UTT - Blog Post 4

Sarah and Mark both believe that God is a human invention, with Mark adding that we should evolve past our "need" for God.  How would you answer that?

Well, that’s an interesting statement, and although I can’t really see what the reasoning behind this is, let me start by giving you a few questions to ask:

       First and foremost: 1. Why say this? What is so overwhelmingly offensive about the concept of God? That could lead to some interesting responses and open the door for you to discuss the ideas of morality (how we share a common Moral Law and how that is evidence for God, as argues a famous Christian author named C.S. Lewis—I’m sure you’ve heard of him), answering to a higher power than ourselves, and maybe a whole other host of issues with Christianity. Either way, it’d be a wonderful starting point to get further into what Sarah and Mark believe and how you would answer that.

       And, secondly, 2. How else do we explain the strangeness that surrounds us? I mean, honestly, there are some pretty crazy things out there around us that we really can’t explain. I mean, I remember hearing about there are better chances that a group of monkeys banging on typewriters would make a letter-perfect copy of Macbeth rather than this world evolve by chance—and that doesn’t even look at the complexity of the human body or our ecosystems. I mean, just look around on the Internet and you’ll see some good examples, although I can give you a few talking points off the top of my head: The woodpecker, with its insanely long tongue and skull formation and bone structure, all of which needed to appear at once for the bird to survive, or the human eye which we still don’t fully understand today, and which is more complex than our best silicon microchips. A really hard thing to evolve, right? I just can’t see that happening by chance. So, from that standpoint, God is our only real answer for the crazy stuff that we see in our world—and to “evolve” past that would leave humanity with a lot of unanswered questions that really need responses.

       Finally, 3. What would be left if we “evolved” past God? From their point of view, let’s give them something to think, about: We would have another kind of religion altogether—the religion of nothing. Think about how depressing that would be for society as a whole, to live for a bit and then you die and that’s all. There wouldn’t be anything to live for, so people would break out on their own and cause major social unrest. From a pragmatic view of society, that would be both dangerous and possibly fatal. But, honestly, this is a lesser point to the first two—try to focus on those if you can.

       Keep it coming, though. They ask good questions! =)