The Atheist Question Of God's Existence

The atom

I think that we should all be free to follow what we believe. And so this is not to offend Atheists, just to discuss the arguments that I have heard in favor of it and against the existence of a God.

When I was a child there was no mention of God in my home, except when accompanied by damn. When my younger sister was born, I felt less loved by my mother than ever. Somehow I knew that with my sister in the picture I would never be loved.

So, around the age of four I began sitting in front of my house hoping that someone would pass by and adopt me. One of the many days I sat waiting for my new family I heard a voice in my head. It was a male sounding voice, the kind of voice that makes you feel safe and secure. This voice told me that I was not going to ever get a new family. It told me that I was very loved, that it loved me, and that when I grew up I would understand why I was in this family and know that it was the right place for me to be.

From then on, I had many conversations with the voice. It comforted me when I was afraid, and made me feel loved when I felt alone. The voice did not offer a name, I did not ask for one. Today, I believe that it was God speaking in a voice that would make a child feel safe.

When I was a teenager, I would come home from school, go up to my room, lock my door and either turn on music or the television. One night I was locked in my room with the television on and I fell asleep, as I did every night (because I was afraid of the dark). I was awaken by the one voice that could pull me out of a coma. I heard my mother scream at the top of her lungs, "Denise!!!!!! Get Down Here". I ran down the stairs to find her half asleep and half watching the television. I asked her why she called me, but in my mind I knew that there was no way that this half asleep woman could look like this after letting out the scream of the century. She looked at me as though I was crazy and said, "I didn't call you". As we were about to enter into this discussion over how I could have imagined her calling me loud enough to make me jump out of bed - while I was sleeping - an enormous cloud of black smoke filled the stairwell and came pouring downstairs. I screamed for my father who was in bed upstairs and he almost fell running down, By this time we could see nothing.

Luckily we found our way to the door and got out of the house. My father burned his hand opening the doorknob as it was already so hot. I ran next door and called the fire department. After the fire department came they told us that it had been an electrical fire. The origination point of that fire was my television. Certainly I would been dead, unlocking my door in the dark was not easy, and there is a chance I just might not have awoken before it was too late. My father and I could have both been dead before my mother even knew that anything was wrong - since she was downstairs. Something supernatural happened to me that night to save my life. That something, I call God.

Two weeks later, those same neighbors I ran to to call the fire department were all killed while they slept in an electrical fire.

Here are some arguments that I have found on the internet against the existence of any god.

"The progress of science
The progress of science bring each day a more complete explanation of phenomena that men attributed, until now, to the divinities. God is pushed back within the limits of the Universe."

Nowthese are quotes from Einstein which address that statement:

"Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated. The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that is there."

and another Einstein quote:

"Science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world
of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

What we are really looking at when we interpret the world - quantum

Here is another argument against God:

A different proof that there is no God is:

"Life is Material, not Supernatural: We are material, Natural Beings
All Evidence points to life being material and natural"

"A popular objection to atheists' arguments and critiques of theism is to insist that one's preferred god cannot be disproven - indeed, that science itself is unable to prove that God does not exist. This position depends upon a mistaken understanding of the nature of science and how science operates. In a very real and important sense, it is possible to say that, scientifically, God does not exist - just as science is able to discount the existence of a myriad of other alleged beings." Austin Cline

According to the ancient religions, God is unnameable, incomprehensible, a power that works within the universe as the universe exists within God. According to renown Physicist David Bohm:

"Bohm believes that life and consciousness are enfolded deep in the generative order and are therefore present in varying degrees of
unfoldment in all matter, including supposedly "inanimate" matter such as electrons or plasmas. He suggests that there is a "protointelligence" in matter, so that new evolutionary developments do not emerge in a random fashion but creatively as relatively integrated wholes from implicate levels of reality. The mystical connotations of Bohm's ideas are underlined by his remark that the implicate domain "could equally well be called Idealism, Spirit, Consciousness. The separation of the two -- matter and spirit -- is an abstraction. The ground is always one." (Quoted in Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe, HarperCollins, New York, 1991, p. 271.)'

In Bohm's view, all the separate objects, entities, structures, and events in the visible or explicate world around us are relatively autonomous, stable, and temporary "subtotalities" derived from a deeper, implicate order of unbroken wholeness. Bohm gives the analogy
of a flowing stream:

On this stream, one may see an ever-changing pattern of vortices, ripples, waves, splashes, etc., which evidently have no
independent existence as such. Rather, they are abstracted from the flowing movement, arising and vanishing in the total process of the flow. Such transitory subsistence as may be possessed by these abstracted forms implies only a relative independence or autonomy of behaviour, rather than absolutely independent existence as ultimate substances.

(David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, Boston, 1980, p. 48.)

We must learn to view everything as part of "Undivided Wholeness in Flowing Movement." (Ibid., p. 11.)"

This comes from the new physics that is responsible for 30% of our current economy. When today's science describes what the material, natural world is made of, it can be described as nothing less than supernatural or metaphysical. What we see as the world around us appears to be real, but what it is made out of is consciousness. A statue made out of clay, can be called a statue, but it is still really clay. Regardless of what we are made into in this material world, what we are made out of is not of this material world. So far, according to Science, what we and the entire Universe is made out of is an unending mystery. And as much as they learn to describe what we are made out of, they cannot ever come to the original cause, why we exist. If that force that underlies and guides the universe is what our ancestors and many of us today call God. Then Science proves God.

Next argument:

If God exists than God must interact with our universe and there must be some physical manifestations of his interaction.

For me, the voice when I was very young, and the voice that saved me from dying in the fire were manifestation enough, but the Universe itself is the greatest physical manifestation of God's existence, not as a "he" not "his" but the mysterious awesome force, the implicate order the unknowable, unnameable Source of the universe.

Often atheists use the Bible to argue against the existence of God. But the Bible, or the Koran can only be used to argue against the description of God, not God itself. In this respect, it is possible to argue because these books are ancient and must be taken on faith, not proof. But God as the Atom, God as the Implicate Order, as Consciousness Itself or Original Cause cannot be argued. Science is, in every day, coming to understand God in the way that our ancient ancestors once did.

To me, God is impersonal, unconditional Love, far beyond our capacity to understand but it is our drive to seek. I don't feel that anyone must believe in God. However, if atheism is logical and realistic as it is supposed to be, then its arguments against God, must be sound, grounded, and able to address even the most ancient spiritual concept of God, which I have not found that it has done. It may be capable of an eternal debate over the validity of religion, specifically or in general, but again, that is not an argument against God.