world which pleases him mightily: behind him are mountains with caves in—mountains are great because you can go and hide in the caves and you are out of the rain and the bears can’t get you; in front of him there’s the forest—it’s got nuts and berries and delicious food; there's a stream going by, which is full of water—water’s delicious to drink, you can float your boats in it and do all sorts of stuff with it; here’s cousin Ug and he’s caught a mammoth—mammoth’s are great, you can eat them, you can wear their coats, you can use their bones to create weapons to catch other mammoths. I mean this is a great world, it’s fantastic. But our early man has a moment to reflect and he thinks to himself, ‘well, this is an interesting world that I find myself in’ and then he asks himself a very treacherous question, a question which is totally meaningless and fallacious, but only comes about because of the nature of the sort of person he is, the sort of person he has evolved into and the sort of person who has thrived because he thinks this particular way. Man the maker looks at his world and says ‘So who made this then?’ Who made this? — you can see why it’s a treacherous question. Early man thinks, ‘Well, because there’s only one sort of being I know about who makes things, whoever made all this must therefore be a much bigger, much more powerful and necessarily invisible, one of me and because I tend to be the strong one who does all the stuff, he’s probably male’. And so we have the idea of a god. Then, because when we make things we do it with the intention of doing something with them, early man asks himself , ‘If he made it, what did he make it for?’ Now the real trap springs, because early man is thinking, ‘This world fits me very well. Here are all these things that support me and feed me and look after me; yes, this world fits me nicely’ and he reaches the inescapable conclusion that whoever made it, made it for him.’

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Latest reply: Feb 20, 2003