Reykjavík Grapevine - 03.12.2004, Blaðsíða 18

Russians today say that they believe in God, two out of five say
that they didn’t then but that they do now. In general, and in
a general trend opposite to the West, it is the older generation,
the one that grew up without god, that is the most irreligious.
In the west, the post war generations that grew up with
materialism at its most rampant are the least religious. God, it
seems, is a concept you learn about. But where, then, does, this
feeling of eternity, that most of
us can feel at times in one form
or another, come from?
The poet and Nobel Prize
winner Romain Rolland, who wrote that art was not an illusion
because it must not be, asked his friend Sigmund Freud this
very question. Romain spoke of an oceanic feeling of the eternal
shared by millions of people. Was this the origin of man´s
feeling of God? Sigmund, as usual, went back to early childhood
to come up with an answer.
Although he claims to not feel it himself, he acknowledges
that this feeling of being at one with the Universe does indeed
exist. It is, in fact, nothing more than a memory. Before we
discovered the “I”, that we were beings distinct from our
surroundings, we felt at one with everything. But then we
realise that some things, such as our mothers´ breast, are outside
our being, and
slowly we learn
to distinguish
between the two.
Any feeling of
oneness with the
Universe is hence
a memory from
the time we did
not distinguish
ourselves as a
distinct part of
it. The key to the
kingdom is not
within us after all.

God in politics
Descartes
did not live to
see the society
without God. But
God has been in
steady retreat ever
since the days of
Descartes. Two
years before he
died in 1650,
Europe’s last great
religious war came
to an end. Having
settled on the
permanent division between a protestant Northern and Catholic
southern Europe, almost six hundred years after Pope Leo IX
and Patriarch Michael Cerularius mutually excommunicated
each other, creating an Orthodox Eastern Europe, God has
been, by and large, banished from international politics. The
Glorious Revolution of 1688 brought to an end the religious
wars of Britain if not Northern Ireland, and Europe’s next
major wars were fought as always with God on every side, but
this time little attempt was made to distinguish what made the
God of the Austrians different from that of the French, or what
made the God of the Prussians distinct from the God of the
English. Although ostensibly
dynastic wars, they were fought
primarily over control of trade,
colonies and resources. Soldiers
were by and large mercenaries who needed no motive other than
money. Never since has war been fought as unashamedly for
profit.
Ideology didn’t re-enter European politics until the French
revolutionary wars of the 1790´s. In defence of the republic, the
French mobilised the population on a previously unheard of
scale, creating mass armies inflammed by political ideology, that
were able to defeat all the other European powers in the field.
When other governments discovered that political ideologies
were as potent a means to pushing the masses onto the
battlefields as religion ever had been, they sooner or later
adopted one or the other as their reason for being. Armies grew
in size as conscription was introduced in defence of the nation,
climaxing with the slaughter of the World Wars.
The static world of the post war era led to political apathy
among the masses in both east and west. The last time a
democracy fought a war using conscripted troops was in the
catastrophic Vietnam War, detested and renounced by large
parts of the population. Political ideology was no longer
motivation enough for the people to go to war. In 1989,
the peoples of Eastern Europe renounced political ideology
spectacularly in favour of mass consumerism. There was no
longer anything to kill or die for. Some even prophesied the end
of history. And then, on September 11th 2001, God returned.
With nothing else left to believe in, perhaps it was inevitable
that he would make a return.
How did it all begin?
My second argument for the existence of God goes back to the
beginning.
Were did we come from? You can trace yourself back to your
parents and their parents, and, with the help of modern science
back to the primeval sludge we all came from and from there to
the Big Bang, but you always reach a dead end. And what then?
Philosophically, as well as politically, God had been in steady
decline since the days of Descartes. The second argument
Descartes used to prove the existence of God is the question of
creation. At some point, something has to come out of nothing.
This, then, must be where God comes in. But of course, this is
just postponing the problem, for what created God? What is the
prequel to Genesis 1.1?
In fact, the great monotheistic religions that originated in
the Middle East are among the first to think that there even
was a beginning to the Universe. This linear view of the world,
that things necessarily move from one point to another, may
explain the great dynamism of Islam, Christianity and Judaism.
Most previous religions saw the world in terms of cycles, most
probably inspired by the cyclical course of nature. Summer,
autumn, winter and spring follow one another in perpetuity.
In China, Ying alternated with Yang, in India one Brahma
followed another, each lasting 311 trillion years. Small wonder
that the impatient West adapted a religion wherein everything
was created in a week with time to spare.
In ancient Greece, things also moved in cycles, but here
the cycles differed from one another. And of course, things are
getting worse all the time. The first age of man was a Golden
Age ruled by Cronos, where man did not have to toil and aged
backwards. He was usurped by Zeus who created a silver age.
But silver age man was disobedient, so Zeus decided to destroy
him and start anew. Now came the Bronze Age, inhabited by
a warrior race, but still Zeus was unhappy and killed them off
in a flood. Next came the Heroic Age, populated by heroes and
demigods. These, inevitably, wound up destroying each other
but some of their tales still exist, most notably the story of the
Trojan War. This was followed by the Iron Age, the one we
currently live in, a time abandoned by the Gods, a time of evil.
But it won’t last forever, one day Zeus will return, destroy it all
and begin anew.
Greek thought was inherited by the Islamic Arabs after
their conquest of the Middle Eastern provinces of the Greek-
Byzantine Empire, and reintroduced into Western Europe
by the Crusaders returning from the Holy Land, steeped in
Arab blood and learning. There, it was merged with Christian
doctrine and formed the basis for modern Western thought.
But unlike the Greeks, the great monotheistic religions do
not believe in endless cycles. Time must have a stop. There is a
beginning and an end. Scripture is silent on what came before,
nothing it seems, and it all ends in Armageddon followed by
heaven on earth.
Zeus was the son of Cronos and his sister Rhea, who were
the offspring of Uranos and Gaia, the sky and the earth who
both sprang up, for no reason given, from Chaos. Babylonian
creation myths also have God springing from Chaos. But the
Judeo-Christian God is firmly divorced from the earth. He is
not of it, he created it, seemingly out of nothing.
In the age of Descartes, his contemporary Galileo, and
Newton who followed them, thinkers liked to think of God as
the watchmaker who created the Universe and set it in motion,
but has had little to do with it since. It was generally believed
that the Universe, once created, would last forever.
In the 19th Century, when God was discredited as a
bourgeoisie conspiracy by Marx and pronounced dead by
another hirsute German, Friedrich Nietzsche, physicists
engaged in thermodynamics began to worry that as heat
flows from hot to cold, then the Universe, wherein heat and
cold are unevenly distributed but nonetheless strives towards
equilibrium, cannot have been around forever. Otherwise the
hot parts would long ago have flowed into the cold, resulting in
“heat death.” In other words, all the suns would have burned out
an eternity ago.
In the 1920´s
astronomers realised that
the Universe was in fact
expanding, leading to the Big
Bang theory. But a Big Bang does not exclude a creationist
God, and Pope Pius XII acknowledged the theory in 1951.
The Devil may be in the details, however, as according to
astronomers the Universe has been 15 billion years in the
making rather than six days, but still, there is nothing here yet
that says the Universe was not created by God.
Did God create the world?
So did God set off the Big Bang? According to Einstein’s´
theory of relativity, matter cannot be divorced from space and
time. Before there was matter, there can have been no space or
time for God to exist in. If there is a God he is situated entirely
not just outside
matter but outside
time and space
too. Which makes
you wonder what
he’s got to do with
anything.
But one problem
still remains. If
not God, then
what caused the
Big Bang? If the
ultimate reason
behind everything
leads us back to
the beginning of
the Universe, how
did the Universe
happen? At
what point did
something come
out of nothing?
According to
Stephen Hawking,
the Universe did
not have a starting
point. Which is
not to say it has
always existed.
There are in fact
four dimensions,
as Einstein pointed out and HG Wells utilised in The Time
Machine. There are the three dimensions of space and then
there is time. If we go back to the beginning of the Universe, we
will not find a single point of beginning, but rather an ellipse.
Hence it is impossible to go to the beginning of the Universe
as it is impossible to go to the ends of the earth. There is no
starting point to the earth, the Universe or anything. I will not
go any farther into quantum mechanics, partly because I don’t
have space (or time), partly because I don’t understand them.
But God has been pushed out of the Universe farther and
farther until he now resides merely as creator. And even there
he is currently under attack.
Without a definitive starting
point to creation, there is no
need for a creator God.

