God is not intelligent
by Joe Palmer
[ opinion - april 06 ]
...invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer. You have to say something like 'God was always there', and if you allow yourself that kind of lazy way out, you might as well just say 'DNA was always there', or 'Life was always there', and be done with it.
- Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker
Intelligent Design is a no-brainer, an attractively simple creation myth. It holds that God made the world in all its immeasurable complexity on purpose. The notion is logically wrong: if God intentionally created the world, then who created God? Furthermore, the label Intelligent Design is euphemistic, a figure of speech disguising the Creator as a sort of immortal human.
To say that God is intelligent is to malign, belittle, and vilify Him. To say God is intelligent like mankind is to personify Him. God is not a person like you and me. Mankind is unworthy of being compared to God in any way. Mankind is insane, vicious, and stingy. God is not loaded down with human attributes that show Him to be insane, vicious, and stingy in addition to being sane, righteous, and generous. The ground of our existence, God, our very being, is in another dimension we cannot understand.
God did not design the world we live in. It just happens without anyone intending it to happen. It continues to seem to happen. It changes constantly. Species disappear and leave their traces in the soil and rocks, including human species. New species appear through a process called natural selection, which is that “species” (whatever they might be) have children that survive them just as their ancestors did.
His eye is not on the sparrow, and He doesn’t watch you, for we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. Romans (8:22)
Intelligence is a property shared by animals and plants. Living things are smart. Trees know when to flower. Seeds know when to sprout. The tiny mites that live in your eyebrows know how to duck and cover whenever you wash your face. They can figure out how to get along. Intelligence is adaptation to circumstances. Even computers to which we have given some of our intelligence are smart, although most of them will not weep when we are gone. Remember Hal the Computer in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey? He despises the other members of the crew of the space ship. Believe it; it’s coming.
We do not know for sure what consciousness is, how it is related to intelligence, and why it happens when it occurs. The earth is perhaps not alive and smart the way we are. The earth, “Gaia,” or Nature seems to be smarter than us in ways beyond our understanding: matter may be full of soul or spirit, a sort of “intelligence” shared by us animals, and plants. Some people seem sometimes to have extraordinary sensory powers and awareness of other dimensions, seeing ghosts and telling fortunes. Some thinkers suppose that the earth’s chemical, physical, and biological processes are integrated in ways that we poorly understand. The earth may be maintaining her balance, compensating for our ravaging her, by getting rid of us, like combing the lice out of her hair. Tsunamis, floods, atomic bombs, wildfires, drought, starvation, and pandemics are all natural happenings, Nature’s way, and Nature has her own special intelligence, different from ours in kind.
Islam and Christian Science hold that we must submit ourselves to the will of God who is everywhere, all-powerful, and all-knowing, as if whatever happens, good or bad, is His will, a supposition we want to be true because we need explanations, and so we often give up trying to understand. However, the belief that a man-like God wills it, desires it, and causes it to happen cannot be true, for the same reason that God is not intelligent.
The Original Sin was to think that man was made in God’s image. When the writers of the book of Genesis, who lived on a flat earth in primitive ignorance not unlike our own, made up the story of Adam and Eve, they invented a mean God who is as nasty and vindictive as man himself. In our ignorant pride we still assert that that God is as selfish as man.
Intelligence is an animal trait. God is not a biological organism. He does not have intelligence like a dog. He does not design anthills. He is not one person who can be correctly referred to as “He.” We have no suitable, proper, accurate, distinguishing name for God. “She” is not a more suitable pronoun, except as a feminist joke.
To utter the name G*d is blasphemy. We must walk and talk softly around violent maniacs like the “god” of the Old Testament, our human God, lest we get His attention and cause Him to strike out at us, causing floods and fire. The tribal people of the Old Testament feared their God Jehovah as much as the inhabitants of Skull Island fear King Kong. Don’t make Him mad is their advice.
The New Testament, in contrast, teaches a different God: The dwelling of God is with the human race. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death and mourning (Revelation 21:3-4), which must mean that after the first death there is no other, a belief one can find consolation in.
Humanistic Christians, however, cannot understand a movie without good guys, a story in which all the guys wear black hats. Like children they expect the good side always to win. A story in which everybody loses is a disappointment to some so-called Christians, a depressing tale too close to the truth. They have lost the ability to understand tragedy. Tragedy is a conflict between evil and evil, the Human Condition.
The Christian “churches” that sprang up after the latest schism with Rome, the Reformation, have turned into a smorgasbord of social clubs, which you may choose from according to your social status and spiritual desires. They have anything in those lines that you might want at the lowest cost, like Wal-Mart. Most of the groups try to convert innocent bystanders into workers for social progress and perfectibility. Such groups are ethical cults devoted to liberal, pacifist, and humanitarian ideals. It is mankind they care about, not God. Their attention is misdirected. They want our fear and trembling to go away. They want a humane, humanitarian, and Humanistic world, a happy world for mankind where you can attend the Cowboy Church Sunday School and sing “Let the sun shine in, take it with a grin. Frowners always lose, and smilers always win. So open up your heart and let the sunshine in.”
Religion that preaches a liberal, human ideology is arrogant nonsense. It is the religion of humanity in which mankind replaces the Gods of the Holy Bible. We have no right to be happy, only the right to pursue it. The books that promise happiness are a set of hypnotic incantations intended to anaesthetize people against the pain of living and dying. Humanists hold that we can eliminate evil and forget death by working together and loving each other as Christians are supposed to do. Humanists say “There ain’t no Hell.” “The Hell there ain’t!” say the Fundamentalists, missing the point that Hell is other people. Paradoxically, the way to avoid Hell is to help other people.
We have no idea how we got to where we are. We do not know where we are or why we are here, wherever we are. Our ignorance is greater than our knowledge, just as our stupidity is greater than our intelligence.
People made up the idea of God. They invented Him. In the Old Testament version God is cruel and mean. In the New Testament version God is a loving saviour. Both books are literally wrong. The God we think we are a part of is unknowable, and He obviously does not care about us as a species of animal or as individuals. We have no salvation or redemption as individual persons from our identities, personalities, suffering, and death. We are stuck in a wheel of natural selection. Where it stops nobody knows. Where it stops nobody should care because we cannot know. It is beyond intelligence and knowledge, unknowable, ineffable, and indescribable in spite of science’s best efforts now and forever.
Is that all there is?
When you die you go back to where you were before you were born. There is no afterlife that you will know about. There is no religion that can keep you alive. Anybody who says so is a liar who wants to comfort you or wants to get your money, or both, that is, a minister, priest, imam, rabbi, shaman, TV huckster, or preacher. There is a smorgasbord of religions to choose from, an a-la-carte menu from which you can pick and choose your poison, religions full of arrogance, ignorance, and the presumption that you are a moral and physical coward profoundly afraid of dying.
Nobody knows how the world came into being. Those who say they know are liars or fools. As far as we know, the world formed itself, maybe. Only the God above and beyond all our created, invented, imagined, and supposed gods knows. Or perhaps He does not know. Who knows?
To go on living with grace and peace you have to come to terms with reality in your own mind. You have to find it by yourself. Christian renunciation of the world and Buddhism’s similar ethic are refuges from pain that are highly recommended by those who practice them.
We have no right to be happy. Happiness comes to us only when we ignore it.
