Does God Exist?

Do I think that there was a creator of the universe? Yes, probably. Does that automatically mean that the creator of the universe gets involved in the everyday lives of individual people? No, I sincerely doubt it. If that is your definition of "God" then I have to say that I don't believe THAT kind of God exists.

Let's look at the facts as we know them:

We have traced back the origin of the universe to a big bang that occurred approximately 13 billion years ago. But what existed BEFORE the big bang? Physics is stumped. Physics suggests that time started at that moment and so there WAS no "before" for anything to exist "in". This does not throw me however, since "time" is a relative construct that is a rather abstract creation of ours anyway. But then where did the original matter come from that exploded into the current universe? Science doesn't know. More importantly - WHY did it explode into creation? Again, unknown by all the evidence and logical analysis that our current science can provide.
Also, from Stephen Hawking's calculations, we know that, as it was being created in the explosion, the rate of expansion was the EXACT right speed to create a universe. If it were slightly slower, it would have collapsed back in on itself and we would again have the singularity. If it exploded just slightly faster, then all the sub-atomic particles would have escaped the gravitational and nuclear attraction of each other, and we would again, not have "matter" as we do today. We would have a very fine "mist" of sub-atomic material shooting out across a void. No physical matter. No rocks, planets, stars, or people to wonder about where they came from.

All of these things tend to suggest the hand of an intelligent creator.

If you look at how the moon came to be where it is against absolutely incredible/impossible odds, then that strengthens the argument in favor of an intelligent creator with the power to move and influnce large amounts of matter in space. (this is another whole story I'd love to tell you sometime)

To me, the concept of 'faith' where you just simply believe in a set of stories and explanations because some religious organization tells you to, is, at best, illogical. At worst, it's a very dangerous cult-like behavior, and it leads to violence and intolerance of people that adhere to competing belief systems.

However, a belief system that is based upon one's own observations, analysis, and deductive or inductive reasoning, is perfectly fine. So, in my own case, the combination of observations and analyses that I have described above are what lead ME to believe in a creator for the universe. I welcome you to either agree with my analysis and conclusions, or I urge you to come to your own conclusions through your own means.

Now, as to a belief in a "God" being that gets involved in the everyday minutae of the lives of every person on Earth, and every animal, and tree and flower, and the course of every stream, and all the bacteria and higher lifeforms on every one of billions of planets in the universe - no. I don't see it.
Not merely because the sheer volume makes it impractical, but also because the various elements work against each other. To favor one, disfavors the other. In World War II, Germany was also a Christian country and felt that God was on their side and they prayed to God to help them win the war. So did we. So did France. So did England, and Canada. And Australia, etc. Same religious background. Same hopes and desires and prayers.
How could any God intervene on behalf of his believers without damaging his other believers. The needs of mankind in a diverse world like ours are almost ALL the time at cross purposes.

However - weird stuff DOES happen from time to time.
Look at that woman who a few weeks ago won a million dollars in the lottery - twice. Twice!! Does that mean that God intervened on her behalf? (thereby denying a few million OTHER people) I doubt it.
But the odds of winning once are 14 million to one. The odds of the same person winning twice are astronomical.

That actually tells me something. It does not tell me that there is a God who manipulates the lottery at will. But it does indicate to me that there is something going on beneath the surface of the universe. Remarkable coincidence like that is the visible hallmark of unknown, unseen things happening just outside our ability to detect and understand them. We do not know everything. This much is clear.

That is why a truly open mind is a wonderfully useful thing.

I should clarify something.
The oversimplified gist of the above is that God exists but he doesn't particularly care about all the moment to moment, day to day things that affect each of us. That's a rough way to put it, but essentially correct, I think.

However, a LOT of people believe in God because they grew up thinking that God is there to look after them personally. An omnipotent and omnicient personal guardian to help us when we need help, and to support us, and keep evil and misfortune at bay. And we are taught he does this because we are good and deserve it. If only we'll do as our minister/priest/Rabbi tells us to do, then God will see the gold star beside our name and will take care of us all our days and welcome us into permanent heaven in the afterlife when we die.

Well, I have noted before that we tend to believe anything that someone tells us when we are 6 years old. It becomes the unshakable foundation of our world view later and cannot be changed.
So those folks who have believed that since childhood, are not likely to give that up now. To imagine that they are abandoned to wild outrageous fortune is just unthinkable! And besides, what would happen to society if everyone thought there were no afterlife consequences to their actions in this life. Fear can be a useful guiding principle in keeping otherwise self-serving sociopaths on the straight and narrow.

So this belief system does have a useful purpose to society.

Yet look at the Muslim people who seek to unravel and destroy our society. Their strong belief is that God is on their side and that we are fundamentally inherently evil. Yet we seem to think that WE are the ones who are good, and if they are plotting to terrorize us then it must be THEY who are fundamentally evil. They think America is Satan's home on Earth and to destroy us is a stroke in favor of God's kingdom.

