Believers always presume they have the all the answers to every question. So being as “smart asses” like they always have been, they seem to think that they have an authority especially in the questions of origin.

Do religions such as Christianity have the answer, or are they also facing a wall when it comes to the question of origin?

An egotistical Christian stated that the question of origin was solved by the Bible...well he said that this was what he and other Christians like him believe. What? What he believe? Oh my papaya! So It just a matter of what you believe huh? He just “believes” what was written in the Genesis narrative.

To believe in something doesn’t necessary follow that it is true. I can believe that the Arroyo Government is not as corrupt as what the opposition wanted it to appear to be. I can believe that every state policy here in the Philippines is being dictated by the Americans. I can believe that Born-Again Christians is really a CIA operative plan to suppress a country’s development by choking its people with Bible garbage.  But that is just a statement of belief.

When a person believes in something, he’s just accepting something as either true or false. Yet mere belief can be challenged. When Claudius Ptolemy “believes” that Earth is in the center of the solar system, it was challenged centuries later. We can’t blame Ptolemy for being naïve. Remember, back in his time, a lot of people believe in astrology. No one on those times challenge the claims of astrology, maybe except for a few. For example, in the Essays of Idleness, written in 1332 by Tsurezuregusa of Kenko questioned Japan’s belief on the Red Tongue Day and on astrology in general.

In Ptolemy time, we can’t distinguish the difference between astrology and astronomy.

Beyond the time of Ptolemy, the writers of the Jewish Tanack seem to be more badly informed. Those authors were really not too interested on planetary motions or even if there is life on other planets. For them, the Earth is the center of the universe. They believe that planet Earth is the foot stool of the god. This planet is god’s perfect creation. If you will read their creation story, you will notice that god created Earth first before the Sun, the moon stars and the other planets. Genesis 1:1 talks about the creation of earth (land) and the heavens (the atmospheric heaven “shamayim”). There is no concept of outer space in ancient Hebrew. They believe that outside planet earth is a very large reservoir of water. Notice that the Hebrew word for heavens is shamayin, which contains the word “water” or “mayim”. Genesis 1:2 is very clear about that.

The ancient Hebrews also believes that Earth is divided by “day” and “night” (Genesis 1:3-6).  The never know anything about Earth’s rotation around the Sun which causes day and night. They also don’t know that when night comes in Palestine, it is morning somewhere in the Pacific.  Also the Hebrew writers seem to be very ignorant in the issue concerning what light is. Today we now know that light is not something that can be separated from darkness. Light is an electromagnetic radiation from an energy source like the sun or stars, and darkness is merely the absence of light.

Since they believe that outside planet Earth is a large reservoir of water, they think that God placed a solid vault (a firmament or “raquiya”) between the middle of the waters, to separate one body of water from the other (Genesis 1:6). In this solid vault, God created the Sun to govern the day and the moon and the stars to govern the night. So the heavenly bodies were placed in the dome. The ancient Hebrew believes that all those “heavenly bodies” revolve around this solid dome...like a lighted menagerie that rotates above a baby’s crib. Here, planet Earth is secured in a foundation of pillars (Job 26:11 and Psalms 104:5). In that solid firmament are trap doors or flood gates that released the rain (Gen. 7:11). The ancient Hebrews doesn’t know anything about the water cycle and that clouds came from water vapor. That is ancient Hebrew cosmology.

Yet they believe it. Today we may scoff at the idea. The Roman Catholic Church even says that 18 chapters of Genesis are myth.  But as I have said, it is a belief.

Belief is a natural activity of living things. Some even say that animals also “believe” on something. Belief is use as a survival tool. Without the existence of any sentient beings, belief doesn’t exist.

Human tend to believe on things. We believe that time exist, that we are capable of doing the most impossible of tasks and so on. There is even a “freedom of belief”. Yet belief is really a language game. Belief must be coherent to be understood or appreciated. But belief is not the truth. Belief is your representation to the world. That’s why belief doesn’t require immediate sensory data to be able to feed valuable information to the brain. Let see...maybe you’re familiar with sushi huh? Sushi is raw fish, right? If you believe that eating raw fish is gross then automatically you’re disgusted with sushi and sashimi, even if you had never even tried eating one. Biases seem to be part and parcel of belief.

Going back to Ptolemy, earlier we said that Ptolemy believed on a geocentric universe. This is because on Ptolemy’s time this is the most natural idea in the world. Even the Christian world who has been reading the Bible agrees with this.  When a Polish Catholic cleric named Nicholas Copernicus challenged Ptolemy’s Earth-centered system, the Christian church resisted. In 1616 the Roman Catholic placed Copernicus work on the list of forbidden books to be corrected where it remained until 1835. Martin Luther describes Copernicus as an upstart astrologer and called him a fool who wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy.

