Does God Exist?

The Search for Truth

“Does God exist?”

“Is the Bible true?”

“How did religion come about?”

“Which religion is right?”

These are just some of the many questions that have been occupying my headspace as of late. In the past few weeks, I’ve been embarking on a personal conquest in decoding my muddled thoughts and skepticism, hoping to see through the smoke and mirrors that have clouded my critical faculty for many decades.

Thankfully, my efforts proved worthwhile, for the insights I’ve gained is nothing but intriguing, and a great revelation.

I’m well aware this is a sensitive and provocative topic, considering the socially conservative society that we live in. I can only envision how this article will most certainly ruffle some feathers, so I contemplated hard on whether I should share it, and if I’m willing to endure the possible consequent repercussions or backlash.

But I’ve always believed that any knowledge gained is meant to be shared, and to be received with an open mind.

This is by no means exhaustive, but I think would suffice as an introduction about God and religion.

The Origins of Religion

About 2.6 million years ago during the Stone Age period, our pre-historic ancestors survived by gathering empirical realities and drawing conclusions about the world beyond them. They assumed they were at the centre of the universe, which they saw as flat, small and under the sky. They believed that if they ate the body of a dead leader, they might acquire his special qualities. They see the Sun and Moon moving across the skies as animate beings. With no defined difference between spirit and materiality, they believed that in preserving a corpse, they were helping to preserve the spirit of the deceased. They saw Gods within everything that moved — in the wind, the rivers, the ocean, the Sun. They attributed much that happened to the spirits and to magic, such as lightning, thunder, rain and the tides.

Their view of the world and how they understand it came to them through storytelling. These were stories that were told and accepted without recognition of a difference between fact and fantasy. Every society has its story about creation, each with a different twist — there were stories of a God having created them out of earth, and a story among others, that they had been created from the bark of a tree. An exception to universal order might be described as the work of a demon spirit, an evil of sorts.

In 4000 BC, an aboriginal Australian in Arnhem land painted an image of a serpent on a rock, called the Yingarna Serpent, which was a key part of aboriginal religion. This creature and a few other associated divine serpents were worshipped for having done everything — they created the sky, the lagoons, the mountains, they coloured the birds, they decreed laws relating to marriage, food distribution and death ceremonies. These serpents also generate rain and storms when anyone breaks the rules of the tribes. The belief structure of the early Australians is almost identical to that found in primitive religions almost everywhere around our planet.

Much of ancient mythology is, in fact, a legal contract between humans and the gods — humans promise everlasting devotion to the gods, and in exchange, they gain mastery over plants and animals. Most foragers spent their entire lives within an area of no more than a thousand square kilometres. Thus, in order to survive, the inhabitants needed to understand the superhuman order that regulated their land, and to adjust their behaviour accordingly.

For example, farmers acknowledge that their powers are limited. They have little control when it comes to the growth of their crops and fecundity or health of their livestock. Here, the gods helped offer a solution to this problem. The gods’ main role was to mediate between humans and the mute plants and animals. Gods such as the fertility goddess, the sky god and the god of medicine took centre stage when plants and animals lost their ability to speak.

Over the years, religion has been a great unifier of humankind. Religions assert that our laws are not the result of human caprice, but are ordained by an absolute and supreme authority. This helps place some fundamental laws beyond challenge, thereby ensuring social stability. Religion can thus be defined as a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order.

In order to unite a large expanse of territory inhabited by disparate groups of human beings, a religion must possess two qualities. First, it must espouse a universal superhuman order that is true always and everywhere. Second, it must insist on spreading this belief to everyone. In other words, it must be universal and missionary.

As far as we know, universal and missionary religions began to appear only in the first millennium BC. Today, there are about ten thousand different religions, each of which is convinced that there’s only one Truth and that they alone possess it.

The big breakthrough came with Christianity. This faith began as an esoteric Jewish sect that sought to convince the  Jews that Jesus of Nazareth was their long-awaited messiah, until Paul of Tarsus began his missionary quest in spreading the religion worldwide. Christianity’s success served as a model for another monotheist religion that appeared in the Arabian peninsula in the seventh century — Islam. Like Christianity, Islam too, began as a small sect in a remote corner of the world. But in a swifter historical surprise, it managed to break out of the deserts of Arabia and conquer an immense empire stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to India.

Henceforth, the monotheist idea played a central role in world history. At the beginning of the first century AD, there were hardly any monotheists in the world. Around AD 500, one of the world’s largest empires — the Roman Empire —was a Christian polity, and missionaries were busy spreading Christianity to other parts of Europe, Asia and Africa. By the end of the first millennium AD, most people in Europe, West Asia and North Africa were monotheists, and empires from the Atlantic Ocean to the Himalayas claimed to be ordained by the single great God. By the early 16th century, monotheism dominated most of Afro-Asia, with the exception of East Asia and the southern parts of Africa, and it began extending its long tentacles toward South Africa, America and Oceania. Today, most people outside East Asia adhere to one monotheist religion or another, and the global political order is built on monotheistic foundations.

Monotheism, as it has played out in history, is a kaleidoscope of monotheist, dualist, polytheist and animist legacies, jumbling together under a single divine umbrella. As remarked by Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens, “The average Christian believes in the monotheist God, but also in the dualist Devil, in polytheist saints, and in animist ghosts”.

