We assume. Much of what we assume remains hidden from us. Only with relentless self-honesty and self-inquiry in sheer reflexivity can we see these assumptions. Many if not all our hidden assumptions stem from our social conditioning, ideas and memes we have absorbed from respected or admired people around us. Elders and teachers, leaders and authority figures, mass media and marketing, schooling and education are all possible sources of our assumptions. Once adopted, these assumptions seep into our psyche and lay buried in our subconscious and unconscious mind. There they lie waiting to be activated and to filter our thinking, feeling, and perceiving, thus configuring our experience.
We assume many things about many things: the cosmos and life, god and devil, good and evil, happiness and suffering, society and morality, marriage and kids, rich and poor, gender and race, text and truth, scripture and reality, and more. But some of our most ingrained and unseen assumptions are in the realm of religion and metaphysics. These assumptions haunt and hound us, filtering our thinking and reasoning and often distorting our conclusions, if not invalidating them.
One common metaphysical assumption is that the cosmos must be created by some intelligent powerful being. This separately existing creator we call God, however conceived. We assume that a complex cosmos must necessarily require a creator. But really? Who says so? Why assume so? We might say that the cosmos is far too complex and orderly to have come out of nowhere and from no one. It MUST have been created by Someone. Let us examine this line of thinking.
First, we say that the cosmos is complex and orderly but compared to what? Is there anything we can compare the entirety of our existence to? No. Perhaps we can compare it to something relatively complex in our everyday experience like a watch or rather a quantum computer (to update the old watchmaker argument). We assume that a complex and orderly quantum computer must have inevitably come from intelligent human beings trained in quantum technology to design and make them. We assume so given that we observe so or read about so through assumed credible sources. Then we extrapolate this assumed logic to the cosmos as a whole. We assume that this complex orderly cosmos MUST have a creator that stands apart from it. That is where we jump the gun, so to speak. There is no iron-clad reason why the cosmos must have a creator, for by that we would be extrapolating from minutiae to totality, from the quantifiable to infinitude where the rules of mathematics break down. We cannot assume that our logic of sequential causality applies at all to the cosmos as a totality. Hence, we cannot assume that the cosmos MUST have a separately existing creator called God.
Secondly, even if we allow for a created cosmos, why should there be one creator? Why not multiple creators? Who dictates that there should be only one creator? We may invoke Occam's razor to make the claim that all things being equal the simplest solution suffices, implying that having one creator is simpler than many creators. If so, we should be claiming that the self-created, self-emergent, self-existing cosmos suffices as the simplest solution compared to it having a single or multiple creators. Adding this notion of a creator or creators to the elegant and simplest model of a self-existing cosmos violates the principle of Occam's razor previously invoked. This monotheistic creator idea would end up being a self-defeating argument.
Thirdly, there are viable alternatives to the idea of a separate creator god standing outside the cosmos magically waving it into existence. Thinkers and mystics and now scientists especially cutting-edge physicists have moved towards a convergence of a consciousness-based model of reality. In this model, the cosmos is a complex phenomenon emerging out of, abiding in, and resolving back into a cosmic infinitude of consciousness. This oceanic field of consciousness is not an entity standing apart from the cosmos. It is not a localised person separate from the cosmos. It is the very space and ingredient of the cosmos itself. And instead of a linear timeline from creation to destruction, leaving a questionable void before and thereafter, we have a cyclical and pulsating cosmos emerging and dissolving moment by moment with no discernible beginning or end. We can label consciousness as "God" if we wish but that could be potentially misleading given our classical monotheistic and personalistic assumptions about God, thanks to the thick cloud of western-dominated dogmas of the almighty Christian personal God. Leaving aside details of this cosmological and consciousness-based model of reality, the main point is this: there exist viable if not more satisfactory alternatives to the problematic traditional monotheistic view of creator god, a dogma overloaded with much troubling theological baggage that I shall not labour to detail here.
In short, I have hitherto argued against one hidden assumption we take for granted: that there MUST be a creator God who made this complex orderly cosmos. I refute this assumption and have given three reasons for doing so. For me personally, the problem of evil and suffering is the greatest proof of the absence of an almighty, all-loving, all-knowing God who cares about and sovereignly controls the minutiae of every sentient being's existence. Besides, what good is such a God if he does not have sovereign control over each being and the entire cosmos as a whole, whether in deterministic or non-deterministic ways replete with free will or not, however you conceive of it? In fact, a truly almighty, all-loving, all-knowing God would not have done such a lousy job of creation in the first place requiring a convoluted storyline of vicarious incarnation and substitutionary atonement that nevertheless does not fully resolve the problem of evil and suffering. At least not yet, or so they say, but why wait? Why keep making excuses and more excuses for this seemingly absent and impotent never-arriving God? To date, no theologian or Bible enthusiast with their theodicies (theological explanations and justifications for evil) has even come close to offering me a quasi-satisfactory answer. With that, I close my case. For now.
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