Why there probably isn't a God

9 May 2007

You would just about have to be God yourself to say there was no God and you knew that for sure.

But the reasons a God is highly unlikely IMO are:

1. The universe (Big Bang) did not require a supervening force to come into existence, or remain in existence. (Read Paul Davies' 'God & The New Physics' - he outlines it in some detail.) It was capable of doing it spontaneously.

2. The organic world (life - including us) did not require a God to come into existence either. The spontaneous exchange of sub-cellular information in the primeval soup led to cells...and the rest is history.

3. Religion is adaptive (it helped H. sapiens to survive), so we are hard-wired to be inclined to believe in a God. That gives rise to a huge panoply of emotions, deeply-held beliefs and convictions, and cherished ideals (to say nothing of religions, spiritual groups, et al) - all of them subjective experiences caused by our neural wiring, with no corresponding reality outside of that wiring.

4. The human brain has in the last 25 years been sufficiently mapped to give us an understanding of how 'spiritual experiences' arise. (This mainly applies to the more Eastern- and 'inner journey'-oriented God-believers.) E.g. your sense of timelessness arises when one part of the brain is temporarily lulled, your sense of 'the presence of a superior power' arises when another part is stimulated, etc etc. That's why religions chant, pray, meditate and sometimes dance rhythmically: these things lull/stir the central nervous system in the required ways. It's well-understood stuff now.

5. In the entirety of human history, there has not been a single piece of evidence for the existence of God. This period includes the 200-odd year history of science, and the 100+ year history of cameras, film and audio recording devices. Not a photo, not a single pulse of data - in all of known time.

If you believe in God you do so because your brain (the product of a million years of human and pre-human evolution) has provided you with a religious/spiritual impulse, not because there is anything divine out there, in there, or anywhere else.

I personally find this sad by the way - I understand the desire to have a God in the Universe. But me wanting doesn't make it so.