Defining the One True

A Single Act of Faith

“Faith is believing that the universe is on our side, and knows what it's doing.”
Marianne Williamson.

Many people of the world go through life worried about whether God would approve of their lives.  This is far from a trivial question to one who believes in God and the afterlife.  The majority of one's existence, whether they spend eternity in the bliss of Heaven or the everlasting torture of Hell, depends on it.

With such high stakes, they might find it difficult to accept all that scientific talk about evolution and other such stuff.  Whether it makes sense or not, the question becomes; of which view does God approve?

How do we know what is the right thing to believe with such high stakes?  Some people want to believe in God but find that they can not agree with the views of their church.  Others don't in their heart don’t believe in God but are so concerned about the possibility of Hell that they do their best to fake it; to force a belief where none exists.

Some believe in God but can't stand the Bible/Koran/other religious belief or writing.  Others were born without a religion and are mystified by the number of religions to choose from.  Some jump from religion to religion once a month, perhaps thinking they'll be safe if they have a little taste of all of them.

I refuse to believe that God will condemn millions of good people to hellfire simply because they don't follow the proper religion.  It might be true.  I can't disprove it.  No one can.

But I just believe that if God were truly intending to be that strict, then there would be more just the Bible or Koran to go by as a rule book.  There would be simple, clear, and unambiguous rules, constantly coming down from heaven.  They would be updated continually as times change, perhaps either clarifying the old rules, or creating new ones.

Of course, if God HAD done this, the Bible would now be larger then all (100) volumes of the United States Code Annotated.  People wishing to own a copy would have to set aside large areas of their basement.

Still, why doesn't he?  Perhaps it is just because God feels that everything that needs to be said has been said already in the first book.

But there is more than one book to choose from, and, even within a single book, there are as many interpretations as to the messages contained within, as there are people who study them.

That really doesn't need to matter, I know.  We still might be expected to choose the right book by being guided by some Inner Light, and to instinctively know exactly what the right interpretation of the messages are.

I just don't choose to believe it.

I believe that, since God is refusing to tell us the right choices to make in life, that God wants us to find our own answers.

And how do we find these answers?  By reading the book and going to church?

Partially, perhaps.  But how do we determine if the preacher or minister or whatever is up there in front is really telling us the word of the One Who Created Us All, or if he's just some guy from the street that put on some fancy robes.

I think, to an extent, we judge the value of what we hear in church by comparing it to what life has already taught us.  When one religion tells us to honor our fathers and mothers, we compare this to what we have already learned in life, and perhaps say, "Yea, it makes sense to honor my father and mother."

When we hear another preacher say that evolution never happened, and that all-that-is was created in six days about four thousand years ago, and we compare this to what we see and what life seems to be telling us, and see if it this makes sense.

There is one thing in common with all religions, no matter what they're all about.  And that's the fact that they give us rules about life.

And if these rules weren't at least somewhat useful, if they weren't at least somewhat effective in solving the problems they set out to solve, the chances are they wouldn't be followed for very long.

But God created life.  God created the universe and all that exists within it.  God set up the rules of existence.

And this is here my single act of Faith comes in.

My single act of Faith tells me one, very simple, very easy to assume thing.  It does not require a belief in any book or any concept that runs counter to natural skepticism or conventional wisdom.

My faith is: if God exists, then God is fair.

Not too big a leap, is it?

But, virtually every difficulty that religion has ever faced can be understood and solved if this single act of faith is taken into account.  It gives us a direction to look toward to solve problems, both those in our selves and in societies.  It shows us in what ways purposes lie.  It explains so much.

But first of all, I must first explain exactly what I mean by, "fair".

It doesn't say that the universe God created is fair, and that everything that ever happens in the universe if fair to each individual in it.  This is so obviously not true that it is ludicrous.

Is it fair that I was raised in a middle class family and have never known true hunger or extreme pain, when there are thousands of people who die every day of starvation, who are suffering for crippling, painful diseases, all without doing anything apparently wrong?  Am I that special in God's eyes?  Am I one of the chosen ones?

No, I don't think so.

Yet, I do feel that God would be fair in how he interprets our actions, if these actions determine who gets into Heaven and who doesn't, but that isn't what I am really talking about, either.

My idea of fairness has more to do with the way that God would have set up the universe, and basically about the nature of reality.

It is possible that God planted the dinosaur bones, deliberately made our genetic structure similar to that of the apes, deliberately makes our carbon dating results incorrect, deliberately made the universe appear far, far older then the Bible allows for.

But I just don't believe it.

I don't think that God is lying to us, as a test of our faith or for any other reason.

