God, The First Mover, The Matrix of Matter, The Aether or atheism?

I've had several friends post this recently. Or some other version of it.

First of all let me say that I really, REALLY like Stephen Fry! He's hilarious and he's a formidable intellect. His comedy has made me laugh, his quiz show, QI, has made me think and laugh. He's well known for his charity work. The man is definitely someone to be respected and even emulated.

And this short vid. quickly went viral being posted and re-posted by mike dropping, check and mating atheists who considered this a brilliant, unassailable argument that would surely put to death the last vestments of belief in something so silly as God in any reasonable thinking person. And by some others.

I even saw it posted by a friend of mine who prefaced it with, "I am by no means an atheist but this was good. The response would be interesting." So being intrigued by the prospect of God's response to this atheist who, let's not forget, had just had his life's philosophical pursuits blown away by the existence of a God he was sure didn't exist, I thought about that. How might God respond to this former atheist calling him a capricious, stupid, cruel, monstrous, maniac? Certainly not the best thing to say to a capricious, stupid, cruel, monstrous maniac. Why would Stephen Fry say those things? Well, that's a good question.

It would be futile for Fry to present God with those arguments that had nurtured his earthly atheism, all of which God's existence has just disproved. I have heard famous atheists claim that if given solid evidence of God, they would acquiesce, but, dare I say God bless him, Stephen Fry just isn't one of them.

I'm not saying he didn't acquiesce on the existence part. He really has no choice if God is right in front of him. But he doesn't want to give up the fight. So he downshifts to sour grapes. "Okay the futility of my atheism notwithstanding, I don't wanna go to Heaven anyway, and here's why..." He now knows there is a God. He now knows there is a Heaven. And he's insulting God and refusing entrance into Heaven for some long held grievances that he feels he needs to air. Maybe I'm speculating here but I've seen this before and it puzzles me every time. I think this is that inexplicable contradiction within atheism that I just don't understand: people saying they don't believe in God because of some attrocities that he committed or allowed. How can you blame a God you don't believe in?

This reminds me of two things. The first is my favourite author, J.D. Salinger, who once wrote, "After all isn't cursing really just the lowest form of worship?" I think of all the past atheists I have known and few did not have the "God damn you God!" attitude that for the life of me I cannot understand in intelligent people.

The second thing I think of is how atheists seem to all agree that religion is just a blight on humanity and they generously sprinkle blame for a lot of things on religion and by extension, God. But to a man, woman and child if you ask them whether the Quran, Bible or any holy text or doctrine was written or even inspired by God, they'll say no. They HAVE to, otherwise a belief in God is implied. So then, really, religion has nothing to do with God at all, does it? It's just man's belief in a God and man's dogma, laws, rules, protocol, and behaviour that they hate. To be honest, I'm with them on this! A lot of people who believe in God are too simply because religion has lead to a lot of bad crap, but none of this crap is God's fault. It's stupid, stupid mankind.

So what it comes down to is you can't be a genuine atheist if you are like me and blame the world's ills on mankind because then none of that crap is God's fault. And you can't be a genuine atheist if you blame the world's ills on God because then you believe in a God you say you don't believe in. This answer Stephen Fry is giving is a great illustration of that connundrum.

I think of Charles Darwin too. So make that three things this brings to mind for me. Darwin was rounding into form midway through the 19th century when the movement away from God in many major areas of society was becoming popular. It flew in the face of widely held logic such as the early 1800's watchmaker analogy of William Paley. If you find a watch on the ground you naturally assume a creator due to the irreducible complexity of the watch. Obviously only a lunatic would give any credence to the concept that the watch could be formed by randomly occuring natural processes. Paley contended that even the simplest living creature was exponentially more complex than a watch and therefore living things had a Creator.

Darwin challenged this somewhat in his seminal publication "On The Origin Of Species," and many took him to be an atheist because of it. He never was. That's a huge misconception. At one point he said that he could be termed an agnostic but never an atheist. Darwin's reasoning was similar to the eye burrowing insect Fry talks about. Only Darwin found, among other natural horrors, a beetle that injects its prey with a paralysis syrum so that the poor victim can't move but CAN feel the beetle eating it alive! How could a loving God create such an attrocity? Darwin maintaned doubts until he died, but always maintained a belief in an Aristotilian, (300 B.C.), first mover and a creative force in the universe.

"It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist & an evolutionist... I may state that my judgment often fluctuates. Moreover whether a man deserves to be called a theist depends on the definition of the term: which is much too large a subject for a note. In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God.— I think that generally (& more and more so as I grow older) but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind." Charles Darwin.