Yet even Copernicus’ model was challenge. It was in the sixteenth and seventeenth century when ecclesiastical pronouncements were considered as more reliable than scientific matters. Here devotions to divine revelations and arcane theological matters seem to be more intellectual than rational inquiry and scientific method. Yet amidst such condition, Johannes Kepler revolutionized astronomy when he discovered the elliptical orbital movements of planets. Kepler was a deeply religious man, striving for years to prove his theory of “Divine Geometry” in which the planets moved in perfect circles around the sun. Finally, Kepler was forced to abandon his theory, because the observed motion of the planets contradicted the theory’s predictions. Contrary to Christians belief or what they want to believe, Kepler got his inspiration of an elliptical planetary orbit not from the Christian God and the Bible but from a Greek pagan named Apollonius of Perga which matched Tycho Brahe’s observation. According to Kepler, the universe is not perfect (unlike what Christian apologists claim) so since the universe in imperfect, then planetary orbits is not a perfect circle as Copernicus thought. Because of this, Kepler was excommunicated by the Lutheran Church. Three-hundred years later, “modern” creationism maintains that the solar system obeys Divine Geometry!

So that’s the trouble with belief, sometimes it seem to refuse change and revisions.

Let us go on...

This overconfident Christian asked, “What do atheists believe to be the origin of life and everything? Do atheists believe in the Big Bang and Darwin’s Theory of Evolution as the origin?

As I have always stated on all the articles I wrote concerning this subject, the Big Bang and the Theory of Evolution is not about life origin and the beginning. The Big Bang may be the origin of our present universe, but not “the universe” per se. So far, the Hindu religion is the only religion that held the idea that the universe undergoes an infinite number of death and rebirth. According to them, the universe is but the dream of a god who, after a hundred Brahma years, dissolves himself to a dreamless sleep. The universe dissolves with him – until, after another Brahma century, he stir and recomposed and begins again to dream the great cosmic dream.

In India, there is this bronze statue of one of the god Shiva’s incarnation. The Natajara, the Dance King has four hands. In the upper right hand are the drums whose sound is the sound of creation and on the left hand is a tongue of flame which represents destruction...a profound image that picture each cycle of creation and destruction. The Big Bang is not the creation of the universe but merely the end of the previous cycle, the destruction of the last incarnation of the cosmos. In an oscillirating universe, the Cosmos has no beginning and no end and we are just in the midst of an infinite cycle of cosmic deaths and rebirths.

In the issue of the Theory of Evolution, evolution is also not about the origin of life on planet Earth.  The cause of this misunderstanding is when people seem to define the word evolution outside the scientific community.  Evolution, by definition, is a gradual accumulation of functional adaptations. Evolution is a process that results in heritable changes in a population spread over many generations. Biological evolution ... is change in the properties of populations of organisms that transcend the lifetime of a single individual.

In the broadest sense, evolution is merely change – not origin. So a well-informed atheist will not state the theory of evolution as the origin of life on Earth.

Not all religions believe that a god is required in order for a universe or any thing to exist. Jainism believes that the doctrine that the world and the universe were created is ill-advice and should be rejected. Entertaining the thought of an immaterial being created a material universe seems to be too silly. The Chinese story started with an egg and in Philippine mythology, the gods didn’t create humans, they just came out inside a bamboo shoot. Northeastern Siberian mythology even say that a female raven, not a god created the first human.

In Buddhism for example, well we know that Buddhism is a sort of atheistic. They say that the question of beginnings are meaningless questions which reflected gross misunderstanding on the part of the questioner and which in any case had no relevance to one’s spiritual development.

So what do atheists believe to be the origin of life on Earth? Well...believe it or not but an atheist can also believe anything. An atheist can believe in a more naturalistic non-mystical explanation of the beginning of life. If you believe that living things are collections of molecules, like everything else, then it’s really not so hard to explain. 3.85 billion years ago molecules like amino acid began to have the ability to replicate itself (like what polymers can do), it created DNA. DNA was covered by a thin membrane and a nucleus was form. The formation of a nucleus started the formation of organelles. These organelles soon form mitochondrion. Mitochondria manipulate oxygen in a way that liberates energy from foodstuffs. They reproduce at a different time from their host cell. They look like bacteria, divide like bacteria, and sometimes respond to antibiotics in the way bacteria do. From that point...maybe you now know the rest of the story. Evolution will take care of the rest.