There is no way of proving this.

God, all powerful in concept, can easily make us believe anything that God wants us to believe.  God could make us see red as green.  God could make it appear that the Earth goes around the Sun when actually the sun goes around the Earth, or the Moon, or Mars, or nothing at all.

God could, conceptually, change our thoughts and emotions toward things, either making us deliberately choose a poor course of action (as was done to the pharaoh in the book of Moses), or to choose the correct one against our will.  God could make us believe false proofs of things, or disbelieve proofs that are true.

God could, conceptually, do all of these things.

But it is in this direction that paranoia lies.  It is my act of faith that says that God would not do any of these things.  I believe that God is honest with us, that what we see around us is actually what is here.  That our proofs are as correct as we can make them, and if they are for whatever reason, false, they are false merely because of our own faulty reasoning, not because of God's interference.
What's more, I believe that, if God does choose to deceive us, for whatever reason, what God deceives us in is what God wants us to believe.

If we find evidence that evolution actually happened, EVEN IF IT DIDN'T, it would mean that God WANTS us to believe that evolution happened.  If the Universe appears old and it isn't, then it is because God wants us to think that the Universe is old.

I will take this belief one step further yet.  I believe that if we study the universe, if we study human behavior, social interaction, the relationships of man and nature, the nature of physics and the physical world, and everything, and if we can come to some conclusion based what seems to work best taking everything into account, then we will automatically be following God's plan.
It all stems back to my single act of faith, that God is fair.  I do not believe that God would create a Universe that suggests optimal behavior as being one thing when God actually wants us to do something else.

If God created the universe, then God's plan is all around us.  It is built into the nature of things, just waiting for us to discover it.  It is wired into the chemical nature of our brains.  It is built into the natural laws of physics and economics and social interaction.

I believe that, the closer we are to following God's plan perfectly, the more satisfied with life and existence we will ultimately become.

My Faith tells me that the answers as to how we should best live our lives are all around us.  They are built into the fabric of existence.

Creation Myth #56,042

Genesis
(The Prequel)

In the Beginning, God was bored.

It was not a boredom of a lazy Sunday afternoon, just after one finishes cutting the grass and it's another three hours until dinner and there's nothing good to watch on TV.

It was rather the boredom of being locked in solitary confinement for ten years in a dark cell with nothing to do and no one to talk to and no sounds to listen to and nothing to see but the dim outlines of a bed and a toilet bowl.

Only, for God, it was several orders of magnitude worse.

He existed.  Not much else could be said.  There was not even a universe around for Him to exist in, let alone a toilet bowl for Him to contemplate.

Being all-powerful was great, wonderful, fantastic, and all that, but, there being nothing around to be all-powerful with, He was seriously pressed for something to do.

By definition, being all-knowing meant that He already knew everything (duh!), so He really didn't have anything to think about, except the obvious, and the obvious thing most pressing on His mind was that He was bored.

He had existed an infinite amount of time before (non-time, really, as time had yet to be invented), and it looked as though He was going to exist an infinite amount of non-time to come.

Given the past history of the nonexistence He existed in, nothing looked too promising for an exciting future.

Being all-wise, He knew that His current state of boredom was emotionally unhealthy.  But having already lived an infinite period of non-time as He did, He occasionally experimented with unhealthy emotional states.

What else, after all, was there to do?

He had whiled away a great deal His nonexistent time twiddling his great, majestic, Godly thumbs, waiting for something great to happen, which, of course, He knew to be silly, because (being the only thing existing), He knew that, if anything great were going to happen, He would have to be the one to do it.

For a while, He contemplated creating something large, perhaps on a galaxy-like scale, but had a lot of difficulty seeing the point of doing so.  Since he would know it perfectly anyway, and know its every action and complete history even before He created it, why bother?  What difference would it make, philosophically speaking, in the long run?

And, for God, all He really had was the long run.

He became discouraged after this.  Out of sheer boredom, just for the ducks of it, He briefly caused His own nonexistence.  This failed to satisfy Him much either, so He brought Himself back shortly thereafter.

"Enough of this!" He finally said to Himself.  "What I need," He thought, "is a challenge.  Something I won't know the outcome of in advance.  I need companionship, yes.  But what I really need is, a surprise!"

Being omniscient, He knew that to do this would involve creating a paradox, but, being all-wise as well, He decided that He could live with this without any deep emotional traumas.

All He had to do was come up with a good way of surprising Himself.