Evolution of Religion Over The Years

Religion is a social institution that involves a unified system of beliefs, practices and plays a role in structural functionalism. Émile Durkheim, the French sociologist, identifies 3 major functions of religion that contribute to the operation of the society:

(1) Social Cohesion

Religion helps establish social cohesion, by uniting people around shared symbols, norms and values. He argued that religious thought promotes norm like morality, fairness, charity and justice. Churches act as gathering place, forming the backbone of social life for many people. Membership in a church is the most common community associations for Americans.

Belonging to a group brings with it many advantages. The protection it offered against other groups improved survival chances. There are a few ways in which a religion helps bind a group:

Numerous social rules are imposed on individuals in the name of God, sometimes accompanied by dire threats about the fate of those who refuse to adhere to them. Blasphemy is severely punished in the Old Testament and is still a capital offence in most Islamic fundamentalist countries. Some religions even consider it sinful to marry an unbeliever. Education is segregated according to faith, which makes it easier to reject others, because ignorance breeds contempt.

Most religions have rules that promote reproduction. This can entail a ban on contraception. The faith is spread by having children and then indoctrinating them, making the group bigger and therefore, stronger.

Most religions apply symbolic-interactionism, which use symbols and recognizable traits to identify their religion and group. Rituals are a form of symbolic practice that highlight faith:

(i) Many religions use certain actions during prayer that symbolizes deference to God, for example, Catholics make the sign of the Cross before prayer, or Muslims supplicate themselves and face Mecca, the birthplace of Prophet Muhammad.

(ii) Many rituals also practice ritual ablution, or washing certain parts of the body during a religious ceremony. For instance, in the religious practices of baptism, water is a symbol of people’s belief that faith cleanses the soul. Muslims practice the wudu.

(iii) Objects can also take on sacred meaning. Symbols like the Cross or the Star of David are considered totems, objects that we have collectively defined as sacred. Totem infer in-group membership to those who wear or use these symbols, because they provide a way for people to demonstrate their faith and recognize that faith in others.

(iv) Physical characteristics can also be identified, such as types grooming practices for men (beards in Islam or Orthodox Judaism), donning a headscarf or burka for Muslim women; and common traditions such as circumcision of Muslims and Jewish children.

(2) Social Control

Religion acts as a form of social control. People behave well, not only out of fear of their friends and families’ disapproval, but also out of desire to remain in their God’s good graces. For example, Christianity and Judaism have the 10 Commandments, a set of rules for behaviour that they believe were sent directly from God, which they must abide to.

(3) Sense Of Purpose

In a functionalist perspective, religion provides people with a sense of purpose in life. Religion gives people a reason to see their lives as meaningful, by framing them within the greater purpose of their God’s grand plan.

“If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed”.

—  Albert Einstein

Religion As A Coping Mechanism

Throughout lifetime, human beings have endured numerous external pressures and tragedies — war, famine, poverty, natural disaster, pandemics etc.

Baruch Spinoza, the Dutch philosopher, concluded that the belief in a personal God came about because humans assumed that everything around them had been created for their use by a being who ruled over nature, including all natural disasters.

Having a religious faith provides a source of comfort and hope during these difficult times, assuring that a higher being has one’s back. Believers console themselves by seeing their problems as a test or punishment from God, that is, as having some meaning.

Interestingly, a research done by Paul Grey across all countries have shown that religiosity increases with various indices of social malaise or “existential insecurity”. It revealed that a higher percentage of people tend to resort to religion in countries where they feel insecure in their lives due to factors such as income inequalities, being unsupported by health care and other social welfare provisions; or in places where there is high infant mortality and abortion rates among teenagers.

In the words of the English evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, “Societal despair provides a climate in which religion flourishes”.

“In the beginning…” : How the Universe Began

For many years, the riddle as to how the universe was created continues to remain an unsolved mystery. A number of theories or hypotheses have been formulated by physicists — some attributed it to the Big Bang, the string theory or the steady-state model etc. However, the bottom line is, we do not know the answer yet.

Ceaseless back-and-forth arguments between theologians and scientists have since commenced, whereby theologians claimed God is the answer and would criticize scientists for their failure in discovery.

But, as mentioned by Julia Sweeney, “Maybe we shouldn’t perceive these uncertainties as signs of weakness, but rather, a sign of strength and wisdom — that our scientific methods are working and that we are constantly filtering new and better information”.

We may not know everything yet, so probably we don’t have to pretend like we do. As quoted by Pierre-Simon Laplace, “What we know here is very little, but what we are ignorant of is immense”.

Does God Exist? : Arguments On The Existence Of God

In the 11th century, a French monk named Anselm of Canterbury, proclaimed that God’s existence is provable. He offered a deductive argument for the existence of God, based on what he understood to be “the nature of God’s being”. This was the start of the ontological argument, with ontology meaning “the study of being”.

Anselm defined God as “a being than which no greater can be conceived”.

In view of this statement, he proposed two probabilities in which God may exists:

(1) God can exist only in our minds and strictly be imaginary; or

(2) God can exist in our minds but also in reality — something that we can imagine but is also real.

