The evidence for the existence and nature of God can be found all around us, in the basic observable facts of the universe. If you see a clock, you can posit a clockmaker, whose purpose was to create a clock. Likewise if you see this universe, you can posit a Creator of the universe, whose purpose was to create this universe. The two scenarios are exactly alike. Just as no clock could conceivably spontaneously emerge, due to its complexity all designed to fulfill a single function (which chance shouldn't care about), but could very easily be understood why it exists because it serves a distinct purpose (it tells time for an intelligent being who looks at it), there's no way this universe could emerge by random chance.
Okay, conceivably, if there are infinite universes then any possible formulation of matter could emerge by random chance, including even a universe where all whirling atoms by pure coincidence combined to form nothing but clocks. But this is a ludicrous stretch because the probability of such an event is infinitely lower than the probability of the clocks being purposefully created by a Creator. Occam's razor, the lynchpin of science and clear thinking, says that the simplest explanation that fits the facts is always best. A clock universe emerging by random chance is far less likely than a clockmaker making a clock.
How does this universe look and act similar to a clock? Humans are the clocks of this universe. This vast universe, 13.7 billion years old, trillions of stars, surrounded by trillions of planets, all of which have had 13.7 billion years to support life, and yet look around you, the only thing in the universe is humans. There is no alien life anywhere. If there were sentient alien life anywhere, it would have visited us by now, or at least be visible via radio signals picked up by our telescopes. The convoluted explanations for why aliens exist all around us but somehow perfectly hide their existence from us again doesn't meet the criteria of Occam's razor. Yes, such explanations are conceivable, but they are less probable than the simple explanation that the reason we don't see any aliens is because there aren't any.
Which means this entire universe, this vast megascape of trillions of stars and 14 billion years, exists solely and only to support human life. It served no other purpose. All the laws of physics produced only humans and nothing else but dull chemical reactions that couldn't be of any interest to anyone. A few simple molecules, some hydrogen fusing into helium, some cold rocks floating out in space, lots of dust, whoopdee doo. If life emerges naturally according to the laws of physics and humans aren't special, why are we alone in the universe? Life should be everywhere already. Sentient life should be everywhere already. It is not actually difficult to go from life to sentient life. Since there is an evolutionary advantage to ever greater intelligence, and since many different species on Earth have become more intelligent over time, there is no way sentient life doesn't emerge naturally from life.
I'm sure there's some hand-wavy explanation for how, uniquely, even though there is multicellular life everywhere else in the universe for some bizarre coincidence none of it ever evolved towards intelligence on all the trillions of other planets and moons whirling around trillions of other stars in the universe. But Occam's razor says the simplest explanation is best, and the simplest explanation for why intelligent life emerged nowhere else is because life didn't emerge anywhere else.
It's even worse. If life is indeed everywhere in the universe but none of it ever evolved to sentience, the paradox is yet more inexplicable. How does life specifically avoid evolving towards greater intelligence on every other star but every lifeform on Earth keep evolving towards intelligence -- ravens, crows, dolphins, monkeys, octopuses, pigs, wolves, parrots, all the hominids that predate homo sapiens like Neanderthals -- through pure coincidence? Through nature? Through random chance following the universal laws of physics? Why do the laws of physics invariably produce intelligence on Earth and invariably fail to evolve life towards intelligence on any other planet orbiting any other star? Is there something unique to Earth's soil? Is the sun composed of unique elements not found anywhere else in the universe? Of course not. Everything about our solar system is normal, using the same assigned elements as found everywhere else in the universe. So there is no mechanism by which Earth evolves intelligent life but the rest of the universe can't for some hand-wavy reason.
Humans are clocks. They are extremely complicated objects that do not emerge spontaneously in nature. Just by seeing one you can surmise a clockmaker. We know humans do not emerge spontaneously in nature because nature has had trillions of stars and 14 billion years to produce a human 'naturally' and it never did. We are alone in the universe. If humans were simple, natural phenomena then we'd meet them as often as light or water or heat. Instead space is a vast empty void.