To achieve true companionship, He would need to create something just as, if not more, unpredictable than Himself.  Better yet if it had to have His level of omniscience and omnipotence.  An exact duplicate of Himself would never do, of course.  That would just result in two of himself being just as bored as one.  No point in talking to Someone when You already knew everything they would ever have to say.

To not be bored with this new omniscient being (or beings), God decided that it or they would have to evolve independently of Himself, with minimal guidance.
And -- He would have to not be able to predict exactly how this evolution would take place.

Tricky to do, being omniscient and all, but, being all-wise and all-powerful, He thought of a way to do it.

He would create and extremely large thing, something He would call a Universe.  It would be so complicated that the tiniest change in any portion of it could affect the actions of the whole.  Being omniscient, he could of course figure out all the changes that would occur from the initial change.  Because this new Universe thing would be so large, however, it would take Him just as long to figure it out as it would take to happen in real life.

So, God manipulated the laws of reality just so.  The resulting laws would be capable of evolving another all-powerful being.  He just set up the rules, though.  He could never guarantee that an all-powerful being would evolve.  He could never even guarantee that life would even be created.

But, it was the best He could do, given His objective.

God looked at the new laws of reality, and saw that they were good.  With a snap of his great, majestic, Godly fingers, he set the Universe and the rules of existence into motion with a bang!

And He hoped to Himself that He wouldn't regret it.

The Secular 12 Step Program

Last year, while trying to learn to cope with my procrastination tendencies, I looked into the traditional "12 step" program designed to help people overcome their addictions.

The problem was that I couldn't get past all of the "giving myself completely over to God" stuff.  Not that I couldn't see advantages to doing it that way, but rather that it was just not for me.

So I developed a 12 step program for atheists, agnostics, or theists who would rather try it without the Big Guy's help.  Here it is, for whatever it's worth.

The Secular 12 Step Program

1. I admit I am powerless over my flaws -- that my life has become unmanageable.
2. I believe that releasing my ownership and self-reproach of the problem is the key to my sanity.
3. I have decided to turn my life over to my imaginary Perfect Self, and to let this self take care of it.
4. I have decided to make a searching and fearless inventory of myself.
5. I have decided to admit fully and honestly to myself and another human being the exact nature of my wrongs.
6. I am entirely ready to have my defects of character removed.
7. I ask my Perfect Self to help me remove my shortcomings.
8. I will make a list of all persons I have harmed, and become willing to make amends to all of them.
9. I will make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. I will continue to take personal inventory and when I was wrong, I will promptly admit fault.
11. I will seek through meditation to improve my connection to my Perfect Self, seeking for wisdom, and for strength to act it out.
12. Seeing the light as a result of these steps, I will try to carry these messages to others, and to practice these principles in all my affairs.

The Paranoid Principle

After I finished writing the first proof, I kind of hit a road block and felt a moment of panic.  After all, at the beginning of the paper, I promised that I would find a way to not only demonstrate that no proof for the non existence of God exists, but also that no proof would ever exist for His existence.

And, while I did the first part, I didn't know how to do the second.

I knew that such a proof existed.  I never doubted it for a second.  It just seemed so obvious to me, almost like a gimme.  But, now that I had committed myself to the gunfight and was walking the eighth step of the ten paces away from my opponent, I realized that I didn't know how to shoot.

Finally, I seized on a principle that I had gathered from reading science fiction.  The more ridiculous and far out the example, the better it can sometimes illustrate the point that needs to be gotten across.  A situation that is incorrect at the extremes of reason will show where the same situation falters within the bounds.

To demonstrate that no proof for God exists, therefore, was much more subtle then the Proof of the Mischievous God, and relied on a chain of unlikely events.  It was based on the idea that one doesn't require an all powerful being to deceive us.  That is, a lesser being may be able to get the job done.  Human beings can be very gullible sometimes, after all.  I called this proof . . .

The Paranoid Principle

1. Let us suppose that God does not exist.
2. Let us further suppose that there exist more advanced civilizations than ours that wish to deceive us, for whatever reason, into believing that our proofs for God's existence are correct.
3. As these civilizations are not God, they are not all knowledgeable or all powerful.
4. Since the civilizations are not all knowledgeable or all powerful, the possibility exists for us to find a way to disprove the false proof which the advance civilization could not anticipate or prevent.
5. It is possible, however, that a more advanced civilization could then offer us another proof in which the disproof of the previous proof doe not apply.
6. To this proof it will be possible to apply 3, and to this it is possible to apply 4, ad infinitum.
7. We could never be certain that we are not being deceived into believing our proofs until we ourselves become all powerful and all knowledgeable, at which point the question becomes academic.