Based on his definition of God, things that exist in reality are always better than things that exist only in our imaginations. Thus, since God is defined as the best thing that we can conjure up in our minds, the only thing that could possibly be greater than him would be — a real, tangible version. Therefore, God must exist in reality.

One of the famous objections came hundreds of years after Anselm’s time, from the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant offered the point that, as he puts it “existence is not a predicate”. It’s true that if God exists, then he must be the greatest being imagined — but that does not prove he does exist. “Predicates add to the essence of their subjects, but they can’t be used to prove their existence”.

In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas proposed five arguments for the existence of God, with the first four being the cosmological arguments:

1. Argument from motion — Nothing moves without a prior mover. Something had to make the first move, and that something is God.
2. Argument from causation — There can’t be an infinite regress of causes, for nothing is caused by itself.  There must be a first causer, itself uncaused. And that is God.
3. Argument from contingency — In philosophy, we often distinguish between two beings: contingent being (any being that could’ve not existed) and necessary being (a being that has always existed, will always exist, and that can’t not exist). Our existence is merely contingent on the existence of other things. There had to be something that prevented an infinite regress of contingency. So we have God, who is a necessary being.
4. Argument from degrees — We need a measuring stick in order to understand the value of things, for example, between good/bad, big/small, hot/cold etc. None of these concepts can exist in isolation. Properties come in degrees. In order for there to be degrees of perfection, there must be something perfect against which everything else is measured. God is the pinnacle of perfection.

Philosophers have argued that these examples don’t seem to establish the existence of any particular God and doesn’t prove the existence of a sentient God, in reference to Jesus Christ. They rebutted Aquinas’s insistence that everything requires a starting point, where he denies the idea of an infinite regress. But it remains unclear whether this stipulation is true, or why it has to be true.

The last of Aquinas’ argument:

5. Teleological argument (Intelligent Design) — Teleology means goal-oriented or purposeful. It was deduced that the world is designed by an intelligent creator with a particular end goal in mind. This argument was then popularized 100 years after Aquinas’ time in the late 1700s, by the English Christian philosopher William Paley.

William Paley believed that the complexities of the human bodies and elements of the natural world operate according to complex laws that sustain a beautiful, natural harmony. This couldn’t possibly just have happened, for there must be an intelligent designer, by which he attributed to God. Just as a watch has a creator (the watchmaker), so does the human body or the universe.

But subsequent theories refute this argument — the natural world is relevantly dissimilar to watches, who we evidently know the creator. It is incorrect, however, to equate a man-made artifact with the natural world, or even the human body.

Paley argued that bodies are purposeful, and from there concludes that the purpose had to have been put there by an intelligent God.

We can concede that a designer-god helped make sense of the origins of the world in a pre-scientific age. But now, we have a scientific explanation for how the complexity of the world came about, which was brought forth by Charles Darwin in the discovery of natural selection and descent with modification. Natural selection is the process by which random evolutionary changes are selected for by nature in a consistent, orderly and non-random way. In other words, it is the survival of the fittest.

Another objection to Paley’s argument came from 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume, who pointed out that, if the analogy of an Intelligent Design were to be taken seriously, then it can be concluded that the creator Paley posited seemed imperfect. For example, why do we have blind spots if it only limits our visual capacity? Why are body tissues such as breast, prostate or colon incredibly prone to cancer? Why would God make umbilical cords that could wrap around a baby’s neck? Why would He make butterflies immobile for their wings to dry as soon as they come out of their chrysalis, making them easy prey to predator? Hume pointed out that the world is chock full of things that look cruel, impractical and contrary to life. “A flawed world implies a flawed creator”. The development of evolutionary biology over the past couple hundreds of years has taken a big hit on the teleological argument.

Religion and Morality

If God doesn’t exist, are we able to discern between good and evil? If we do not have religion, do we lose our morality?

Today, scientific evidence have revealed that we, apparently, have innate morality — with or without religion.

The pre-frontal cortex of the brain functions in higher reasoning and executive functions, such as planning, decision making, risk assessment, impulse control and morality — the ability to discern between right or wrong, good or bad.

However, moral decisions aren’t just made in the prefrontal cortex; many other regions of the brain are also involved, namely the foremost part of the temporal lobe and amygdala, the septum, the ventral tegmental area/nucleus accumbens and the hypothalamus. All of these areas are essential for the motivation and emotions that underlie moral behaviour.

Adherents of the Intelligent Design movement (the belief that the universe is created by a deity) believe that morality has no biological basis but is given to man through God’s grace, and that believers were at the front of the line when it was handed out. However, over a century ago, Charles Darwin was able to describe in detail how our moral awareness was developed from social instincts that are futile for survival. This type of behaviour can be observed in all social animals whose members need to cooperate, such as primates, elephants, birds, dolphins, dogs or wolves etc.

Moral precepts also act as a social contract, imposing restraints on individuals to benefit the community at large. Darwin’s Theory of Moral Psychology (1859) traced the emergence of ethical behaviour not to selfish competition between individuals, but to social solidarity within the group. As they evolved, humans developed altruistic behaviour, based on the loving care shown by parents toward their offspring, which then extends to others of the same species.

