Does God Exist?

At some point or another, I've got to talk about whether or not God exists. This is a monumental problem for me because my family is Christian, I was raised Christian, and yet I still question His existence. If he doesn't exist, then all that was wrong and that brings into question a lot of basic moral and fundamental pillars of my life. The problem is, if he does exist, it calls into question some of the basic and fundamental beliefs I have about myself. Now I'm not deluding myself into thinking I can answer the question of whether or not there is a God in this writing, but I think that maybe if I put it all out on paper I can get my ideas in order.

    The first and foremost question for both arguments is "where's the proof?" If you can prove to me that God either exists or doesn't exist, that would be great, please go ahead and do so and I can move on with the rest of my life knowing one way or another. The fact is, no one can definitively say one or the other and prove it. What does this mean for my ultimate search? It means that I will have to make my own decisions based on what I know or believe to be true.

                 One problem I have with people who say that there is no higher power and that the universe was created in one giant cosmic blowup is the amount of detail it takes for us to survive. Even if one minute detail was changed life as we know it could not sustain itself on earth. Scientists have postulated that if we were as close as 1,000 feet closer to the sun we would all fry like eggs. That to me doesn't happen just from coincidence. There are too many finely tuned actions on earth that lead me to have trouble with the big bang theory. The relationship between the moon and our oceans for example. There is an intricate series of events which take place that to me make it impossible to chalk that up to mere chance. I just can't see how a cosmic explosion could have a side effect with so much detail in order to sustain life on this planet. Another example is one from our own bodies, and that is the eye. By the way, scientists call these examples irreducible complexity. Anyway, the eye only works the way it is now, and would not have worked any other way, so by evolutionary theory the eye would have been taken out of the gene pool rather than perfected into one of our senses.

                The next problem is the evolutionary theory itself. I don't know all of the details of the theory, but I do think I know quite a bit, and from what I know, to suggest that one species has had this remarkable evolution from monkey to me while the rest of the world stayed virtually the same is a bit ridiculous. I can stomach the continents shifting, I can handle the migration of peoples from one place to another changing the way they looked, but I cannot see how the survival of the fittest made it necessary for humans to exist. And isn't that contradictory thinking anyway? If we came from monkeys because we were the smartest and coolest monkeys of the pack, then why are there still other monkeys around today? Wouldn't natural selection have killed them off? Another thing, why are there no ancient stories of our ancestors being monkeys. Before written history, there was a great oral tradition, and almost every one tells of a great flood, but not one tells of when their ancestors descended from the trees to build the great cities of Babylon and Ur. Why would these newly self-aware monkey/people not want to include that in any of their oral histories the memories of beginning to walk upright, the loss of hair, or any of the other things that separate us from monkeys. Why are there no cave paintings of that? And where is the missing link? I've been waiting for them to find a fossil for years now, and still nothing. If all this change was happening to all the species of the world, wouldn't there be some physical evidence of such? How can I just accept this theory to be true when there is no evidence to support it, and why do the greatest minds in history? Surely if I can poke holes in this theory they were able to as well. I should add that I do not have a problem with natural selection, because that has been proven to be true, and to deny that would make me a fool. I have no problem believing that the strong live and the weak die, then the strong mate, passing on whatever genetic advantage they had over the other members of it's species to the next generation, eventually becoming the norm for the species. This process of natural selection is called Darwinism, because that is the theory that Darwin presented. Contrary to popular belief, Darwin didn't come up with the evolutionary theory, at least in public. The only thing he ever proposed was natural selection, a theory which has been proven time and time again in the lab and in studies of other species. Neo-Darwinism is the spreading of the natural selection theory to it's logical, if a bit unsettling conclusion. Could all life on earth have come from some primordial pile of goo?  I don't know, but the problem I have with the theory is not only irreducible complexity but also the species jump. I can apply natural selection to a species and see it work, but where I have problems is when they tell me that there were enough genetic mutations in a certain line of apes that over time they became human. If you cross a species you are going to have to show me proof. As I said before, where is my missing link?

                 Then we get to the problems I have with the actual existence of God. If, indeed there is a God, then why am I here? Does God need someone to worship him? Am I, and the whole human race, for that matter, a plaything for God to make himself feel better? And if so, why was I given a choice of whether or not to worship? Why not just make me a mindless robot? Going further on that matter, am I anything more than a robot? If God is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient then am I really self-determined as I think I am? If God knows what I'm going to do before I do it, and my whole life is pre-determined before birth, then God is controlling me and I am a puppet, making life pointless. The problem is that I can't accept that, because it was my choice to write this paper rather than play video games, and it was my choice to go to college rather than be a custodian for the rest of my life. How can God be controlling me if I make these decisions? The fact that I make these decisions using my mind is one of the few things that I do know for sure, especially since this subject deals heavily with Cartesian doubt. According to Descartes in his Meditations, the only thing I can know for sure is that I do exist, because I am thinking (cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am), and the very thoughts that I am thinking are the decisions I am making and being carried out by my body. My point is that even if everything else is a lie, including my body which carries out these decisions, I know that at least the decisions I made concerning the surroundings I'm presented with were real, even if their effects are not. If this is true, then how can God know what I'm going to do even before I do? And if this is not true of God, then what else isn't true about Him? What other basic beliefs about God am I wrong about?

                  I feel like in the course of my musings, I must at least mention the ontological argument for God once. St. Anselm once theorized about God in this manner. He wrote that the most commonly accepted definition of God was that "God is the greatest being than which no greater being can be conceived". If this is true, then God must exist, because if he didn't exist, then something else that did exist would be greater than it, and that thing would be God. Therefore, God must exist. Now, I'm not so sure that this proves the existence of God as we know Him to be, but I think it makes an interesting point. I think it points out that there may indeed be a power higher than ourselves, and if that power exists we may not like what we find.

     So what does all this mean? Is anything clearer than it was before? I don't know about for anyone else, but I think my position is a bit clearer. I have coined for myself a new term of description, or rather an amalgam of two older terms. Through the course of this writing I have come to see myself as a God-fearing agnostic. I am an agnostic in that I cannot prove the existence of God, but I cannot disprove it either. The fact of the matter is, if I believe that there is no God and act accordingly, only upon my death to discover I was mistaken, I would be out of time to change it. On the other hand, if I live my life as if there is a God, and then find out otherwise, I have still lived an honorable and respectable life. Therefore, I will continue to act as if God does exist, making me a God-fearing agnostic.

    Not surprisingly, I was unable to leave this argument in it's infant stages, so I have written more. Please, read on. Addendum