Does God Exist….and is anybody listening?

The eternal question “Does God exist or not” has of late been receiving another high volume airing. Although neither side can actually, really, categorically, hand-on-heart prove this statement one way or the other, this rather important point has not stopped the protagonists leaping in, and substituting any attempt at polite persuasion with high octane volume.  And everywhere its being talked about, it seems to be following a prepared sequence of events that goes something like this:

1.   Each side put forward a point of view that more or less requires that the other side accept without precondition that it is 100% totally irrevocably wrong;

2.   Both sides then profess amazement that the other has failed to see the scientific facts / divinely revealed truth whilst each becomes only more determined not to cede a nanometre of the bomb-cratered trench of its own view point;

3.   Each side then repeat their mutually exclusive arguments at ever increasing orders of volume;

4.   See step 2.

This is of course a very serious business, and the protagonists have spent years honing their arts and arguments. It’s almost becoming business-as-usual.  But to listen to these debates, or follow them on-line reveals how ridiculous the whole thing is becoming. Indeed recently we had the amusing spectacle of a very eminent scientist (Dawkins) and an important clergyman bickering at a near infantile level about who could recall the full title of Darwin’s “Origin of Species”. Apparently both saw such a test of recall as some kind of comparator measure for a non-believer, if it should be held, on the other hand that, to qualify as a (Christian) believer, a person should be able to recall some biblical tract or detail (can’t remember what is was – no pun intended).

Both sides are like neighbours, who trapped in uneasy yet by necessity close proximity to each other, spend their days at the proverbial garden fence. There, with throats raw and hoarse from enraged shouting, and nose to nose, mouths as open wide as ears are tightly shut, they hurl their arguments at each other about whose “poodle fouled the porch”.

These arguments no doubt are as old as religions itself (“Baal exists – no he doesn’t” – I guess the “He Doesn’t” crowd win that one) and will continue long into the future as religions, as they have always done, mutate to reflect changing societies and concepts. New religions have formed, often as hybrids of well-established ones. This is nothing new, just as Mormonism is an off-shoot of Christianity, so were the Roman Gods developed from the religion of Ancient Greece – perhaps the Greek’s felt it was an early form of intellectual property theft? Another thing that won’t change either is that this argument will continue to be characterised by collective deafness on all sides.

Perhaps Bertrand Russell got closest to summarising the situation with his theory of the cosmic tea pot – whilst you can’t prove it’s not there, how can you prove it is? In short, if you want to claim something, then you need the scientific rigour and arising facts,  not to mention the courage to welcome challenge, to support your theory…..there is no basis to claim something exists solely because it can’t be proven not to.