An
Atheist’s Acceptance that God is Love
By
Chad
A few days
ago, I watched a video that made me think for a second about being
atheist. The premise was simple. They likened DNA to a book. They placed an actual book in the hands of an
atheist and asked the atheist, "Do you think this book could have
materialized out of thin air?"
Of course
the atheists replied, "Absolutely not! A book cannot magically appear out of thin air. Someone must have made it. Someone must have made the paper, made the
ink, created the language, pictures, etc., required to physically produce the
book. A book clearly has a
creator."
Then, the
narrator goes on to explain how DNA is the instruction book for every living
thing on this planet, and how every living thing, when it comes time to make a
cell for a certain function, refers back to it’s DNA book in order to produce
the cell to the correct specification. The
narrator got the atheist to agree that DNA is a book, and then re-presented the
atheist’s previous conclusion that a book must have a creator. All of the atheists interviewed were
speechless.
So, I
thought about this. I thought about this
in the context of religion, science, evolution, the age of the universe, and my
limited but interested, understanding of chemistry, physics, space and
time.
My initial
rebuttal is that comparing a physical book to DNA is false equivalence. A physical book simply cannot be the same
thing as DNA. After all, DNA is a
chemical; it’s an acid. But apparently,
in that acid sits a code, and that code can be compared with a book that has
three billion pages. For humans, 99% of
those three billion pages are the same.
The remaining one percent makes up the differences between you and me. The other three billion pages are reserved
for every other form of life that exists on this planet. So, when you think about it like that, simply
denying that DNA is a book is not enough to justify mine, or anyone else’s,
atheism.
After my
initial rebuttal, I thought some more, and here’s where the “DNA is a book”
analogy breaks down, at least for me.
I’ve
observed every living thing on this planet have defense mechanisms. These mostly biological responses serve to
protect an organism, and in certain situations, other organisms like them. We see protective responses all the
time. In animals, we see them when
mothers care for their young, and when species live in packs. We see plants chemically warn other plants of
impending destruction. None of these
living organisms has a god, none of these organisms stand to benefit by
recognizing that there is a god, and none of these organisms will ever think
about being punished by a god.
From the
Miller-Urey experiment in 1952 that proved amino acids can be built from
inorganic precursors while simulating the conditions of early Earth, to the
Abiogenesis theory that that the transition from non-living to living entities
was not a single event, but an evolutionary process of increasing complexity
involving molecular self-replication, self-assembly, autocatalysis, and ultimately
the emergence of cell membranes, it’s clear that electricity, a natural
phenomenon, jump-started, and was later harnessed by, molecular
self-replication (a.k.a. “life”). At a
sub-atomic level, molecular self-replication used electricity to assemble a
chemically-encoded instruction set for how it came to be, and how it could
continue to be.
This
chemically encoded instruction set was “the book”. So what created the book? It’s simple.
It’s obvious. It’s the only
answer that’s ever stood the test of time, and probably ever will stand the
test of time. We did. Life did.
It’s always been us. It’s always
been life. The book was required for life’s
self-preservation.
When I set
this theory against the backdrop of time and imagine the elements forming
organic compounds in a primordial soup, chemically instructed at a sub-atomic
level to preserve themselves, to look after each other, aging, evolving, using
new materials and chemically recording their experiences, given the vast
expanse of time and space (Earth is 4.53 billion years old), I can see how the
book accumulates three billion pages.
I think it
was slow at first and probably suffered some setbacks, but with electricity
(lightning) as the catalyst for the specialized chemistry of carbon and water, building
largely upon four key families of chemicals (lipids, carbohydrates, amino acids,
and nucleic acids), after one billion years, these organic compounds began
manifesting their destiny. With enough
time, they’ve recorded enough intelligence in their chemistry to animate themselves
and evolve in many different directions, resulting in an explosion of life in
the oceans. Within the first billion
years of Earth's history, life appeared in the oceans and began to affect
Earth's atmosphere and surface, leading to the proliferation of anaerobic and,
later, aerobic organisms.
Some
geological evidence indicates that life may have arisen as early as 4.1 billion
years ago. Since then, the combination of Earth's distance from the Sun,
physical properties and geological history have allowed life to evolve and
thrive. In the history of life on Earth, biodiversity has gone through long
periods of expansion, occasionally punctuated by mass extinctions. Estimates of
the number of species on Earth today vary widely; most species have not been
described. More than 99% of all species
of life forms, amounting to over five billion species that ever lived on Earth,
are estimated to be extinct.
But I
digress. This post is not necessarily
about theories on the origins of life, but more about disproving the existence
of god.
Look, I get
it. People need spirituality to feel
connected. A feeling of connection is
how we reproduce. Often, people need to
feel that someone somewhere is looking out for them, preserving them. This, innate, biologically-encoded ideal is
the origin of the god construct that has plagued humankind’s psyche since the
beginning of their existence on this planet.
We only have it because our brains are evolved enough to operate above
an instinctual level. This has freed our
mind to wonder, and for early humans to derive supernatural explanations for
the unexplained. These leftover
supernatural explanations gave rise to modern day religion.
So what is
god? God is a defense mechanism. It’s a defense mechanism we construct for
ourselves, in order to feel connected, to feel preserved. But, if defense mechanisms come from a
chemically-encoded instruction set for how a being came to be, and how it
continues to be, it can be argued that the innate feeling of preservation for
ourselves and others, is the real
defense mechanism, and that “God” is merely a figment constructed by the
conscious mind. What else do we call it
when we take action to preserve ourselves and others? Love.
We call it love.
That same
feeling, that same energy, that drives us to hug our family and friends, to
pamper our pets, and to water our garden is the same energy that pushed the
building blocks of life, all those eons ago, to band together and simply look
after one another, to take care of each other, so that it, whatever “it” was,
could continue. Over time, life came to
realize “it” as reality.