The human brain is the most complicated structure in the universe. Logically, the most difficult to construct structure, the one with the most restrictions and requirements and effort to assemble, the one least likely to occur without divine intervention, must be the part of the universe God had to purposefully design. If God was just throwing some atoms around for fun, humans wouldn't have happened, we would get a bunch of simple objects like atoms, suns, rocks, dust, water, heat, gravity, etc. But humans did happen, despite being orders of magnitude harder to emerge from the laws of physics than everything else we see in the universe. The purpose of the universe is whatever is furthest from the universe's ground state, because that's what requires the most purposeful action to create. We are the furthest from the universe's ground state, thus we are the purpose of creation. (Or, alternatively, whatever humanity in the future evolves into is the purpose of creation, and we are just scaffolding on the way to constructing God's true design, just like monkeys were mere scaffolding on the way to creating us, but either way we are clearly the vital part of God's plan for this universe)
Through a perfect act of balancing, God created the initial conditions of this universe such that humanity and only humanity would naturally emerge, according to natural emergent phenomena, in all the trillions of stars. God created initial conditions in life, in the first molecules that self-assembled and self-replicated, that despite the endless series of chance events humans would eventually emerge. This is like a pool player hitting a billiard ball with the exact right angle and force such that ten trillion collisions later all the balls except the 8-ball and the cue-ball fall into their assigned pockets. Except much, much vaster and harder a calculation than that. That level of skill could only be described as divine. If not infinite intelligence, it's immeasurable intelligence. So God must have known what he was doing when he created us, he must have had some purpose in mind, and with the level of skill displayed there's no way he messed up and we somehow didn't fulfill his purpose (or won't fulfill it in the future).
This means that every faculty of mankind is there by God's design. Which, by the way, proves God is good. If God were evil, he could have easily evolved lifeforms that were capable of infinite suffering but never dying. He could have evolved life such that it has no capacity for good thoughts or feelings. As stated before, simpler things are easier to construct than more complicated and difficult things. Suffering is simple. Happiness, fulfillment are difficult. They require lots of different conditions and events coming together in exactly the right way and forming exactly the right shape to happen. Any animal can suffer, but only humans can achieve real happiness. (Likewise, any animal can feel pleasure, but human happiness and fulfillment is a mode of thought well beyond anything an animal can replicate). The fact that God went out of his way to give humans the faculty not only for suffering, or pleasure, but also for these higher modes of thinking that lead to higher levels of fulfilment proves that he wanted us to employ those very faculties. And a God who gives us the ability to understand and appreciate love, beauty and truth for the express purpose that we do so cannot be anything other than Good. No other adjective fits such a creator.
The purpose of the universe is humans because we are the most complicated aspect of the universe, which means the universe must revolve around us in order to produce this rarest and most complicated of chance conjunctions. Likewise, the purpose of humans is our most complicated aspect, not any portion of humanity that is shared with lower life forms, but only the parts that are not shared with any other life form, that go beyond them in complexity and flower into something greater. The unique features of mankind that go beyond all the rest of existence -- what are they save our virtues?
Our vices -- selfishness, cruelty, greed, lust, gluttony, etc. -- can all be found in the lower life forms. Evil motivations are always simple and primitive. But our virtues are ours alone. They can only be found in us. Our virtues are thus the purpose of the universe. Virtues require heroic effort by free wills that surpass their lower life form evolved conditioning. They often require we go exactly against our evolved instincts and altruistically sacrifice ourselves. Virtues require serious efforts of intellect and spirit that revolt against the 'easy path,' and specifically choose the harder, more arduous, more roundabout, more long-term, more abstract goal. They are the highest apex of human achievement and thinking.
A virtuous person is more rare and more difficult to produce than a 1600 SAT score or a sprinter who can run 100 meters in less than 10 seconds. Those things, in comparison, are extremely simple and commonplace. Therefore the human body is not God's design (cheetahs are faster), nor is the human mind (computers can do more calculations per second), but only the human spirit (that from which virtues emerge). The most ineffable aspect of human life, the one hardest to copy or emulate through any other process, is again the most complicated structure, and thus the one requiring the most intentional design for it to exist. Our virtues are the things least likely to emerge by chance and least capable of being emulated by anything other than human beings, therefore our virtues were the things most designed and intended by God. What a wonderful creator!
Given that God is Good and God created the universe, Good cannot help but triumph in the end. God is too skilled to mess up and accidentally fail in his creation, look at all the series of chance events he navigated already to produce intelligent life forms with free will in only one corner of an endlessly vast universe. Therefore this must all be part of God's plan. The biggest mistake the old religions make is here. After realizing everything is part of God's plan, they assume God will constantly intervene in the present and the future to 'set us back on the right course' no matter what humans plan on doing themselves. God never intervenes. From the very first moment of creation, God calculated how everything would go from that moment forward, and therefore never has to intervene in his creation again. There are no miracles, no answered prayers, no communication from God to man. Just like when a bowler throws a bowling ball, the initial throw is the only interaction between the bowler and where the bowling ball eventually hits. A good bowler can hit down all the pins without ever touching the bowling ball again. Obviously God can do anything we can do, so it's absurd to posit the need for God to constantly be adjusting his bowling ball's course with extra, illegal touches all the way down the bowling alley.
