“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”. These words were put by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle into the mouth of his most-celebrated creation, Sherlock Holmes, and for me they provide a useful way of approaching the deepest mystery of all — is our universe and all that is in it the end result of a series of random accidents, or does its very existence testify to a Higher Design?
Previous generations were far more concerned about these kinds of questions than is our own. Some will no doubt argue that “science” has answered so many of the questions that baffled our credulous ancestors, thereby making belief in a “higher power” essentially obsolete. In my view, scientific discoveries are indeed the reason why people tend not to dwell on the ultimate questions of existence, but not because these have taken the wonder out of Creation. Actually, the more one discovers about our world, the more one should marvel at the sheer grandeur of its multi-faceted design.
Where science has indeed deadened the questing impulse, I believe, is because it has made our lives so very comfortable. From a purely materialistic point of view, we are healthier, wealthier, better informed and freer from physical drudgery, to an extent, than our forebears could never have imagined possible. Secondly, the phenomenal technological advances have served to create innumerable distractions, whose end result is to prevent people from thinking too deeply about anything. Entertainment and information of all kinds is instantly available at the click of a button.
Previous generations lived far closer to death than we do. Life expectancy, particularly of children, was so much lower, making one’s daily crust an arduous and monotonous chore for almost everyone and recreational opportunities extremely limited. It was to be expected, therefore, that there would be a greater concern about questions relating to a higher plain, a grappling with the all-too-evident reality of one’s mortality and what deeper meaning, if any, there was to one’s fleeting physical existence.
Because so many of us today live in highly developed, democratic societies where we are free to choose our own lifestyles and can readily access the fruits of the exponentially increasing technological breakthroughs, we are especially at risk of passing our entire lives in a semi-comatose state. Bombarded as we are with so much interesting information, we can all too easily forget the reality that no matter how advanced our PCs, no matter how corpulent our bank accounts, our final destination on this Earth is the grave.
Perhaps our generation’s most-profound challenge is to take the necessary time out in order to confront the questions that go to the heart of our existence and see whether they can be plausibly answered.
Coming back to Sherlock Holmes’s maxim, this should help in resolving the first crucial question that must logically be addressed, namely whether our world is the result of an inexplicable cosmic accident or whether it was brought into being as a deliberate act of creation by a higher power.
When fellow Thought Leader writer David J Smith posted an article entitled “Creation vs Evolution“, I assumed it would be just another piece of superficial Creationism-bashing. I was pleasantly surprised, therefore, to see instead an eloquent debunking of the theory that all life forms accidentally emerged from a pond of protoplasmic, prebiotic slime. Implausible as the assertion that there must be an all-powerful Creator is (how came such a Being to exist at all?), the alternative — that life, in all its fabulous complexity, simply came into being on its own through a chain of literally countless incredible coincidences — is so self-evidently impossible that one is virtually forced to accept the existence of a Higher Power and Intelligence. Merely dwelling on the workings of the phenomenal machine that is my own body is enough — indeed, more than enough — to convince me of this.
I read in the autobiography of Frank Harris that he began doubting his religious faith when someone asked him: “Tell me, who created the Creator?” This kind of reasoning puzzles me. Imagine my pointing to a loaf of bread and declaring that its existence testifies to the existence of a baker, whereupon a sceptic cleverly rejoins, “Aha — but who baked the baker?” Of course, that is an entirely separate question altogether. What is actually being focused on is the loaf of bread.
In summary, the existence of a Power and Intelligence so colossal as to be responsible for all the marvels we see around is, on the face of it, implausible. However the alternative — that everything just happened by itself — is self-evidently impossible. The upshot of all this hardly needs to be spelled out.
Merely accepting the reality that a Creator must exist is only, of course, the first step. The next logical question is whether that Creator is concerned at all about the world He created, and in particular about human beings, whose abilities so vastly outstrip those of the remainder of the animal kingdom. This, too, seems easy to answer. Does it make any sense for the Creator to bring the world into being, and to populate it with a living species of such awesome potential so as to eventually acquire the ability to ultimately blow that world into oblivion, without ever communicating with them? Humankind’s extraordinary abilities suggest that the Creator should indeed be very concerned with its doings. Presumably, we were created for some sort of purpose.
The third question to explore is whether, in fact, there is any historic evidence of the Creator communicating with His human creation. Seen in this light, the claims of the various religions need to be taken seriously, not merely for political purposes of multicultural understanding, but as modes of thinking whose roots may very well originate with a Higher Power.
At this point, of course, one enters complex and sensitive territory. One soon finds, for a start, that while there are a host of religious traditions that in general claim to have been Divinely inspired, these generally contradict one another and seem, moreover, to base their claims to authenticity on highly tenuous grounds.
In weighing up the various claims of these competing traditions, one needs to ask what mode of communication by the Creator would have been the most effective? Put another way, would it make more sense to address a single individual, or to communicate with a large group of people? Obviously, claims of mass revelation are more credible than individual testimony. It would seem to me that in this regard my own religion — Judaism — is the only major world faith that bases its claim to authenticity on revelation en masse, and that such revelations occurred not just once but frequently over an extended period. However, I am certainly no expert on world religions, and no doubt different faiths have their own strong arguments on which they base themselves.
The point of this necessarily brief article is to argue for religion to be taken seriously, not just as a form of cultural expression, but as a potential key to understanding the most crucial questions of human existence. It can be said that in these times, the intellectual regard in which religion is held has never been lower, but that kind of knee-jerk dismissiveness has itself become a form of rigid fundamentalism and we need to move beyond it.
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