Is There A God Is A Big Question

How can we ever expect to know the answer to a question like is there a God? It raises all sorts of implications about us, about what’s important to us, about our personal approach to life and how we see things. Like the abortion debate or gay marriages, the question of is there a god raises some very strong emotional reactions in people. While some fervent scientists like Richard Dawkins will go to the grave denying the possible existence of a god, others take a more open view that allows for the possibility.

When I was young I can remember thinking about this question and wondering whether there could be a god. I recall making a decision that was based on the fear that there must be and if I believed that there wasn’t a god and there in fact was a god, then I would face his wrath. But as I got a bit older I realised I think that that was a pretty stupid basis for making a decision. Going to church didn’t shed much light on the issue in my mind because church was a place established by people who had already decided that there was a god and so they had moved past the point of wrestling with the fundamental decision in the first place. Sure, church made sense once you’d decided that god existed but I wasn’t at that point in my mind so I needed help from elsewhere.

Pondering a question like this might be part of human nature. So too is asking other questions like what is love. But asking questions is really only helpful, in my experience anyway, if you’re able to get answers to the questions. Or at the very least investigate the question in a rational sensible way to some degree, even if you don’t actually find the answer. The difficulty in trying to answer a question like is there a god is that you can’t actually test it properly. Well, that’s not entirely true. Some scientists even argue that there are ways to test that. Concepts like teleology, which stress a view of natural events in which things have a tendency towards a predetermined goal seem to me to be pretty well related to dealing with this kind of issue.

Some people won’t even tolerate discussion about the issue of god, like it’s a forbidden subject that is so outrageous, absurd, disgraceful, horrible and ridiculous that we shouldn’t even waste the oxygen we breath to discuss it. I don’t think that’s a healthy position for an open society to hold. God, can you imagine what it must be like in some of those fundamentalist religious countries or regimes, like under the Taliban. As if they would tolerate questioning of whether there is a god. For them they take the opposite view that mere humans have no right at all to think independently about issues of god and that questions like that are heresy. Thankfully we are more open minded than that, but sometimes I think only just. I recently came across a page titled Is there a God? on a website called the World Transformation Movement and it has certainly got me thinking deeply again about this subject. I mean I actually just keep going over and over in my mind now that I have read this page, not only is there a God but also, can he/she/it now be explained, is that possible?