Whatever course we take, God is okay with us taking that course, and he will never intervene to change it. If that course leads to certain doom and destruction, then God will be satisfied with the decision we made and leave that up to us. "If that's what you want, take it." We are free and have free will. The purpose of our creation was not to put on a puppet show for God, dangling from his hands as he directs our every motion. Obviously that's purposeless. How utterly boring. No one in their right mind would go out of the way, put in so much effort, to create all this stuff and take all this time just so that things would happen exactly in the way God plotted out. If God had already plotted out everything that would happen and we were just going through the motions, why even create us? Simply the thought of our plotted out story in his head would be exactly equivalent to going through the motions, so he would have stopped there, at merely the thought. But we in fact do exist, which means we are more than a plotted out story, we are independent actors creating reality as it happens, with God's purpose merely being to observe it. Essentially we are story tellers whose purpose, as far as God is concerned, is to entertain God with new and interesting stories. One of the thrills of a story is the listener does not know the ending or even what will happen in the next five seconds. God is entertained by virtuous people, or else he would have stopped creation short of virtue's emergence, which would have been easier to create. This entire universe is a playground from which humans can display their virtue, or lack thereof, and the ability to choose is necessary for something to be called virtuous at all. If it were easy, if it were natural, if it were necessary like breathing, it wouldn't be a virtue anymore, but merely a mechanism. It's because we have to choose to do it, because we have to put in effort to accomplish it, because we can ignore it and do something else if we please, only then is it praiseworthy that we went ahead and did it anyway.
The next supposition we can make is that God admires virtue (Good) and doesn't like seeing vice (Evil.) If he found evil pleasant he would have ordered the universe differently. So even though he allows people to be virtuous or vicious according to their own inclination during life, so that the most rich, varied, and unexpected twists and turns happen during his storytime, he would still want, ultimately, for Good to triumph and evil to fail. These are contradictory impulses, but what else is new? Anyone with desire quickly realizes that his various desires commonly contradict one another. God acted with purpose in order to create this universe, therefore he has desires, and therefore it is no wonder that God's desires are also contradictory and often at cross-purposes. An infinite being of infinite intelligence no doubt has infinite desires that are bedeviling him in infinite contradictory ways. The life of a human is much more complicated, the basis for our decisions much more convoluted, than lower life forms in exactly the same manner.
Therefore it's possible to imagine that God wants us to survive and prosper, but will sadly accept us going extinct or degrading back into a pitiful impoverished stone age, for the sake of his higher desire that we be free to embrace our potentialities or deny them and thus have a moral purpose to our lives. Luckily God is all powerful (or at least powerful enough to have created this universe in such a way that it unfolded exactly according to his design, so we can say, immeasurably powerful), so there's no reason why God couldn't have it both ways. Unlike humans he doesn't have to compromise.
And on this logical basis one can surmise an afterlife. All contradictions can be subsumed into the perfect outcome if there is an afterlife. I don't know for sure whether there is an afterlife, it's up to God if he thinks this is better than just creating a new universe with new humans and restarting the story whenever humans screw up and let it end, but if I were God I would definitely include an afterlife feature. This is because injustice is infuriating and only the afterlife can set things right that went wrong in life. God is Good, so he must be as disgusted and infuriated with evil people getting away with everything in life as I am. Why not use an afterlife to finally punish them as they deserve? Likewise, God would be as pained to see an innocent person crushed underfoot by evildoers or unlucky natural phenomena and want to reward them whenever life didn't offer any of its own rewards. So there's at least a very high probability, given what we know of God's psychology, that there are rewards and punishments to be found in the afterlife.
Actually, if it were guaranteed and easily verifiable that rewards and punishments awaited us in the afterlife, we would be just as stripped of free will as if God had forced our hand at every move in this life. With such a weighty sword of Damocles floating over our heads, we couldn't help but make every decision in such a way as would please God, so that we can avoid his punishment and gain his rewards, that will surely exceed anything we can find in this life. Every rational actor would make every decision with God in the back of his mind, thinking, "will God flay me in eternal fire if I do this? If so I'd better not. . ." So the uncertainty of the afterlife is a prerequisite for the meaningfulness of our decisions in this life. We can look forward with hope to the afterlife, but it can never be the determiner of our actions and lives. That would spoil the whole point of this life. In this life we just have to do what is right and let the chips fly where they may.