If God were to grant the wishes of some of his believers at the expense of the others, then he is not "God" anymore, is he? Because if he damages his devout followers regardless of whether they deserved that treatment, they could not actually 'earn' their respite. He has then become merely a concentration of capricious power acting unpredictably.
So, if God acts in any way to advance the position of some people over others, then he loses his status as divine arbiter of souls and judge of good and evil. Therefore, a divine super-being could NOT act in that capacity. It is a logical prerequisite.

Does this mean that we are abandoned to wild chance, and nothing we do matters or counts, and there is no reward for good behavior or punishment for bad behavior?

No. Not really.

Those who are sensitive to such things will see patterns in the chaos. They detect a plan underlying our existence. Many people extrapolate that to indicate God's hand in our lives. But I think it is something else.

If you study reincarnation you will read about the concept that we all get a chance to design our lives ahead of time just before we are born. There is a plan for us, but the architect of the plan for each of us - is ourself.

There are many people who have been regressed back into previous lives and into the bardo state between lives and this is what they discovered.

I have no proof for this except to say that this belief system suits me well. It fits all the observable facts and their logical implications. It works.

I would like to exercise another corner of the thinking I was showing above.

I implied that blind faith does not serve us well, and it could be argued that belief in God based on the Big Bang theory is just as faulty. Science has it's pet theories and it's blind adherents to those theories are somewhat akin to the religious people who adhere blindly to the doctrine of their theology. So I want to expand just slightly on my reasoning there to show that I have allowed for that theory to be wrong.

I said that I believed in a creator because it was the most logical explanation as to why the universe exploded into being in the Big Bang that started it all. Something had to cause it to happen, and physical science is at a loss to explain how or why.

But what if there was no Big Bang? After all, the reason scientists think there was a big bang is really because of a phenomenon called 'red-shift', which is simply a shift of the EM elemental signature toward the red end of the spectrum when examining the light coming from other galaxies. This is said to be caused by the fact that they are moving away from us at close to the speed of light.

It was deduced that since ALL galaxies seem to be moving away from each other, like dots on the surface of an expanding balloon, they must have started somewhere, this is the center of the metaphorical balloon. Based upon measurements assuming this underlying theory, it turned out that they did start in the same spot at the same time. That location is 15 billion lights years from here, and the time was 13 billion years ago. (The discrepancy is due to an acceleration in the expansion of the universe that started about 3 billion years ago, but that's another tangential topic for discussion).

So, if they all started at the same time in the same spot and are now shooting out from that spot still at tremendous speed, then that is an explosion of sorts, and hence the title "Big Bang".

But what if they are wrong? What if the red shift is caused by some radiation belt at the edge of our galaxy that distorts the EM signatures of light that passes through to our telescopes? Or what if there is some other atmospheric or gravitational cause for this effect? Then that might destroy the whole Big Bang theory which is now a central theme for much of cosmology as it exists today (for any physicists reading this: I am deliberately oversimplifying this to make a point. Hang with me here...)

If the Big Bang theory were found to be false, then the alternate implication is that the galaxies were NOT created in an explosion of matter from a central mathematical singularity, but rather ALWAYS existed in their current form and positions. This used to be called the "Steady State Theory" when I was first learning about this as a kid in school.

Well, even if the SST is true, then that also suggests that there was a creator, doesn't it? Science says that matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, so that leaves out some 'natural' physical science explanation of how all this matter just bubbled into existance out of nothingness. And so we are again left with a divine being of supreme intelligence and massive power to create the universe as we see it today.

Let's take a third alternative. What if all we see is mere illusion? When you dream in your bed at night, you might dream of stars in the night sky. Does that mean that those stars were dreamed thousands of years ago in order for their light to reach your 'eyes' now? Of course not. You simply dreamed them into existance now just as they appear.
What if our stars in the night sky are no more than that? What if they and everything else we see are simply dreamed into existance right now for us to see and live and experience. Our scientific conclusions based on the lights we see at night seem silly and ridiculous now in this context. They are logical and reasonable but based upon faulty source information - because it's all just a dream created for us to live in and experience things.

Well, if THAT is the true nature of the world and universe around us, and if science is completely wrong on the subject of our beginnings, then still SOMEONE has to be creating this dream, correct? That creator is, by definition, God.

And so I say, whether the universe was created as it is now - billions of years ago, or whether it was created in a Big Bang explosion, or whether it is merely all a dream created to appear this way, in any of these cases, we arrive at a logical conclusion of a God to create it. There simply seems to be no other more reasonable explanation.

And so I believe in God. A creator for the universe.

But that does not mean I think he is interested in fixing the lottery for me to win this weekend. But I may buy a ticket anyway. Because you just never know...