Mind Boggling
By Njeri Mucheru-Oyatta
The page I had stopped flipping at had a Psalm 139 which I read. The writer was talking to God and acknowledging that God knew him inside out. He credited God with the responsibility of forming him in his mother’s womb in a fearful, wonderful and marvelous form skillfully created. He beseeched God to turn him away from any wickedness and direct him to everlasting life. So who is God? According to the psalmist, God is the one who made the decision about my being born and who knows my purpose in life.
The fear of change (and another possible funeral) arose again in my gut when I followed that line of thought and remembered that I had already acknowledged not having any role to play in my being born. So if I didn’t do it, and yet I was alive, and I don’t believe in coincidences, someone must have done it. Philosophy tells me that someone could have done it, but I cannot know who it was who did it because no-one who claims to know who did it can prove it. In fact, no-one can prove that I am alive. Ok, well how does that lead to the conclusion that there is no God? In the same way that it cannot be proved that He is there, it also cannot be proved that He is not there. What if there is a God out there? According to the psalmist, God has the answer to my question since he already knows my life’s purpose. It was therefore very important that I know whether or not He is really there.
In trying to decide whether God existed, I went back to my legal training. In the world, people are willing to accept that someone is guilty of a crime punishable by death, when the proof required for such guilt is not definite proof. People are always accepting things to be true without asking for definite proof. In school we are taught about what is inside our bodies and how it functions based on what others have seen when they have cut up other humans. When treating an illness, a doctor presumes that your body functions in much the same way as other people who he has treated with the same condition and follows the documented history of past patients and studies when treating you.
At a more personal level, friends meet up for a cup of coffee in the evening and share the events of the days when they had not seen each other and each of them readily accepts what the other tells them without requiring definite proof. Definite proof does not exist in this world and what philosophy was doing to me was to cheat me that it does sending me on a wild goose chase. The way of the world, from time immemorial is that we act based on what we are taught and we teach based on what others before us have seen and taught. Not in what we can prove.
I am not a scientist but for me, until the day someone figures out how to make an eye lash from nothing, science is just a very useful subject.
So now, this God question had me really puzzled. I needed to know why I was born and my purpose in life. Here was someone who might know but, I couldn’t prove He exists because the only evidence I seemed to have was written in a dubious book. I was in a lot of difficulty because I believed that people existed based on the history books, newspapers and magazines I had read. I have never met Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie but I believe they are there somewhere because I read about them and their 4 kids in a magazine. I have boarded an aircraft and believed that it took me to a far away land called America yet I did not see how I got there. If you asked me to prove that I actually went to America, my air ticket would be sufficient evidence even in a court of law. Yet, not my lawyer or his opponent or the judge or magistrate or my opponent can prove for certain that I did go to America. Simply put, none of them was on the flight with me AND even if they were, they couldn’t prove my physical presence on the flight when it landed in America.
Physical presence cannot be put in an evidence bag and analysed in a lab. It is intangible. Feelings cannot be proved yet we are always feeling this or that and doctors are always asking us how we are feeling. The greetings in every language I know enquire about someone’s feelings. You can’t prove feelings. Only you know how you feel. You can pretend to feel something. If there is anything you are in control of, you and only you are in control of your feelings.
I concluded that believing in God does not have anything to do with accepting all the stuff that is written in the scriptures of whatever religion. It is about acknowledging that you did not create yourself or anything that is in the world today.
I mean, if you had the ability to create yourself or the world, I don’t think you would be here mingling with us. Your abilities would destroy the world so you would have to keep far away from it. Perhaps in a place called Heaven. And we would know you as God Almighty creator of Heaven and Earth and all that is in it.
So that you can communicate with us, your creatures, you would have to install in each of us some special detection device that can pick up signals from your frequency, and perhaps we would call that device instinct or what the atheist philosophers call it, gut feeling.
By Njeri Mucheru-Oyatta
The page I had stopped flipping at had a Psalm 139 which I read. The writer was talking to God and acknowledging that God knew him inside out. He credited God with the responsibility of forming him in his mother’s womb in a fearful, wonderful and marvelous form skillfully created. He beseeched God to turn him away from any wickedness and direct him to everlasting life. So who is God? According to the psalmist, God is the one who made the decision about my being born and who knows my purpose in life.
The fear of change (and another possible funeral) arose again in my gut when I followed that line of thought and remembered that I had already acknowledged not having any role to play in my being born. So if I didn’t do it, and yet I was alive, and I don’t believe in coincidences, someone must have done it. Philosophy tells me that someone could have done it, but I cannot know who it was who did it because no-one who claims to know who did it can prove it. In fact, no-one can prove that I am alive. Ok, well how does that lead to the conclusion that there is no God? In the same way that it cannot be proved that He is there, it also cannot be proved that He is not there. What if there is a God out there? According to the psalmist, God has the answer to my question since he already knows my life’s purpose. It was therefore very important that I know whether or not He is really there.
In trying to decide whether God existed, I went back to my legal training. In the world, people are willing to accept that someone is guilty of a crime punishable by death, when the proof required for such guilt is not definite proof. People are always accepting things to be true without asking for definite proof. In school we are taught about what is inside our bodies and how it functions based on what others have seen when they have cut up other humans. When treating an illness, a doctor presumes that your body functions in much the same way as other people who he has treated with the same condition and follows the documented history of past patients and studies when treating you.
At a more personal level, friends meet up for a cup of coffee in the evening and share the events of the days when they had not seen each other and each of them readily accepts what the other tells them without requiring definite proof. Definite proof does not exist in this world and what philosophy was doing to me was to cheat me that it does sending me on a wild goose chase. The way of the world, from time immemorial is that we act based on what we are taught and we teach based on what others before us have seen and taught. Not in what we can prove.
I am not a scientist but for me, until the day someone figures out how to make an eye lash from nothing, science is just a very useful subject.
So now, this God question had me really puzzled. I needed to know why I was born and my purpose in life. Here was someone who might know but, I couldn’t prove He exists because the only evidence I seemed to have was written in a dubious book. I was in a lot of difficulty because I believed that people existed based on the history books, newspapers and magazines I had read. I have never met Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie but I believe they are there somewhere because I read about them and their 4 kids in a magazine. I have boarded an aircraft and believed that it took me to a far away land called America yet I did not see how I got there. If you asked me to prove that I actually went to America, my air ticket would be sufficient evidence even in a court of law. Yet, not my lawyer or his opponent or the judge or magistrate or my opponent can prove for certain that I did go to America. Simply put, none of them was on the flight with me AND even if they were, they couldn’t prove my physical presence on the flight when it landed in America.
Physical presence cannot be put in an evidence bag and analysed in a lab. It is intangible. Feelings cannot be proved yet we are always feeling this or that and doctors are always asking us how we are feeling. The greetings in every language I know enquire about someone’s feelings. You can’t prove feelings. Only you know how you feel. You can pretend to feel something. If there is anything you are in control of, you and only you are in control of your feelings.
I concluded that believing in God does not have anything to do with accepting all the stuff that is written in the scriptures of whatever religion. It is about acknowledging that you did not create yourself or anything that is in the world today.
I mean, if you had the ability to create yourself or the world, I don’t think you would be here mingling with us. Your abilities would destroy the world so you would have to keep far away from it. Perhaps in a place called Heaven. And we would know you as God Almighty creator of Heaven and Earth and all that is in it.
So that you can communicate with us, your creatures, you would have to install in each of us some special detection device that can pick up signals from your frequency, and perhaps we would call that device instinct or what the atheist philosophers call it, gut feeling.
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