The rise of atheism and the fall of God reflects the deepening chasm that prevents humanity from being human

In the beginning, something created what we call the universe and life. Theistic religions call that something “God” while atheists call it “something.” If atheists think or believe that science will someday reveal the genesis of life and the physical world, then atheists have faith that science will eventually deliver the answer. They have faith in science. If an atheist believes that we will never know, the atheist is also engaging in an act of faith — faith that mankind cannot ever discover the answer.

Faith is not an act that requires belief without evidence. It is merely a belief rooted in evidence of one’s own interpretation of what constitutes evidence. The moral battle between atheism, agnosticism and religion requires faith on all sides.

Agnosticism takes the middle road, accepting that the existence of God cannot be proved or disproved by any evidence, scientific or otherwise. It leaves open the idea of God’s existence, while also not discounting the idea that God could be an imaginary creature created by conscious beings who yearned for meaning in their misery and understanding of their place in the world.

The agnostic, therefore, has faith in the inability for human beings to know the truth.

The biggest challenge for anyone contemplating the “why is there something rather than nothing” question, or the “why are we all here” question, is this: Are we willing to accept that fact that, even if we know the answer to the origin of the universe, regardless of who is right, will we really be able to understand it? That is, is our intellectual capacity capable of processing the origin of the universe?

The atheist’s perspective

Renowned atheist Dr. Richard Dawkins claims that the impetus that sparked the Big Bang was something simple. Admitting to not knowing what that simple thing is, he has faith that it is simple, because he is using evidence that he has determined to be credible to support his claim (although I’m not sure what that evidence is, really).

While explaining how it’s impossible that an intelligent being could be responsible for the Big Bang, Dr. Dawkins falls victim to that Ayn Randian, self-deifying trend that human beings have an intelligence capable of understanding everything in existence. Going backward in time, Dr. Dawkins explains his thoughts on reaching the beginning.

“The one thing that's not going to work is terminating it by some sort of highly complex intelligence,” he said on Britain’s Late Late Show. “You're going to terminate it by something simple. The Big Bang is a very, very simple event. Physicists don't understand it yet, but it certainly won't be a conscious intelligence designing the thing, because that requires a gigantic amount of explanation in it’s own right, you've explained nothing at all if you do that.”

Herein lies the dilemma — Dr. Dawkins, like many of us, including yours truly, falls victim to the illusion that human beings have the capacity to explain or understand everything in existence. For argument’s sake, if God exists, how can we, as mortal beings with a finite lifespan and a concrete sense of time, how can we expect to understand the mind of a being that has existed for eternity? That is the ultimate exercise in hubris and narcissism, because we assume that we can understand something that, in reality, transcends our capacity for understanding.

In the apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, he notes that only a person can know his or her own mind. “In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God,” Paul wrote. And if the difference between human beings is infinitely more trivial than the difference between a person and God, how then can we assume to know the mind of the Creator when we can’t even know the mind of our spouses?

Dr. Dawkins assumes that if there is a God, it would inspire far more questions than answers, “because that requires a gigantic amount of explanation in its own right…” Should God exist, would we really think we would be able to explain why God exists? Religion only attempts to explain the nature of humanity in the context of an eternal Creator, it does not attempt to explain the origins of God, at least not in the Abrahamic religions, which, by virtue of monotheism, avoid any idea that God’s origin can be explained. Even most polytheistic religions cite a singular entity as the sole source of the gods.

Of course, religion bases its validity on being created by God, so therefore it claims to be an extension of the will of the Creator, with each religion claiming to be either the sole ambassador or a member of ambassadors to human beings from the Creator. But this isn’t so much about religion — as atheism and agnosticism are religions that put other faith-based beliefs in place of God — but it’s more about the origin of existence. 

Agnosticism and exploration

There are only two plausible explanations for life as we know it — intelligent design or something else. In some ways agnosticism offers us an objective lens through which we can search for answers. In this case, the search is the answer, because an agnostic knows that it is impossible to know whether or not God exists. For the agnostic, obtaining knowledge through the search for the answer to an unanswerable question is the goal.

