Reykjavík Grapevine - 03.12.2004, Blaðsíða 17

can jesus, allah and science coexist?
“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.” Easily the best opening line in
history. Better than Dickens’ “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Better
even than Tolstoy’s “All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is
unhappy in its own way.” If nothing else, at least it excludes any possibility of a prequel. Or does
it?
When trying to convince myself, for whatever reason, that there is a God, I tend to fall
back on two arguments. One is that all societies, no matter where or when they have come
into existence, seem to have a notion of, a belief in, a God. Believing seems almost to be as
fundamental a need as eating and fornicating. And one unique among the species to mankind. If
there is no God, have all men at all times, then, been wrong?
Our memory of God
Where does the feeling that there is a God come from? Is it just a fear of nothingness, a fear
of dying that lies behind all the worlds’ religions? Or are we all born with a sense of something
above and beyond us, a feeling for something greater out there, because there is? Is there
something in the collective racial memory, something in our myths that goes back to a time
when gods walked the earth, whether these were the Titans of the Greeks, the sons of God “who
took wives among men“ in Genesis 6, or the spacemen of Daeniken? Is it any more fanciful to
believe that there is some truth to the most profound truths in any society, than that there is
none?
Descartes, often called the father of modern philosophy as well as being a mathematician, stated
that man’s profoundest thought, the idea of the perfect, the eternal and the unlimited, the idea
of God, must be true precisely because it is the highest thought, because it cannot have derived
anywhere but from God.
It took a girlfriend to convince me otherwise. Growing up in the Soviet Union, she was
taught by society that there was no God. And she seemed to have no conception of him, unlike
the Western atheist who tries to destroy god by logic. To her, there simply was no question
of him existing at all. And hence my faith that we had within us some conception of eternity
because there was something eternal, collapsed. The generations that grew up under Soviet
communism grew up in a society where God officially did not exist. Whereas three out of five
by Valur Gunnarsson
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