There is also the belief that a meteorite brought life in this planet. The Murchison meteorite was found to be 4.5 billion years old, and it was studded with amino acids—seventy-four types in all, eight of which are involved in the formation of earthly proteins. This is called panspermia.

An atheist can also philosophize on the issue regarding the origin of life in a mystical yet non-theistic view like Buddhism. Some will say that life doesn’t begin from anything. Life like energy is neither created nor can be destroyed. It will only shift from one form to another. Yet other atheists can believe that aliens from a highly civilized planet created humans...something that sounded like what Zachria Sitchin is trying to promote. Or they can believe that we are all a product of cosmic coincidence. According to the anthropic coincidence (Carter 1974; Barrow and Tipler 1986) a slightly weaker weak force and we would have a universe that is 100 percent helium. This is not nice because hydrogen will not form, which will be bad news for the formation of stars and life. As Carl Sagan has said, we are all star stuff.

An atheist can also believe that human beings emerge from a bamboo, created by female ravens or to any creation story that doesn’t need a god or gods. But most rational atheists will just tell you that to answer the question of the beginning of life on Earth is purely speculative. A simple answer of “I don’t know” is sufficient than pretending that you know the answer but will reply “God did it”.

Remember, the Christian asked the atheists. An atheist is a person that doesn’t believe that god-concept exists. Therefore, any explanation that doesn’t require a god is atheistic.

But I would like to ask, do god-believers have already answered the question of origin? Does this arrogant Christian who boldly claimed that the Bible have already answered the question of origin really responded the query? All he said was ‘God did it”. The apparent fallacy in this “answer” is that it blindly presumes the conclusion that it sets out to prove. If you begin your case by assuming (1) that God exists, (2) that He is the God of the Christian Bible, (3) that He is omnipotent and omniscient, (4) that He created the universe, Earth, mankind, (5) and that all of His actions are purposeful, then of course your consequent, “logically-deduced” conclusions will identically ape these premises, which you have already believed uncritically by blind faith. Bear in mind that to answer a question saying that “god did it” is really not an answer. As Richard Dawkins and J.Coyne have said, “Why is God considered an explanation for anything? It's not - it's a failure to explain, a shrug of the shoulders, an 'I dunno' dressed up in spirituality and ritual. If someone credits something to God, generally what it means is that they haven't a clue, so they're attributing it to an unreachable, unknowable sky-fairy. Ask for an explanation of where that bloke came from, and odds are you'll get a vague, pseudo-philosophical reply about having always existed, or being outside nature. This, of course, explains nothing.”

So the Christian challenge to atheists to state how everything began was already unraveled. Unfortunately the challenges posted by atheists against Christian believers are still unresolved.

Until next time,

John the Atheist

When discussing Christians and other god believers, there is a common reply that I always took notice of.

I once had an argument with a Christian. Well…the argument was about his so-called proof that his Christian god exist. From the time when this Christian fellow has almost out of ammunitions that he could throw, he retorted by saying that we are entitled to believe or not to believe and he chooses to believe. Well maybe he thinks it’s a best way to end the argument.

But does “believing in something” the best solution? Does “choosing to believe” answer everything?

The media is one powerful tool to rouse people’s belief. I saw this T.V. program…I think it’s 700 Club Asia…It has shown this feature about certain people having this evil power to kill a person just by dropping an egg. Nobody bothered to look into this installment if the story was true…Nevermind…the program’s purpose is to prove that evil literally exist and that’s what they want their Christian viewers to believe. There’s nothing wrong with that…you may think. Have you also notice how local tabloids create their front page?  Forget those large, colored pictures of sexy girls wearing very skimpy bikinis. I’m talking about those large bold letters in the front page. People tend to pay no attention to the news and lean to notice the big picture. You buy those local tabloids thinking that that large headline is really the news bulletin yet you get disappointed when you started reading the report article.  Tabloids are good in misleading their readers. But that’s the point of making sensationalized news…to win buyers. The more people believe, the more income you gain.

Yet not all T.V. programs here in the Philippines are created to mislead the public. I would recommend GMA’s “Investigador”.  Mike Enriquez’s program sure did a good job of exposing cons pretending to be faith healers in his T.V. program. There were episodes uncovering so-called ghost reports, ghost photographs and U.F.O. sightings.  Hmmm I wonder if there will be more “Investigador” in Philippine prime time.