Our moral values have evolved over the course of millions of years, and is a code of beliefs that was only recently incorporated into religions a mere couple of thousand years ago. These moral values are based on universal values of which we are unconscious of. Primatologist Frans de Waal has shown that people usually don’t think at all about moral acts. Instead, they act quickly and instinctively, on a biological impulse. It’s only afterward that they think up reasons for what they did unconsciously in a flash. The way people respond to these moral tests, and their inability to articulate their reasons, seems largely independent of their religious beliefs or lack of them.

To cite Marc Hauser, author of Moral Minds, “Driving our moral judgements is a universal moral grammar, a faculty of the mind that evolved over millions of years to include a set of principles for building a range of possible moral systems. As with language, the principles that make up our moral grammar fly beneath the radar of our awareness”.

“The greatest tragedy in mankind’s entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion”.

— Arthur C. Clarke

Empathy is natural, even in animals. It is the capacity to recognize and share feelings of others, and provides the basis for all moral behaviour. Empathizing with and helping others may lie at the heart of human morality, but such behaviour has a long evolutionary history and certainly isn’t exclusive to humans. It is also, however, not a trait exclusive to Christianity, as claimed by Cees Deeker, the radical Christian and vocal proponent of the Intelligent Design in Netherlands.

Tests have shown no significant difference in the moral choices made by atheists and believers. So, it’s incorrect to say that we only derive morality solely from our religious teachings, as Jitse van der Meer, a Biology lecturer in a Christian university, writes “Humans are the only primates who are capable of moral thoughts”, because evidence have shown quite the contrary.

To investigate the morality level of believers, Gregory S. Paul, in the Journal of Religion and Society (2005), systematically compared 17 economically developed nations, and reached the devastating conclusion that “higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlates with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies”.

On the other hand, the following data described by Sam Harris in his Letter to a Christian Nation, mentioned, “While political party affiliation in the United States is not a perfect indicator of religiosity, it is no secret that the ‘red (Republican) states’ are primarily red due to the overwhelming political influence of conservative Christians. If there were strong correlation between Christian conservatism and societal health, we might expect to see some sign of it in red-state America. We don’t. Of the 25 cities with the lowest rates of violent crimes, 62% are in ‘blue’ (Democrat) states, and 38% are in ‘red’ (Republican) states. Of the 25 most dangerous cities, 76% are in red states, and 24% are in blue. In fact, 3 of the 5 most dangerous cities in the US are in the pious state of Texas. The 12 states with the highest rates of burglary are red. 24 of the 29 states with the highest rates of theft are red. Of the 22 states with the highest rates of murder, 17 are red”.

Religion: A Double-edged Sword — War and Peace

“If everyone fought for their own convictions, there would be no war”.

— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

It’s perhaps worth interjecting here that, of all the stimuli that bind communities together, having a common enemy is the most powerful of all — a mechanism that many world and religious leaders have exploited.

A very important element of religion has always been that it sanctions killing other groups in the name of one’s own God. A combination of aggression, a group distinguishable by its belief, and discrimination of others, bring with it a huge evolutionary advantage. Over millions of years, humans have developed in an environment where there was just enough food for one’s own group. Any other group encountered in the savanna posed a mortal threat and had to be destroyed.

These are a few instances where religion proved poisonous to society:

Around the year 1500, the Protestant church reformer Martin Luther described Jews as a “brood of vipers”. He published books on anti-semitism where he openly expressed his hatred towards the Jews. Luther’s anti-Jewish rhetoric contributed significantly to the development of anti-semitism in Germany, and in the 1930s and 1940s it provided an ideal foundation for the Nazi Party’s attacks on Jews, leading to pogroms and ultimately made the Holocaust possible.

In 1947, over a million people were slaughtered when British India was partitioned into India for the Hindus and Pakistan for the Muslims. Since then, four Indo-Pakistani wars have emerged, battling over the ownership of Kashmir. Unfortunately, this interfaith hatred has not diminished ever since.

Since the year 2000, 43% of civil wars have been of religious nature, namely those that occur in the Middle East.

A frenzied pandemonium was incited during the publication of 12 cartoons from Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which depicted the Prophet Muhammad and were perceived to make fun of Islamic extremism. Over the next 3 months, indignation was carefully and systematically nurtured throughout the Islamic world, which then resulted in attacks on the Danish embassy, riots which killed 200 people all over the world, boycott of Danish products, burning of churches etc. In 2008, Osama bin Laden declared that “Europe and Denmark will be punished”. The act of self-censorship, especially in criticizing Islam for fear of violent reprisals from Islamists, has been an issue confronted by many journalists all over the world.

Extremist organizations such as the Talibans in Afghanistan, Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon are good examples of what happens when people take their scriptures literally and seriously. They provide a horrifying modern enactment of what life might have been like under the theocracy of the Old Testament — honor killing, public beheadings of blasphemers and blowing up of ancient statues, massacre, suicide bombing and decapitation of hostages and apostates.

Al-Qaeda and 9/11; 7/7; witch-hunts; Gunpowder Plot; Israeli-Palestinian war; Bosnian genocide; Jewish deicide leading to the Spanish Inquisition, Holocaust, crusades; the list goes on.