This borders on intellectual masturbation rather than exploration, in my opinion. It’s similar to a person searching for the fountain of youth. A life spent searching for something elusive that yields no results aside from knowledge gleaned during the pursuit makes it worthwhile on a personal level, but how does it improve the nature of our understanding of our place in the universe?

For the atheist, the answer is that there is no intelligent creator, and the goal is to search for evidence that the universe was created by something else. For the theist, it’s proving the universe began by a Creator.

There is the growing trend in humanistic society to assume that spirituality is personal, that each person has a unique experience with the spiritual realm that religion inhibits by its mere existence. Even in the Rastafari religion the personal road is valued as the path to a relationship with the Creator. But personal journeys are only part of the story, and it matters more how that personal journey interacts with, negatively or positively, other personal journeys. To blindly seek enlightenment while ignoring the trail of unintended consequences is nothing short of ignorant narcissism.

Religion, of course, is strewn with dogma and ignorance and hate. But this is a product of human beings, not religion. Religion is a tool, and like any tool, it cannot be blamed for the purposes given to it by fallible human beings. One cannot blame the hammer just because someone used it to kill someone else. That hammer can also be used to build a house. Religion has also been used to save lives, through people like Martin Luther King Jr., Mohandas Gandhi, Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Bishop Desmond Tutu, etc.

Atheism and theism and agnosticism are not the problems. It’s intolerance of other people’s belief systems that is the problem. This has been the problem with humanity since the dawn of our kind.

God?

Let’s take the existence of God as matter of pragmatism. First of all, believing in an imaginary God, should God not exist, is arguably a better position to take than not believing in God should God exist. It’s better to be wrong and be a believer than be wrong and not be a believer. Faith in God is not a blind leap of faith. Even an imaginary God serves people better than no God at all.

While God exists for yours truly, God doesn’t exist for many others. My understanding of God is that God is not without a sense of humor. If people die and don’t believe in God, and believe their consciousness ceases to exist and all that’s left is a corpse, then that is precisely what will happen to them. Self-fulfilling prophecy at its most ironically poetic.

Now, this doesn’t mean that if I believe that I will die and become king of some angelic place and be the focal point of 72 virgin women then it will happen; on the contrary, believers in God are faced with more scrutiny than those who don’t believe in God because they have taken up the responsibility of being ambassadors of the Creator for those on Earth. Like the apostle James said in his first epistle: “…those of us who teach can expect a stricter judgment.”

And most people know these “God ambassadors” are not doing such a great job. As the apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans, quoting scripture: “It is your fault that the name of God is blasphemed among the pagans.” Pagans can easily be substituted for atheists and other non-believers today — people who turn from God because those who talk about how great God is while living a life of intolerance and ignorance make God appear intolerant and ignorant. That’s not the kind of entity that deserves obedience, no wonder why so many people are losing faith.

Atheism is gaining popularity, earning coverage by influential columnist David Brooks of the New York Times and others at the powerful media company. Bill Maher and Family Guy’s Seth MacFarlane talked with great pride of the growth of atheism, with MacFarlane basically saying in 200 years atheism would be the status quo religion.

If people continue to ruin God by acting ridiculous in God’s name, then MacFarlane’s off-the-cuff estimation could be overshot by 150 years. People who believe in God but are intolerant of others, specifically gay people and believers in other religions, are killing God on Earth. People who claim the Bible is the end all/be all sanctioned word of God but cannot find it in themselves to respect a woman’s right to choose are giving credence to the atheist cause. Dogmatic beliefs about the age of the earth and evolution add more fuel to the fire.

Atheism is attractive in many ways. It inspires an unparalleled notion of wonder at what could be the beginning, while simultaneously freeing the mind from burdens of afterlife salvation or damnation, thus allowing the person a sense of freedom that religion blocks in many people. One cannot dispute the beauty of a religion that puts human beings at the apex, as we are, after all, quite remarkable creatures, even with all our flaws which are many. Above human beings is something unknown, but at least attainable to be known, which allows us to think that we are capable of understanding everything there is to know in the universe. A very confident and appealing position to take.

However, true freedom does not come from a realization that death is the ultimate end. That is temporal freedom, a freedom of the material world, a freedom of the ego. Here on earth it looks appealing because it makes our time on earth a pleasure- and knowledge-seeking adventure whose sole purpose is to live and let live, the humanist way. Very romantic and appealing. But it is temporal freedom.