God staying at a remote remove, not revealing his hand, not telling us what lies in store for us in the future, not telling us what he wants us to do, is all necessary for our free will. The very mysteriousness of what happens after death is necessary for an afterlife to exist. So contradictorily, the fact that God has never sent down any revelations, any instructions, any prophets, any terms or conditions or laws at all, is evidence for heaven and hell far greater than if we could see heaven and hell through a telescope. This is the only heaven or hell God could possibly allow, given that our purpose at creation was to freely play out a story of good and evil across our own soulscapes for God to pleasurably observe. Life is the main goal, so the afterlife, which only serves a secondary goal, can never interfere with the main goal, but only supplement it.
But, one might ask, even the prospect of an afterlife should alter people's free wills into slavishly trying to obey God for fear of punishment or hope of reward, so isn't the afterlife logically banned? Well, look around you. Does the uncertain prospect of an afterlife seem to affect anyone's behavior? It seems to me that humans are not unduly changing their behavior out of fear or obsequiousness. Actually what I see is evil humans acting with impunity, completely unafraid of the future -- and good people choosing good as its own reward, without any regard to extra servings of pudding they might get in heaven. I'm being a little derisive here, but humans can't wait five seconds to get what they want. The afterlife is so far beyond their calculations, so long away, that clearly no one is doing anything with an eye towards the afterlife. It might be a foolish failing of humans, it might not be logical at all, but given the reality we see before us, yes God could have an afterlife and still predict humans would act regardless of it.
If God can have his cake and eat it too, why wouldn't he? Therefore odds are there's an afterlife we're all hurtling towards.
What might the afterlife look like? I have three concepts of heaven I think God might have set up. The first is simple, you get to go to heaven and converse with God, where everything is made clear to you, you might even merge with God and join in his enjoyment of the universe the same way he does. The second concept of heaven is that your next life will be your highest imagined utopia, the life you wanted to live on Earth but couldn't. (A good incentive for people to philosophically construct and imagine as good a utopia as possible while still alive! It just might come in handy when God is handing out just desserts!) The third concept of heaven is much like the mormons posited -- if God finds us worthy he will grant us the power of God and we could then construct the next universe according to our design. Like a master-apprentice relationship with our life being our masterpiece which grants us the right to set up our own shop if the master approves of the work done.
All three of these heavenly possibilities are infinitely better than the heavens described in our religious texts, which shows what frauds all those texts must be.
I only have one concept of hell that I think befits a Good God. It isn't the hell described in the holy texts of mindless, endless, physical torment. I find that to be pathetic and purposeless. The point of hell would be justice, and one of the first principles of justice is that the punishment must fit the crime. If the crime was some physical act of torment, then hell could physically torment you, but it would be finite, just like the torment you caused in life was finite. If the sin you committed caused mental anguish, then physical torment wouldn't be a productive answer at all. Hell would have to cause the same mental anguish as you caused others, by putting you in the position of the receiver instead of the giver of the verbal or situational abuse. The purpose of the mental pain would be to get people to see the evil they had done in life and regret it, because, out of empathy, after finally understanding how painful it was to themselves, they could see how painful it had been to others. This regret would be the purpose of hell. No one should be allowed to live and die with a self-satisfied smirk on their face as they trample over the innocent and leave misery in their wake. But a simple "I'm sorry," after suffering more than all the suffering they visited upon others, would be utterly satisfying.
And for those who only hurt themselves through making one degrading and imbecilic decision after another, I imagine hell would be a sort of tutorial, where God walked you through every decision you ever made that led to evil outcomes for yourself, and held your hand and talked you through each moment, saying, 'now, is this really what you wanted? Is this for the best? Maybe you could have done this instead.' It would be like a kind old grandfather walking a kid through a chess match and explaining that you really shouldn't move your queen in front of a pawn for no reason.
Obviously if an evildoer did a combination of all three things -- physically hurt others, mentally hurt others, and degraded their own spirit or ruined their own life -- then hell would be a combination of all three punishments. But in no case would it ever be infinite. It would only ever be until it fulfilled its purpose. One of the wonderful things about God is that every act of God is purposeful, and God always achieves his purposes. The purpose of hell would be to correct the errors people made in life, once corrected, hell obviously ends.
Is there a cycle of reincarnation, an after-after-life for those who went to hell and emerged on the other side? Who knows. Maybe. Or maybe, once souls have seen the light, they're mercifully extinguished as undeserving of another round, at peace with themselves and their fate. I can't see that far into God's design.