Religion has proved innumerable times that decent people can end up performing evil deeds. They are not psychotic; they are religious idealists who, by their own lights, are rational. They perceive their acts to be good, not because of some warped personal idiosyncrasy, and not because they have been possessed by Satan, but because they have been brought up, from the cradle, to have total and unquestioning faith.

“Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion”.

— Steven Weinberg, Nobel-prize winning American physicist

Religious Teachings: Obsolete In A Progressive World?

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully”.

— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

Karl Marx, the German philosopher and revolutionary socialist, saw religion as an agent of social stratification, which serves those in power by legitimizing the status quo and framing existing inequalities as part of a divine plan. It entrenches existing inequalities, such as in instances where rulers were believed to be given their right to rule by divine right. For example, Chinese emperors were believed to have a mandate from heaven, and were given the title Son of Heaven to indicate their divine authority to rule. In Europe, the heads of state were often also the head of the church; in fact, to this day, the British monarchs are formal heads of the Church of England. And some Christian religions, such as Calvinism, espouse predestination, or the belief that God pre-ordains everything that comes to pass, including whether you get into heaven. So, by this logic, having wealth and power was seen as an indication of God’s favour. For these reasons, Marx saw religion as a huge barrier to revolutionary change, referring to it as the “opiate of the masses”. After all, it is hard to convince people to rise up against the elites if they believe that elites have the power of God behind them.

In addition to entrenching political and economic inequalities, religion also depicts gender and racial inequalities, for example, in the subjugation of women and patriarchal religious structures. Most of the Holy Books depict accounts of misogyny, with women being seen merely as properties subservient to men. In countries with fundamentalist religious beliefs, women are treated as inferior to men, thus they are denied the rights to education, forced into child marriage, remain voiceless in household matters or family affairs; their roles confined in homes or solely as means for pro-creation. A woman’s unique individuality is evidently stripped away from her after she attains puberty.

Female genital mutilation (FGM), which is considered as one of the most brutal practices conducted on a woman, is still being performed in some parts of the world, with more than 90% of cases in Sudan, Egypt and Somalia. FGM supposedly aims to ensure premarital virginity, marital fidelity, and to reduce a woman’s libido, therefore believed to help her resist extramarital sexual acts. However, this procedure clearly has no health benefits, and it harms girls and women in many ways. As a consequence, women have to suffer excruciating pain during urination, menstruation, sexual intercourse and severe maternal haemorrhage during childbirth, which can ultimately lead to maternal and newborn deaths.

FGM procedures differ according to the country or ethnic group. They include:

Type 1: Removal of the clitoral hood and clitoral glans;

Type 2: Removal of the inner labia;

Type 3a: Removal of the inner and outer labia;

Type 3b: Closure of the vulva, known as infibulation. A small hole is left for the passage of urine and menstrual fluid; the vagina is opened for intercourse and opened further for childbirth.

Most religions have strict views that openly ban contraception, in any way possible — use of condoms, contraceptive pills and other artificial methods. Due to this doctrine, millions in South America are condemned to a life of poverty; and in Africa, millions have succumbed to AIDS infection. In 2005, three million people died of AIDS, and five million people were infected with HIV.

Followers of the Jehovah Witness prohibits the transfusion of blood, based on a passage in Acts 15:28-29, which states, “The Holy Spirit and we have agreed not to put any other burden on you besides these necessary rules: eat no food that has been offered to idols; eat no blood; eat no animal that has been strangled; and keep yourself from sexual immorality. You will do well if you take care not to do these things. With our best wishes”. This belief has caused tremendous upheaval among healthcare professionals, who are torn in a dilemma between the responsibility in saving a life, or to abide to an archaic, ancient literature.

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people”.

— Karl Marx

Evidence-based or Mythologies?

Unfortunately, religion has train us to accept everything at face value without questioning its validity and credibility, and I am guilty of this as well. We don’t ask the big questions — who wrote the Holy Book? When and how did they know what to write? Were they unbiased observers? Do they mean like how we understand they mean? Or did they have an agenda that coloured their writing?

We have forgo the spiritual joy of a rational, scientific understanding of life; and have tempt children down the same barren path.

Ever since the 19th century, scholarly theologians have made an overwhelming case that the gospels are not reliable accounts of  what happened in real world history. All were written long after the death of Jesus (some even hundreds of years after his death), and also after the epistles of Paul. Each of the gospels was composed in a different environment, at a different time, with particularly different interests in mind. Some hypothesised that they were copied and recopied, through many different “chinese whispers” generation and through word of mouth, by fallible scribes who, in any case, had their own religious agendas. It’s probably no coincidence how the three Abrahamic religions in the world (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) have almost similar biblical scriptures. The essential features of the Jesus legend, including the star in the east, the virgin birth, the veneration of the baby by kings, the miracles, the execution, the resurrection and the ascension, have already existed in other religions in the Mediterranean and Near East region.

Some inconsistencies have been debunked between events in the Bible and evidence in real history. For example, in the Gospel of Luke, he mentioned a time when Cyrenius (Quirinius) was governor of Syria. Caeser Augustus had decreed a census for taxation purpose, thus everyone had to go “to his own city”. Joseph was of the house and lineage of David, and therefore had to leave to the “city of David”, called Bethlehem. However, when historians traced back the historical validity of this event, they concluded that there indeed was a census, but it was not the one decreed by Caeser Augustus for the Empire as a whole. Apparently, it happened too late — in AD 6, long after Herod’s death. Historians deduced that probably it was Luke’s desire to fulfil Micah’s prophecy (Micah 5:2) when he wrote it, whereby the long-awaited Messiah would be born in Bethlehem.