I put it to you that there really aren't many, if any, true atheists. I don't believe in aliens because I haven't seen proof. If this is a person's stance on God then they are not an atheist but an agnostic. If they say they don't believe in God for things they blame Him for, then they are an objecting believer. And if they say they are an atheist because they hate religion, then they are an ahumanist, not an atheist. I have heard no explanation to refute this theory of mine but would welcome one. I'm just saying that this is what it looks like to me.

I don't know many other reasons to be atheist but there could be some. Perhaps the thrill-seeking personality? If you believe in God and are wrong, oh well. If you don't believe in God and are wrong, fire and brimstone. "Oh yeah? That sounds like a dare to me!!!"

So anyway, I took a stab at what I thought God might have said in response to His plucky little critic, Stephen Fry. If I may be so bold, And God said, "Stevie-boy, what makes you so sure all the misery, injustice and pain were NOT man's fault? I know you denied me in your life on Earth but if every man had lived life like you, there would have been an AWFUL lot less of the evil you blame me for. Come on into Heaven."

"How can things like cancer and eye-burrowing, child-blinding pests be man's fault?" you might ask. Well, I'm glad you asked that question. There are many who maintain that we have everything we need on the planet Earth to make it either a heaven or a hell. I don't think I need to say which direction man's shortcomings, (mostly greed and pride), have trended toward. Instead of Utopia, man has chosen dystopia and along the way I believe there has been a great shift away from God that has robbed mankind of science and technology that could easily have rid the world of a great deal of its misery, including cancer and eye-burrowing insects, not to mention global warming, pollution, social and financial inequality, injustice, suffering, the whole shootin' match. And I'm not alone.

It may be uncomfortable for some to call the entity to which I refer "God," and great minds in the past have referred to that entity in other ways. I mentioned Aristotle's Prime Mover already. That's tantamount to God. Today the scientific bent is toward the Higgs Boson or a God particle, but the originators of quantum physics never intended it that way. Much like Darwin, their cause was hijacked by people who wished to take it in a more secular direction. Max Planck, who is credited as the father of quantum theory, and won the Nobel Prize in 1918 for it, said, "All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter."

The matrix of matter. More comfortable than just saying God. And then there was the guy who I think was the smartest of them all, Nikola Tesla, who believed in something he called the Aether, or Ether. He was an opponent of Einstein and since Einstein's theories fit better into the secular direction science was taking, he was the favourite. But Tesla caused Einstein a great deal of doubt.

"I hold that space cannot be curved, for the simple reason that it can have no properties. It might as well be said that God has properties. He has not, but only attributes and these are of our own making. Of properties we can only speak when dealing with matter filling the space. To say that in the presence of large bodies space becomes curved, is equivalent to stating that something can act upon nothing. I for one, refuse to subscribe to such a view." Well you can see his mistake. Referring to God was instant scientific suicide in his day. Even though Einstein admitted that if the Aether was detected, it would prove his theory of relativity wrong, and even though Tesla showed him an experiment that showed a pulse traveling at a greater rate than the speed of light, not many people heard about that.

Then in 1920 Einstein actually stated outright that the Aether exists! The theory of relativity is wrong! Again, not many people heard about that. Science politely told him to take his Nobel Prize and the money that comes with it and shut up. They were using that theory. "Only the existence of a field of force can account for the motions of the bodies as observed, and its assumption dispenses with space curvature. All literature on this subject is futile and destined to oblivion. So are all attempts to explain the workings of the universe without recognizing the existence of the ether and the indispensable function it plays in the phenomena.“

Tesla was silenced. But he's making a comeback. There's even a movie about his life coming out soon. And nowadays his theories are being used in research on, among other things, you guessed it, cancer! I read an article about a kid in Nigeria who created a solar and wind powered car out of mostly scrap. How many people who are financially disadvantaged because of man's improper stewardship of the planet have had ideas that could advance science and technology but they were never developed? How much has the left brain indoctrination we call "education" suppressed the creative forces of our species? How great could life be if everyone could be a scientist and science was truly science once again and open to ALL ideas, not merely the ones that coincide with its chosen direction?

We will never know, but I'd be willing to bet that if man hadn't messed up this world so efficiently, we would have solutions to plenty of things that plague this existence and cause people to become atheists. Including eye-burrowing insects. Then God wouldn't be subject to so much criticism or so many non-believers whether they call Him God, The First Mover, The Matrix of Matter, or the Aether. But that's just what I reckon. I could be wrong.