The reason why I called this the paranoid proof is that it pre supposes that everyone in the universe is against us.  The mere fact that this pre supposition is ludicrous does not rule it out as being a possibility.

At the end of the paper, I concluded that, in using these two proofs, it is possible to disprove virtually any other proof in the known or unknown universe, and that the mere possibility of a mischievous God necessitates it.  I then said that, as these proofs will never get us anywhere in the practical living of our lives, it would probably be best to ignore them and get on with the business of living it.

The Proof that No Proof can Exist for God's Non-existance

My professor for Section 4 of Philosophy 100 was Dr. Kathleen Wider, who I enjoyed immensely.  We talked and learned about all that mind-bending philosophical stuff that introductory philosophy professors love to use to confuse their students.

After a while, we got to our God chapter, and we began discussing all kinds of not-very-good proofs for God's existence, and a lot of less bad but still incomplete critiques of the proofs, and we were told it was time to write our first and only paper.

The assignment I settled on discussing would have involved disputing or supporting the arguments of St. Thomas Aquinas in his proofs of God's existence, or of critiquing or supporting a non saint named W.I. Matson's arguments against them.  I had glanced over the arguments on both sides long enough to know that I wasn't interested in doing this.  I was sure that hundred's of thousands of philosophy students around the world had critiqued this stuff millions of times over, and if no consensus had been reached by now, then probably no consensus would ever be reached.

I decided that, instead of writing what I was supposed to write, I would write something demonstrating that both of them were wrong, and that, in fact, anyone who ever dared to write anything about religion was also wrong.

So, as a first step, I naturally spent six-and-a-half of the seven days I had been given for the assignment writing a word processor from scratch.

This kind of stupidity came easily to me.  I had spent about two years of my life lamenting that I couldn't keep track of my schedules because I couldn't get the schedule program I was writing on my computer to work.  It honestly never occurred to me just to go out and buy a date book.

So, there I was, the day before my paper was due, and I had perhaps three or four hours to prove that the proofs that philosophers and theologians had been working on for the past six thousand years were all a waste of good parchment.  All on a word processor that had never even been tested before, let alone employed for something useful.

I didn't have a plan, but I did have a purpose.  I thought a few moments, came up with what seemed to be a reasonable strategy, and started writing without even bothering to think the problem all the way through.

As a first step, I demonstrated that no proof could ever exist for the non existence of God.  I called this…

The Proof of the Mischievous God

1. Suppose that God exists, and that this God is all powerful and all knowing.
2. God can, then, influence the human mind and make one believe whatever He wants us to believe.  This would certainly fall under the heading of what an all powerful person could do.  (As for making us believe anything, I'll deal with Descartes another day.)
3. God could, for example, cause one to believe a false proof for God's non existence, and to believe it for as long as He so chooses.
4. Therefore, there can exist a situation where a proof for God's non existence exists despite God's persistent existence.
5. Under these circumstance, the proof would be false.
6. There would be no way to determine if these circumstances exist, because God, being all powerful and all knowing, could keep us from finding out.
7. Any proof for God's non existence could therefore be false beyond our ability to prove otherwise.
8. Since a good proof, by its definition, can never have a false conclusion, it follows that God's non existence cannot be proved.

This is, of course, only one-half of the proof necessary for my purpose.

At this point in the paper, I noted that the proof had the really cool side affect of disproving the proofs of virtually everything that man had ever done.  All one has to do is insert the appropriate proof name in the appropriate places and watch its truthfulness erode.

Anyway, back to the paper.  I pointed out at this point that I wasn't stating that I believed that God would actually do anything as mischievous as what He does in the proof, only that He could, and that even this possibility is what makes the proof work.

I went on to point out that probably the one proof that this proof doesn't disprove is the existence of a proof for God's existence, which was my original goal.  How could it be possible, after all, for a non existent God to make a proof of God's existence incorrect.

And, while an existing God can make the steps of a proof incorrect, He can't disprove the conclusion without causing his own non existence, which would make the proof doubly wrong.

I will continue with the other half on another day.

My Personal Vow to the Reader that I am Not a Lunatic

            I, Steven Herod, swear that I have not in any way received any personal notification from God, Allah, Satan, Zeus, or either of my cats that my ideas are correct.  I have received no edicts written on tablets of stone, golden or otherwise.  I have never had a vision, unless you want to count that once as a child when I saw helium balloons floating all over the place after a particularly disquieting birthday party which had no religious significance what-so-ever.

            If He has ever spoken to me, He has done so in that nudge-you-in-the-ribs kind of way that says, "Am I God, or am I your imagination?  I know, but you will never be sure.  Sucks to be you!"