The Gospels of Matthew and Luke are the only two evangelists to treat the birth of Jesus at all, and both were most probably written almost a century after Jesus’ birth. There were some contradictions between these two gospels, though. Matthew traces Joseph’s descent from King David via twenty-eight intermediate generations, while Luke has forty-one generations. But the funny thing is, there are no overlap between these two lists. Regardless, in either cases, if Jesus was really born by a virgin, Joseph’s ancestry is irrelevant and cannot be used to fulfill, on Jesus’ behalf, the Old Testament prophecy that the Messiah should be descended from David.

The four canonical gospels (Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) were chosen, more or less arbitrarily, out of a larger sample of at least a dozen, including the Gospels of Thomas, Peter, Judas, Nicodemus, Philip, Bartholomew and Mary Magdalene. These gospels were omitted by ecclesiastics perhaps because they included stories that were implausible than those in the four canonicals. The Infant Gospel of Thomas, for instance, has numerous anecdotes about the child Jesus abusing his magical power, such as cursing a child to death after he bumps into him on the street; impishly transforming his playmates into goats; turning mud into sparrows; or giving his father a hand in carpentry by miraculously lengthening a piece of wood. Most of the four canonical gospels are derived from a common source, either Mark’s gospel or a lost work of which Mark is the earliest extant descendant. It is unsure who the four evangelists were, but they almost certainly never met Jesus personally. Some even speculated that these four canons are most likely rehashed from the Old Testament, because gospel-makers were devoutly convinced that the life of Jesus must fulfil Old Testament prophecies.

In the last few centuries, the Church had been guilty of stifling progressive thought by disputing scientific evidence which opposes the Bible. In 1543, Nuremberg, Germany, Nicholas Copernicus published ‘On The Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres’. This posed a heliocentric view of the universe, rather than a geocentric version widely accepted at that time and based on the book Joshua. In 1616, the Catholic Church moved to declare the heliocentric theory nonsense and angrily bans Copernicus’s work. However, Copernicus’s revolution will not be quelled. In 1632, Galileo Galilei defended the system when he published ‘The Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems’. Again, the papacy was furious. It cursed Copernicus once more and had Galileo spent the remaining of his life under house arrest.

Absolute vs Relative Truths: Cherry Picking Scriptures

The Holy Book is filled with tragic accounts of murder, vengeance, misogyny, rape, slavery, abuse, hatred and violence. However, these nasty bits are seldom mentioned in churches or religious schools, and many devout believers are blissfully unaware of their existence. The wolfish horror of the worst scripture verses are cloaked under various forms of sheep’s clothing — the words are not meant to be taken literally, they are metaphorical.

Most of the time, we pick and choose which bits of scripture to believe, which bits to write off as symbols, allegories, metaphor, fables or parables. Such picking and choosing is, it seems like, a matter of personal decision. But by what criterion do you decide which passages are figurative, and which are literal? By what criteria do we decide which of religion’s moral values to accept? Should we just selectively cherry pick whichever moral teaching suits us at that point in time? And if we have independent criteria for choosing among religious moralities, why not cut out the middle man and go straight for the moral choice, without the religion?

According to Richard Dawkins, solid facts should be backed by credible evidence. An absolute truth should not entail the option to choose. Just like scientific facts and evidence, it should be universal, otherwise we would be selectively cherry picking doctrines to our own liking.

“Some people have views of God that are so broad and flexible that it is inevitable that they will find God wherever they look for him. One hears it said that ‘God is the ultimate’ or ‘God is our better nature’ or ‘God is the universe’. Of course, like any other word, the word ‘God’ can be given any meaning we like. If you want to say that ‘God is energy’, then you can find God in a lump of coal”.

— Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory

Religion: A Violation of Free Will?

The decision to be religious or not, certainly isn’t free.

The religion you are born into is highly dependent on various external factors — who your family is, your educational background, where you live, your social class, race or ethnicity.

The religion we will adopt is highly dependent on the most dominant religion that we are exposed to in our social environment.

In America, for example, Catholicism is more common in Northeastern and Southwestern states, whereas the South has high concentrations of Evangelical Protestants, such as Baptists. The Midwest has higher concentrations of other Protestant faith, such as Methodists and Lutherans. Many of these regional differences stem from which racial ethnic group settled in these regions. The Midwest, for example, had high numbers of Scandinavian and German immigrants, and these ethnic groups are often Lutherans. Irish and Italian Americans, who are most likely to be Catholics, settled in New England and the Mid-Atlantic. Black Americans, who are heavily concentrated in the southern states, are somewhat more likely to be religious than the U.S. population as a whole, with 87% claiming affiliation with some faith. And the vast majority of Black Americans identify with a Protestant faith, with evangelical churches being the most common affiliation. 

In a similar fashion, you are most likely to practice Hinduism if you are born in India, Christianity in America or Europe, Buddhism in China, Judaism in Israel or Islam in Saudi Arabia.