My greatest consolation in life is that I'm definitely headed for heaven.
Also, I use the word 'he' for God because that is the accepted pronoun when discussing God. But God probably isn't a 'he.' God, being perfect, would want to be the perfect shape, which is the human female, not the male, form. And, being perfect, would want to be the most virtuous type of human, which is the giver, the lifegiver, the nurturer, the kind and altruistic female (who is also a Creator), not the nasty, brutish, destructive male. So God's mindset would also be more similar to a woman's than a man's. But of course, God being perfect, she would at least have all the male virtues and intellectual advantages, like being able to face facts, act logically, and have the courage to smite evildoers instead of let them get away with everything. I'm just saying God would be more at home in a female body, not that she'd be a perfect replica of a ditzy female who accepts every sugar-covered lie because it makes her feel better.
I don't think God is an 'it.' An 'it' presumes an existence distant from the human mentality. But God created humans, he didn't create 'its.' He created males and females. He created spirits and minds like ours, that think like we do. Therefore this is his preferred mode of thought, his preferred range of virtues, and therefore he is more human than not. He would definitely have a human-like existence, not a computer-like 'it' form devoid of desire or passion or care. Given that God is human-like in soul, and given that girls are more beautiful in body and soul, God is, most likely, the most beautiful and virtuous girl imaginable, carrying predominantly the female virtues at the fore and the male virtues as an echoing afterthought.
Meanwhile, through the same chain of algorithmic logic, we can conclude that we're all heading to heaven or hell soon. This is because a set of axioms have been posited by the people in power. 1) Russia says it will use nuclear weapons to ensure its territorial integrity. 2) Russia cannot win a conventional war with America and all its allies. 3) Russia cannot ensure its territorial integrity if it loses this war. 4) Therefore, if America and its allies enter this war in Ukraine, Russia will have to respond, sooner or later, with all out nuclear devastation, the only way it can fight back and the way it says it will fight back. 5) America has promised to enter the war if Russia uses a nuclear weapon on Ukraine. 6) America has now asserted that any dirty bomb explosion in Ukraine is ipso facto the fault of Russia, unconditionally, without investigation. Any assertion by Russia that Ukraine did it will be declared a false flag. 7) Ukraine has the capability to produce a dirty bomb. 8) Ukraine will lose this war without American intervention. 9) Therefore Ukraine has the incentive to develop and deploy a dirty bomb, whether on a Russian target, which America would still blame Russia for, or on itself, where America would deny any chance of it being a false flag and immediately blame Russia. 10) In the near future, once Ukraine despairs of winning the war without American intervention, it will hit itself with a dirty bomb. America will blame Russia and immediately start bombing Russian conventional forces. Russia will attempt diplomacy and will be rebuffed. It will attempt to fight back conventionally and be overwhelmed. In the end it will have no choice but to follow through with its promise and nuke as many western cities as its 6300 strong arsenal of nukes is capable of. America will respond with all its nukes, demolishing Russia in turn, and perhaps anyone they view to be an 'ally' of Russia while they're at it. 11) In any event, with nukes putting so much dust into the atmosphere, the world will become unsuited to farming and our population of 8 billion will be reduced to complete and total starvation. 12) Whatever few survivors survive the 100 year period without sunlight or whatever will never be able to develop the technological level necessary to reach space again, because all of the world's easily accessible resources have already been used up. All the easily accessible coal, iron, oil, natural gas, etc., everything needed for a rich and advanced civilization, has already been consumed. There is no second chance at the industrial revolution.
I'm going to heaven, so it's no skin off my back what the stupidity of mankind has doomed us all to. But you have to wonder about all these people destined for hell, why they felt the need to destroy the entire world over a sliver of Russian populated land voting to rejoin Russia. Was this really the hill we needed to die on? Consider all the worst atrocities in human history, all the worst injustices, all of which went unanswered. No one lifted a finger when Muslims killed 300 million innocent people and conquered half the world. No one cared when Communism slaughtered 100 million of its own people and conquered half the world. No one cared when Europeans conquered the entire world, genociding the natives and enslaving the survivors. But God forbid one province of Ukraine vote to rejoin Russia after just leaving Russia twenty years ago. That's the one thing we can never forgive and must wipe out humanity in protest over. That's the red line we must not allow to be crossed.
The sheer farce we have made of this world is reason enough for it to end as soon as possible. We don't deserve to go on living.
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