Come on God, intervene already!

In ancient civilizations, or even earlier, say when we were hunter-gatherers. What did people do? Well, pretty much just the basic functions of life – Find shelter, Hunt for food and clothing (for the winter at least) and reproduce, take care of young, repeat. We had much smaller brains and didn’t really understand much of what was going on in the world, but we just kept living, much like a lot of smaller-brained or brainless organisms that inhabit the world. As our brains got bigger and larger, we started developing better cognitive abilities, and with it came the burden of trying to understand the world. 

Now naturally for anything to make sense early on, we needed to posit some sort of higher being for all the wonderful things in the world. Why do we eat? Where did all this huntable food come from? What’s inside our bodies? Magical fluids? What shape is the earth? We couldn’t even come to the point of asking say, is the earth flat or round? That was just a question out of question because we didn’t even know things that would lead us o asking the most basic facts we know and accept today.

So how could we find any meaning in the world?

Well, of course there just had to be a higher being- a creator- who created everything we could see, obviously. Because we didn’t have most of the tools of knowledge that we have today – math, physics, biology, etc. The only way we were able to make sense of anything, was to posit this creator – a pre-being, an infinite being, something that transcends space-time, is beyond anything – looking over us, giving us rain for good harvests, then punishing us with storms for disobeying, food so that we wouldn’t starve, water so that we would never go thirsty and so on.

This is, of course, ridiculous. But if I lived back in the day, even sometime in the recent past, I may have believed those things because there was never any evidence of anything else or any other natural processes that could create new life forms. (I have a lot of respect for early atheists because they rejected the religious institutions and the concept of god even before we knew what alternative to creationism there was, we didn't know shit about evolution).

The idea of an interventionist creator-god is not only ridiculous but if we just look at the way the world is and the way humans behave, we can pretty much tell that if there is this interventionist god then he isn’t doing a good job or any work at all.

You cannot explain complex seemingly improbable things (humans, animals, plants) by positing a creator. Who created the creator? No one can explain the improbable by creating an even more improbable being. Because if everything in the universe is the creation of a higher being, then where is that higher being, on another plane of reality? If so, couldn’t there just be an infinite number of gods existing in different levels, modes and planes of consciousness? If there are infinite gods, why even bother worshipping one? And if there is a god existing outside the physical universe, as I said, on another level, then how is this god intervening in any way with reality if he is outside of the physical world we know as reality?

 These are unimportant questions and they don’t even need answers because god does not exist.

Accept what’s true.

Even if it’s disappointing and makes you sad, and makes life seem a little less meaningful (or more meaningful for some).

The non-existence of god is a huge tragedy.

But (un)fortunately for us, this tragedy is real.

There is no god.