Can man survive without the concept of God?
There is a verbal and written battle in the media and the lecture circuit. Most of the public is unaware of it. To be quite frank, most people would be at a loss to make sense of the complicated verbiage and the convoluted arguments.
The battle pits scientists, professors, scholars, philosophers and theologians against each other and against members of their own profession. In the end, no one will be declared a winner. There is no proof that one side or the other is right.
The need and desirability of religions in the affairs of man is being seriously questioned
The war is unrelenting, bitter and sarcastic, pitting the atheists or secularists, against the religious advocates, who believe in whole or in part that their personal religion is based on the word of God as given to his messenger Jesus, Moses or Mohammad.
Three very prominent atheist authors have written books on the subject. Sam Harris, is the author of “The End of Faith, Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason” and “Letters to a Christian Nation” and Richard Dawkins wrote “The God Delusion”, Christopher Hitchens wrote “God is not great” These men are very critical of the completely irrational basis of all religions. They condemn strongly every religion lying through its teeth, playing tolerant of the others, when in fact each fervently believes that its own faith will lead to true salvation and the others to hell or worse.
When religions cannot prove their tenets, and none can, they rely on “faith”. Faith as Sam Harris states is “a willingness to await the evidence, be it the day of judgment or some other downpour of corroboration. It is the search for knowledge on the installment plan, believe now, live with an untested hypothesis until your dying day and you will discover that you were right.”
In an e-mail debate conducted on Jewcy.com, Sam Harris argues with Dennis Prager, who trumpets the virtues of the Judeo-Christian tradition. While Prager cannot prove the existence of God, he cites the intricacy and majesty of the world and argues that this could not have happened without the guidance of some super force. Harris, with as much vigor, states that the world has always been. He insists that this is every bit as logical as Prager’s argument that it was created by God. To the atheists, the problem is not God directly but the distinctly different customs, beliefs, identities, supposedly from God, forged by man, unverifiable, that divide religions and people, by minor differences that make no rational sense.
Religion turns dangerous when it becomes the authority for claims about the world that cannot be verified by empirical evidence. Christopher Higgins has stated in a single sentence what should make common sense to all, “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”
There were always “interpreters” of God’s demands of the people—–witch doctors, medicine men and now priests, rabbis, ministers and imams. As society became more sophisticated with better means of communication, these interpreters institutionalized their religion on an ever larger scale. The globalization of religion can be compared to the globalization of business. In some aspects, religion is “big business”.
The intense interest in God’s religion at this time has to do with the global growth of fundamental Islam and suicide bombings. Never in my wildest nightmares would I have imagined that so many young and old people, mothers and fathers, students and professionals— not the poor and underprivileged, but vital and with so much to live for—would give up their lives in suicide attempts, all in the name of a faith that, like all others, has no basis in fact and reason. The hold that Islam has on these people is very frightening. The idea that all people, as long as they are healthy and mentally sound, want to live, was fundamental to my personal beliefs. But apparently not!
Islam is not the only problem. In our society fundamental Christianity presents an obstacle to AIDS prevention, development of a rational drug policy and stem cell research. Where is the logic in being against abortion because “it takes away a life” and also against stem cell research that can save many lives, done with frozen embryos that are not alive and would otherwise be discarded? It takes blind faith to believe in that inconsistency.
Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the United States human genome project, a very significant scientist, now believes that there is a basis for a creator and that scientific discoveries will bring humans closer to God. The belief in God has some support in the scientific community , but it is not extensive
Man is the only creature that understands fully that life is finite. Can man live without God and religion? Is the belief in God ingrained in the psyche of humankind? Does the inexplicable natural mystery of life and misery of men awaken in humans the absolute need for the divine, for perfect justice, for a life that transcends human existence?