The surroundings in which we grow up cause the parental religion to be imprinted in our brain circuitries during early development, in a similar way to our native language. The religious programming of a child’s brain starts after birth, and faith is imprinted in them at a very impressionable stage by their Christian, Muslim or Jewish parents.

Richard Dawkins rightly points out that you shouldn’t teach children what to think but how to think, including how to make ideological choices in adult life. Segregating young children in belief-based schools is pernicious — it not only prevents them from learning how to think critically, but it also fosters an intolerant attitude toward other beliefs. Dawkins sees programmed belief as a by-product of evolution. Children accepts warnings and instructions issued by their parents and other authorities instantly and without argument, which protects them from danger. We survived the accumulated experiences of previous generations, and those experiences need to be passed on to children for their protection and well-being. Obey your parents; obey your tribal elders; trust your elders without question. As a result, young children are credulous and therefore, easy to indoctrinate.

This might explain the universal tendency to retain the parental faith. Copying, the foundation of social learning, is an extremely efficient mechanism. We even have a separate system of mirror neurons for it. We all know from those we’ve encountered, how hard it is to shed ideas that have been instilled in early development.

“How so many absurd rules of conduct, as well as so many absurd religious beliefs, have originated, we do not know… but it is worthy of remark that a belief constantly inculcated during the early years of life, whilst the brain is impressible, appears to acquire almost the nature of an instinct; and the very essence of an instinct is that it is followed independently of reason.”

— Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

Religious leaders are well aware of the vulnerability of the child brain, and the importance of getting the indoctrination in early. Thus, the act of questioning God or religion is considered blasphemous. Even Martin Luther believed that reasoning gets in the way of faith when he claimed, “Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God”.

“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful”.

— Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Miracles or Mind Games?

“When one person has a delusion, they are considered crazy. When millions of people have the same delusion, they call it religion”.

— Robert M. Pirsig

Certain neurological and psychiatric disorders can give rise to religious mania, at least if religion has been programmed into the brain during an individual’s youth. After an epileptic seizure, patient can lose contact with reality, and a quarter of these psychoses take a religious form. Religious delusions can also result from mania, depression, schizophrenia or frontotemporal dementia.

It is known that hallucinations can be produced in situations where there is lack of stimuli. If the brain structures stop receiving information in a normal way, they start making up information. This applies to both sensory information (from ears, eyes and limbs) and memory information.

This happens in the case of patients with Charles Bonnet syndrome, for instance, wherein the brain manufactures information to compensate for a lack of input. This condition provokes colourful visual hallucinations in individuals with impaired sight, typically older people with cataracts, glaucoma or retinal bleeding, and tend to occur in dim and quiet surroundings.

A similar phenomenon occurs in the case of memory loss. People who suffer from Korsakoff’s syndrome, a dementia that results from alcohol abuse, produce fake memories of events that never took place, known as confabulations.

Phantom sensations following amputation appear to be based on the same principle.

Mountaineers, especially when alone, sometimes have very vivid hallucinations (hearing voices, seeing people, or having out-of-body experiences) or are overcome by fear. So it’s interesting how the revelations received by leaders of the world’s three main religions were preceded by a period of isolation in the mountains. For example, in Matthew 17:1-13, Jesus took the disciples Peter, John and James up a mountain, where they were alone, to pray. Suddenly, they saw Moses and Elijah, and witnessed Jesus shining with bright light rays, which made them terrified. The Prophet Muhammad saw Archangel Gabriel during his lonely vigil on Mount Hira. Overall, these experiences involved seeing bright lights, hearing voices, and experiencing fear, just as in the case of the mountaineers. When the brain is very isolated, it starts to use stored experiences and thought to manufacture things — sometimes even creating new religions.

In 2003, the former Swedish foreign minister, Anna Lindh was murdered by a 25-year-old schizophrenic patient Mijailo Mijailovic, who stopped taking medication and professing his actions as a “command by Jesus”.

John Nash, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia at 29 years old. His delusions were religious in nature; whereby he saw himself as a secret messianic figure and the biblical Esau.

Patients with temporal lobe epilepsy sometimes have ecstatic experiences, causing them to perceive they are in direct contact with God and receiving orders from Him. Symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy include hallucinations, muscle contractions or twitching, abnormal mouth movements, sweating or abdominal discomfort; to name a few. The “divine visions” in seizure attacks of this kind are usually very brief — between 30 seconds and a couple of minutes — but they can permanently affect a person’s personality, transforming them emotionally or inducing hyperreligiosity. Between these attacks, these individuals often develop Geschwind syndrome, which symptoms include obsessive writing, loss of interest in sex, and extreme religiousness.

In Acts 9:1-9, when apostle Paul of Tarsus (then named Saul) was walking down to Damascus, he had an ecstatic experience of witnessing light coming down from the sky (visual aura) and hearing God’s voice (auditory aura). He subsequently went blind for three days — a typical result of temporary cortical blindness.