In that ghost episode, sociologists says that Filipino tend to believe every stories about the supernatural. Even if the common Filipinos are already familiar with new technologies available to manipulate pictures they still believe on ghost photography. In a certain experiment, they created a ghost picture using Adobe Photoshop™. Then they showed the picture and asked passers-by what they think. Only few people say that it was a Photoshop™ edited picture. A lot of people interviewed consider it’s the real thing! Some even said that they have certain psychic powers and the “dead man” in the picture is even trying to communicate to them. Gosh!!!! So you choose to believe even if you started to look rather stupid?

Not only does large letters and sensationalized news stir the Filipino imagination to strengthen his belief system. Flamboyant program hosts also contribute to influence the belief of the public viewers. That’s why if you will notice, most Christian evangelists and T.V. preachers yell, cuss and  always utilize finger pointing, condemning televiewers from sinning to God. There’s even this bozo who loves to use bad languages to slam other religions and other Christian sects, reproving them of being fools and stupid. Well that’s because he considers himself as the sole authority when it comes to Bible exposition and hermeneutics. Who will argue to his claim anyway, most of his constituents don’t even read the Bible before joining his razzmatazz. So you may say that there is nothing wrong with that. Joining Christian Fundies will not harm anyone. Well let me strike a chord. Have you forgotten what happened with the Bakers and the PTL Club? Still not convince? Do the names Waco, Texas and Jim Jones ring a bell?

In a lay man’s term, belief is a vague idea in which some confidence is placed, and a lot of people believe in different stuff…yep even atheists. That is because belief is the name given to the survival tool of the brain. Yes, belief is a survival tool to help us to the unfamiliar. Oh and one more thing, when we talk about belief, it may be about “how we want to picture the world” or “how the world is.”

We tend to believe because our brain wants us to believe. You see, one of our brain’s jobs is to protect us, whether physically or mentally. Belief is there to expand the range of our senses so we can better detect danger and improve our chance of survival as we more into unfamiliar territories.

So what’s wrong in believing on something?

When a person believes, then he acts. Now that’s where snags steps in. Well you may say that believing on something like a God is a harmless act, but is it? So ok…ok, you need this big, fat, Kahunna in the Sky…Big deal! There’s nothing wrong with that. But if you started to believe that you have to impose your God’s commandments to everyone else and that you have this heavenly duty to save all lost souls…then we’re in trouble.

You may think this is a yarn. O.K. laugh if you want…but sometimes these things get out of hand. What do you think is the reason of all those “holy war” that happened huh? Oh and those nasty terrorist acts that were done in the name of God? These extremist think that killing infidels and non-believers is a key to enter Paradise. Do you still think it’s a harmless belief? The belief justifies the killing. We sometimes become too inhuman because of our own belief.  A lot of lives were lost because of these religious “belief”.  Oh and don’t tell me that Christianity is an exception. Even Christian church fathers and philosophers are as guilty as the average dolt. People like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. So do you still think that it’s just a harmless thought?

Now why do God-fearing believers kill just because they believe in the existence of a certain god? First, believers kill other human beings because they believe that their God wants them to do it. Islamic terrorism is a good example of this sort of behavior. Second, far greater numbers of people fall into conflict with one another because they define their moral community on the basis of their religious affiliation.

Now just imagine if a person will believe to take Luke 19:27 literally?

But that are extreme cases.

Beliefs sometimes justify sexism and bigotry. The Hindus believe in the caste system and look what it brought them. A lot of Indians were discriminated because someone labeled them as “untouchables” – the lowest level of the caste system. Some women in Middle East countries are discriminated because of the belief that men are created higher than women. A lot of homosexuals were treated badly because people believe that homosexuality is a sin. AIDS is believed to be a punishment from God that is why some self-righteous bastard may discriminate a person that is HIV positive. Black people are discriminated by white people because they believe that the Aryan race (white race) is superior. Western (like some Americans) discriminate Asians and so on…Yep the wonder of what belief can do to your world.

Rural folks in the Philippines believe in the powers of herb doctors (albulario) and witch doctors… even in this information age, a lot of Filipinos still rely on supernatural treatments. Again you may say there is nothing wrong with that. But do you know that there are some people in our barrios today that believe cancer will be cure just by rubbing coconut oil and saliva on a certain part of the body. That “pagtatawas” can detect certain body ailments and that epilepsy is cause by goblins and “lamang-lupa”. Good grief! Because of lack of proper treatment, these patients suffer to more complications instead of being cured.

So before you tell me your right to believe and that you “choose to believe” something, may I suggest that a little investigation will not hurt.

Until next time,

Ciao!

John the Atheist