God's Ant Farm

My second posting is perhaps more controversial than the first. It's something that I created a couple of months ago.

For those interested, I was baptized and confirmed in the Anglican Communion. As a boy in high school I joined my father, mother, and brother to form the backbone of the choir at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Petaluma, California. My father was the choir and music director for the church.

I have just finished reading Christopher Hitchens’ “god is not Great” and Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion”. They both make valid points, especially concerning the horrors inflicted upon man and beast by adherents to many of the organized religions. However, their arguments (“proofs”, if you like) for the non-existence of God, like those of many arguments for the existence of God that they are trying to refute, suffer from the same, perhaps fatal, flaw. They are based upon faith.

Just one example: The validity of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in no way proves anything about the validity of Creation. It does, of course, strongly support the argument that the story of Creation as described in the Judeo-Christian bible is allegorical. (Personally I believe that almost all if not all of the stories in the bible, Old and New Testament alike, are allegorical.)

Let me pose a version of Creation and ask whether anyone can disprove it with verifiable and provable observation and fact:

A god (let’s call him/her/it George) became bored. (We cannot say “One day…” or “Once upon a time…“ because day or night or time had not yet been invented.) So George decided to create an ant farm for his amusement. George created the universe in which we now live, with chance playing a large part in its evolution. He (please pardon the use of the masculine. The English language does not have a pronoun to replace he/she/it.) sat back to watch what happened with his Creation. Like a boy watching his ant farm, George, on occasion, pokes sticks into his ant farm (Moses, Abraham, Jesus, Mohamed, Hitler, …) to watch his ants scurry around in response to the stimuli.

I assert that the truth of George and his Creation can no more be proved or disproved than can any of the formal religions or atheism without resort to faith.

ps: I have an answer to the age-old question: “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” Clearly the answer is “As many as your faith will allow you to imagine.”