The deeper freedom lives in understanding that our physical body is only a temporary collection of atoms and molecules — tiny particles that have existed since the Big Bang explosion — and our consciousness is only a representation of the physical world that we live in. True freedom lives in the eternal energy that surrounds all things. On a subatomic level, consciousness ceases to exist. All that exists are atoms bouncing off each other, particles disappearing and reappearing randomly, dancing and vibrating to the music of the universe.

Freedom through awakening

Rudolf Steiner observed that our perceptions are based on sensory input, which at best consists of five basic forms of input — sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. Without senses, our comprehension of our entire world would be completely different than it is. What would our consciousness be like should our five senses cease to work? What then? Do we have a capacity to think without sensory involvement?

Yoga and other meditative techniques attempt this very thing — to separate consciousness from sensory input and therefore unite one’s consciousness with the eternal energy.

The God molecule is a great example. The brain’s pineal gland is the very last thing to lose an electrical signal when the body dies. People who have had near-death experiences have been technically dead for short periods of time, but the pineal gland remained active until they were resuscitated. The pineal gland carries an electrical signal for hours or sometimes days after death, studies have shown.

The gland’s relationship to what’s known as the God molecule, dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, was explored in the 1990s by Dr. Rick Strassman, who hypothesized that the pineal gland had the components to create DMT, a chemical which appears in all plant matter and is found in trace amounts in all mammals. It is also the active chemical compound in ayahuasca, the ancient Quechua brew that is said to release one from the physical world and allow one’s consciousness to temporarily enter the eternal realm.

Experiences of DMT by scientists and skeptics confirm it does something special. Whether it’s just a blown-up version of psychedelic mushrooms or peyote is debatable, but one cannot discount the natural existence of DMT in almost all life on this planet. It is possible that enough meditation could train the brain to create its own DMT naturally, and one could then reach an eternal consciousness through willpower alone. Many yogis would admit this is possible.

Science can explain the processes that lead to a conclusion — the how. But science cannot explain the why. Perhaps if we spent more time trying to explore what is real and agreeable rather than debating whose right or wrong, we might actually stumble onto the evidence that explains existence. It’s usually when we stop looking for something that it is found. Exploring the pure reality is our best chance to move past ignorant dogma and arrogant skepticism and toward the place that transcends our temporal dualist existence.

Living in subatomic reality

Freedom is in submission to the eternal energy, not ownership of our physical body. Our physical body and mind is nothing short of a miracle, and we own it only for a little while, so why focus on something so temporary? It’s hedonism at its worst. The concept of us being unique individuals is only relevant to our role in the bigger picture. When my singular consciousness unites with the eternal consciousness, my individuality ceases to exist. I am now not I, but we.

I am not pretending that I am something bigger than a temporary collection of atoms, but I am seeking to understand that the atoms that compose my body have existed since the Big Bang sent light into the universe some 10 billion years ago. It’s Isaac Newton’s first law of thermodynamics: matter is neither created nor destroyed in a chemical reaction. If life is nothing but a series of chemical reactions, then all the matter that exists in the universe has been here since the Big Bang. From dust we are taken up, to dust we return.

Does my consciousness transcend my physical body? Could it be split into trillions of atoms upon my death? It sounds almost ludicrous, but my few trillion atoms are nothing compared to the nearly infinite number of atoms that make up the universe.

In the end, knowledge is good for our ego but tolerance is good for our souls. War, greed, corruption, thefts, rape, murder, deception, betrayal, ignorance and fear — these are the things that threaten life on our planet. It’s not God, it’s not atheism, it’s not agnosticism. It’s our own inability to perceive our consciousness as a temporal understanding of a universe that transcends our capacity to understand. This is turn precludes our capacity to be tolerant, because we fail to understand our own personal place in existence, choosing instead to stand fast by one’s position, or worse, flip flop between ideas to soothe one’s longing for meaning.

It’s only until we realize that we know nothing and that it is impossible to know everything, only then will we be free to live in peace with everything. Only then will we be one with everything. Only then will we be free.