A Problem with Authority

From your earliest available memory, to the moment you left school or work today, you have been programed to follow the rule of your superiors. You were taught from day one that you shouldn't challenge your parents' authority because no other reason than the fact that they are your parents... And those are the rules. Then in school you were told that those rules apply to your teachers, and the principal. You learned about government; city, county, state, and federal, The United States of America, The Constitution, and all of these other things that you're not allowed to question. Above all you learned that you do not question God, or your religion. Questions are looked at like signs of doubt and doubt is labeled blaspheme. I remember from when I was young, wanting to know what God is and how "he" got here. I was scared to even let myself think about the possibility of God not existing for too long. I thought I would be sent to hell. Being scared into a belief system is not an honest source of dedication.

When I got older I started to consider all of the possibilities. I think that Carl Sagan said it best when he posed the question: What happens when two gods claim the same title? It leaves us to assume that one of them is false. If one is, then isn't it possible that another is, or that all of them could be.

God is basically thought of as the sole creator of time, life, and the universe through supernatural means. Supernatural is defined as anything that is attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature. In the Bible God is specifically credited for creating Earth and later making man, in his image.

The Big Bang Theory, God's number one opponent, is scientifically measurable. When Edwin Hubble discovered that other galaxies were moving away from us, it became safe to assert that they were once closer, and that at one time they could have all started from the same point. A common misconception about this theory is that there was nothing, then there was an explosion and Earth, the Sun, all of the stars, and everything else just popped out. It's much more complicated, however. Using an equation that took the speed of the galaxies that are moving away from us to calculate how long ago the Big Bang would have happened, scientists have figured the universe to be Fourteen billion years is how old. Earth came just four and a half billion years ago. Particles coalesced for millions of years before the first supermassive stars were formed. Later when those unstable giants went supernova, the materials that would create rocks, solid planets, and all known life forms were created. Those planets took millions of years to to coalesce too.

That is a very basic understanding of the modern scientific answer to how the universe was made, but their answer for how man got here is less measurable, mathematically, but is much more observable. Evolution is underestimated in both its complexity and how long it has taken. This isn't Pokemon we're talking about here. Monkeys didn't just wake up one morning and shape shift into humans. Natural selection and survival of the fittest is the most powerful of evolution's tools. Selective breeding, an intentional version of natural selection, is used all of the time by humans to make the most efficient race horse, and different breeds of dogs made to be the best for one specific job. Over time all animals, including humans, participate in natural selection by creating offspring with only mates that have what they see as suitable genetic traits. The other major method, survival of the fittest is even more obvious. Animals adapt to what challenges their environment puts in from of them. Animals do not evolve unless survival is at stake. Life on earth is estimated to have first developed at least as early as three billion years ago which seems to allow enough time for it to complexify to the point it has.

Looking at all of this information like a high-school current event assignment: what happened and when it happened, seems to be answered, in regards to the Big Bang. How it happened is a little more complicated, and is simply just not understood yet. Why did it happen is perhaps the most elusive of these questions.

At this point, crying "God" at any unexplained phenomena, like the Big Bang, and then pushing back what he is responsible for at each new scientific discovery seems as much like a cop out as crediting God for thunder and rain before we understood weather. However, the fact of the matter is that the creation of time, life, and everything, is not yet explainable. As of now it has caused by a force that is beyond scientific understanding, so it is super natural. If we began to, as a society, look at God as the force that caused the existence of our universe and not as a man who judges you and is willing to have you tortured for all of time if you don't follow his rules, we will be able to live by morals that are best for all people, and not just what we are scared into. If these boundaries are broken in our most basic rule systems then all the others will follow shortly. Even the fear of governments will fade.

Do not just question authority, question everything.