2010-06-23

I proclaim: I know how everything operates. Not at full detail, but at deep enough a level to be able to answer all the important questions. As 99 % of people have no clue at all, and as a demonstration of my humble character, I’d like to share this insight. Read on!

Questioning the existence of a god

You were probably brought up in a society in which believing in a deity, a creator of everything, a god, is the norm. I was brought up in mostly a Christian society. The Christian god, or God for short, is described much as a person. And by this I don’t mean a description of what kind of a person God is. What I do mean is, God is attributed with will, feelings such as anger and love, interest in earthly things, the might to affect those, and a capability to communicate. This is not any kind of an exhaustive list; I’m making these up as I go. If we were talking about a human being, and not God, these traits would be quite easy to explain by evolutionary grounds. Will is the capability to make decisions to guide one’s actions. This is obviously advantageous from an evolutionary standpoint. Feelings share much the same purpose, guiding our thought processes. Having an interest in for example self-preservation is highly beneficial. Might over other beings, such as small bugs that continuously pester us, is essential for survival. The ability to communicate makes a population more successful. That all these things provide clear benefits to an individual or a population, hints to that they may be products of evolution. For humans, this appears to be the case, as backed up by a lot of scientific evidence. God, in religious stories, appears to limit themselves to causal actions, just like a human, when there is no reason why an all-mighty god should play by the laws of the physical world.

So, there are two possibilities, either there is a god that happens to be extremely similar to something shaped by evolution, or, the more likely alternative, that there is no god and that the concept of god is a product of human imagination, limiting itself, especially in earlier times, to absorbing elements from the immediate environments of the people making up and adding to the stories and scriptures. For the first alternative, there is no proof. Not even the smallest influence by a god has ever been positively detected, even with the advent of precise scientific instrumentation, and no recorded communication by a god has ever given us prior knowledge, not open to interpretation, of things to come.

Origins of the Universe

Even if one accepts that it was evolution that gave rise to humanity, and that the god, if one exists, does not communicate with us or interfere with the physical world, there will still be the open question about the origins of the Universe. A popular answer is that God made it. I assert that existence of the Universe is a misconception brought about by our conception of how objects in the every-day world operate. The conflict arises when we think of the pre-Universe nothingness and the sudden appearance of  the Universe in it. We think, such an abrupt and purposeful change must be by someone. All the matter and energy, stuff, must have come from somewhere! Where we go wrong is in thinking that there is an event by which the universe appeared. An event is always associated with a point in time, but time is an inner quality of the universe. Concepts and expressions that hint to time include “to come to be”, “to appear”, “create”, “beginning”, “before”, and “birth”.  Stuff might appear, but not the Universe. There is no such thing as before the existence of the Universe.

Let us think about existence for a moment. I am going to claim that existence itself is also an inner concept of the Universe. By inner, I don’t mean anything like the air inside a balloon in contrast to air outside the balloon, where in and out share some ….., but something like the letters of a literary work. Letters don’t exist in our every-day world. They are confined in writings. Letters are the stuff of literature. If I were to make multiple copies of a book, and also copy the book onto a computer, where I would store it in all kinds of formats, would the work of literature still exist.

If letters were able to ask neighboring letters what they see, they would become pretty convinced of their own existence. But there is a catch. If we were to destroy the book, there would be no more letters to ponder upon the question of existence. But what if I was to save the book on a computer, would the . You could say that as the two are equivalent,   So we might as well quit discussing the existence of the Universe.

Let us take a step back, as this might seem