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
