Science vs. God

The title subconsciously begs the big question: is there a God? Or are we simply running around without anyone watching over us? If you’re alive and are old enough to comprehend any semblance of religion, you have probably asked yourself this question a time or two. Those who study various religions, both past and present will tell you that throughout history, humans have commonly given broad conceptualization to things that they have never been able to explain. Obviously, the concept of God has always been rather hard to define by the everyday sort of person, which is why we have always left it up to the church.

Whether you’re Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, or Orthodox, by definition these various faiths all worship the same God. The cause for there being a variety of faiths can be attributed to various schisms throughout history based on power and doctrinal divergence. It’s simple as that. Even before the modern Christianity movement that took place in the beginning of the first millennia, there were other faiths, which included paganism (those who worship inanimate objects) or Zoroastrianism (those who worshipped a “prophet” of sorts named Zoroaster). As one can tell, these religions and many others have lost out in the natural order of human history for various reasons. But why?

“The Church” or what is now the modern Catholic Church did away with paganism by attaching brutal stigmas to it, i.e. barbarism, etc… Pagans still exist today, but in areas of the world that are remote and are out of the reach of modern society. Oddly enough, the stars that symbolize the rank of general were always seen as a symbol of evil in paganism; I find that ironic, which is why I mention it. Anyways, it was the Egyptians, Romans, and the Greeks that gave us the modern concept of God, as they were polytheistic or believed in many Gods. The Egyptians for example had various Gods that they believed to control natural phenomena such as the weather and crop growth.

It was the early Christians that gave us the monotheistic view of God or the one all powerful God. Even though we live in a modern age where science has trumped many aspects of religion, billions still believe. A common area of discourse is over our very existence on this planet. Religion tells us that God created the world and us in 7 days. Science tells us that we are here because of the “Big Bang” or the idea that the universe was created in one giant burst of energy. The products of that giant burst eventually came together to create Earth and the life on it (long story short). My point is that religion has crafted our current view of God over time and they haven’t exactly forthcoming about it.

Religion is firmly aware of science and have has gone to extreme lengths in the past to disprove it to maintain their stranglehold on the masses. In the basement of the Vatican, there are archives that document human history over the past two thousand years. Yet, the Vatican has always been guarded in allowing access to the archives, most of which has never seen the eyes of an outsider. Only the pope has access to these archives. Do you think they are hiding something? For example, our common visualization of Jesus is of a white man, but in reality, Jesus was probably Middle Eastern in descent and looked like a common, dark skinned Middle Eastern. Even the above picture of God painted by Michaelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel isn’t exactly representative of humanity.

To me the whole concept of religion and God has been skewed by human finagling over the centuries. Even what you see in the Bible today was decided in 325 in the first ecumenical council; do you think they were unbiased? I don’t think God showed up to deliver the final manuscript in person. For all we know, we are a bunch of psychotic apes floating around through space on a tiny ball of various gasses that allows us and every creature on this planet to survive. On the other hand, maybe we were strategically put here by a super natural being for some reason or another. If I knew the answer to those questions, I’d probably be God or some sort of billionaire prophet. This is a question that is subjective to the individual or “faith,” but isn’t it a fantastic source of discussion and war?