Where does God go from here?
God has returned to the realm of politics more than he has
to the realm of ideas. True Believers today more often than not
seek to set science aside, and even reason itself, dismissing it in
favour of religion.
Just as the Second World War was a three way battle
between Central European fascism, Anglo-American capitalism
and Soviet communism, the two winners then having it out
with each other, we’re now witnessing a three way struggle
between the Islamic Middle East, Secular Europe and a
Christian controlled United States. So far, the two parties most
prone to resorting to violence happen to be the ones that believe
in a God.
Science may in the end provide the ultimate answer as to
how everything happened. But now that we’re here, what do we
do about it? It is here that we reach the true limits of science.
But it still stands to reason.
Descartes, who professed to believing in God, wondered
why there is evil in the world. God may be intangible and
unquantifiable, but the results of evil are too apparent. Man
has a will which is not limited in the way reason is. When
will surpasses reason, evil results. Why did God then give us
more will than reason? Because we have needs which need to
be fulfilled, needs without which the body does not function.
Needs create will, but our will often surpasses our needs.
There may be no being with horns that tempts us to do evil, and
no God to punish us if we do, but there is the very human trait
of greed. Whether we believe in God or not, we would be wise
to think more about what we need and less about what we want.
Which may be more reasonable.
Greek thought was reintroduced into Western Europe by the Crusaders
returning from the Holy Land, steeped in Arab blood and learning.1.1
1.2 A Big Bang does not exclude a creationist God, and Pope Pius XII acknowledged the theory in 1951.