According to neurologists of recent times, the founder of Islam, Prophet Muhammad, had allegedly experienced a history of epileptic seizures linked to religious experiences from the age of six. He encountered his first vision in A.D. 610, where he saw and heard Archangel Gabriel speaking to him while asleep in a cave called Hira, located on a remote hill near Mecca. From then on, he continued to receive revelations from Gabriel up to the time of his death. These were subsequently written down and collected as the suras of the Qur’an. During these periods of revelation, he was also noted to experience bodily spasms and excruciating abdominal pains, twitching in his neck muscles, uncontrollable lip movements and sweating even on cold days.

Saint Joan of Arc is dubbed the national heroine of France. She was 13 when she first heard the voice of God — it came from the right and was usually preceded by a bright light on the same side. Not long after the voice, saints appeared to give her daily advice during her campaigns, even during wars. Between seizures, she displayed all 18 characteristics of Geschwind syndrome, including emotionality, euphoria, a conviction of dedication, a lack of humour, modesty, a strong moral sense, asexuality, impatience, aggression, depression, suicidal tendencies, and extreme piety.

It seems that the divine image imprinted in our brains during early development reemerges during epileptic seizures, along with our mental store of thoughts and convictions. Conversely, in non-Western cultures, this syndrome have never been reported seeing Jesus or a Western image of God during seizure. In Haiti, temporal lobe epilepsy is interpreted as possession by the spirits of the dead and a voodoo curse.

The electroencephalograms (EEGs) of Carmelite nuns have shown marked changes during mystical experiences when they felt they were “one with God”. The scans revealed a complex activation pattern of certain brain areas; in the (1) centre temporal lobe (relating to feeling of being one with God, this region is also activated in temporal lobe epilepsy); (2) caudate nucleus (emotional processes); (3) brain stem, insular cortex and prefrontal cortex (relating to bodily and autonomic reactions that are influenced by emotions and cortical consciousness); and (4) parietal cortex (feelings similar to near-death experiences).

Near-death experience can be caused by oxygen deprivation, extreme fear, high fever, or exposure to chemical substances. The symptoms are as follows: sensation of leaving their body and seeing themselves lying down; traveling at high speed through a dark tunnel with bright light at the other end; being reunited with deceased friends; or experiencing divine apparitions. All of these happen in less than a minute, whereby the compromised brain responds to the situation by retrieving an incredibly rapid stream of memories, thoughts, images and ideas. Memories appear to be recalled at much greater speed than normal, and people have visions of the future. Perhaps, this is what happens when a person is on the brink of death, whereby they’d claim to be “brought back to life” after having “seen God”.

Conclusion

It’s never my intention to shove any doctrines or ideologies down anyone’s throat. This article was done purely out of curiosity for educational purposes. However, the ball is in your court, now that you’ve acquired these information — to make use of the ones deem necessary and discard the remainder.

I hope this has been an enlightening and mind-opening read for everyone. This blog entry is by all means, just the tip of the iceberg. But if it has encourage you to do your own research regarding this topic, then I’ve accomplished my mission.

“Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end, the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own”.

— Bertrand Russell, What I Believe

REFERENCES

Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. Black Swan, 2016.

Harari, Y. N. (2019). Sapiens. Random House UK.

Good News Bible with Deuterocanonical Books / Todays English Version. Thomas Nelson, 1979.

Swaab, D. F., and Hedley-Prôle Jane. We Are Our Brains: from the Womb to Alzheimers. Penguin Books, 2015.

Religion: Crash Course Sociology #39. (2018, January 8). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIgb-3e8CWA

The Big Story: Origins of Religion. (2013, September 9). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9mFNgu6Cww

HISTORY OF IDEAS – Religion. (2015, September 4). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge071m9bGeY

Intelligent Design: Crash Course Philosophy #11. (2016, April 25). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7e9v_fsZB6A

Sweeney, J. (2013, December 18). Letting Go of God. Retrieved from https://translatedby.com/you/letting-go-of-god/original/?page=3

Martin Luther and antisemitism. (2020, April 14). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_and_antisemitism#Anti-Jewish_agitation

Luther and the Protestant Reformation: Crash Course World History #218. (2014, November 29). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1o8oIELbNxE

The Conflict In Kashmir, Explained. (2019, March 21). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyayif_nla8

How this border transformed a subcontinent | India & Pakistan. (2019, June 26). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5Ps1TZXAN8

Danish Muhammad Cartoon Controversy (Pt. 1) | Flemming Rose | FREE SPEECH | Rubin Report. (2017, February 8). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXUXvtoBhUo

Female genital mutilation. (2020, May 3). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_genital_mutilation#cite_note-FOOTNOTEAbdulcadirMargairazBoulvainIrion2011-8

Aquinas & the Cosmological Arguments: Crash Course Philosophy #10. (2016, April 12). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgisehuGOyY

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas Explained. (2016, December 8). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7JYGOhgnKc

Gospel of Thomas: Why Is It Not In the Bible? (2016, August 2). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDQ0w_f5P2s&t=327s

Anselm & the Argument for God: Crash Course Philosophy #9. (2016, April 4). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmTsS5xFA6k

Sina, A. (n.d.). Muhammad and Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE). Retrieved May 5, 2020, from http://www.faithfreedom.org/Articles/sina41204.htm#_ftn5

Bond, H., Goodacre, M., Ilan, T., Maunder, C., Peskowitz, M., & Charlesworth, J. (2011, August 2). Mary. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/history/virginmary_1.shtml