The case for atheism
The hunters and gatherers 10,000 years ago didn’t know much about nature. They had a god of thunder, a goddess of harvest, a sun god, a moon goddess, and many others. As human knowledge evolved, it became apparent that all nature is one, everything is interconnected, and there is no such thing as a bunch of gods living in the skies.
Later, when they were ready, humans became monotheistic. They finally had one god. But he was still some mythical creature, sending plague, famine, or good fortune down, punishing the bad guys, rewarding the good ones, and so on. He sat in the skies and ruled the world on a day-to-day basis. He’d part a sea here, talk to a prophet there, cure the sick in this corner, and make a woman pregnant in that one.
But a few centuries later people knew all there was to know about thunder, floods, eclipsed sun, and planetary formations. The more people learned about the world around them, the less room there was for mythology. And the more things were explained, the less god had to do with them. Invariably, however, he receded to control the areas that still were not understood. Human emotions, diseases, our “souls”, some physical phenomena, etc. People actually drew the location of the soul on the pictures.
But science moved along. We learned about the immune system, genetics, and functioning of the brain. We found what areas of the brain are activated when we feel “in love” or when we feel hate, what neurotransmitters are released when we are sad or happy. The brain is still a marvel, but we are moving along relatively fast. Some day we’ll be able to write every brain reaction in the form of biochemical equations and integrals. That’ll likely happen in our lifetimes. We now know there is no physical soul, we know why we get sick or get well, we’ve been to space and saw no god there. We even know how we fall in love or why we get hooked on gambling. And we know it all on a scientific, chemical level.
The religion had to retreat again. Now everything is invisible. Our soul evolved into some unknown metaphysical entity nobody can see or feel. The God is something that’s nowhere and everywhere, and doesn’t control things because we have free will. Nothing can be proven because nothing can be known.
Mind you, this is NOT the religion that people who wrote the Bible espoused. This is not the God they envisioned. But hey, we still want to believe in afterlife, right? It’s so comforting and convenient… But we have to make amends
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