The Idea of God Has One Major Flaw

I don’t believe, especially as an aspiring scientist, that I can call myself an atheist. At most I can claim to be agnostic for there is no way to prove that God doesn’t exist. Having grown up in the Southeastern United States, I was introduced at a young age to Christianity. It remains the religion with which I am most familiar. The argument I make here is specifically in regards to this Christian God but I believe it is an argument that could be made for any of the thousands of gods that have existed throughout human history. The belief in them suffers from one specific flaw which has kept my faith in Christ— or in any other deity — at bay.

It is not that the idea itself is too grandiose. I’m inclined, after all, to believe in the multiverse with its great heaving bounty of worlds and its numerous perfect copies of myself. Neither is it the many possible interpretations of the Bible which turned me away from the idea of an all-powerful entity. But it was that upon stepping back, I realized what religion truly is.

Religion is like a maze whose only entries and exits close once someone has entered inside. The maze itself is a divine experience. Walls are painted high with rosy cherubs floating amongst the heavens. Echoing within these passages are the joyous timbres of choir song that reach deep beneath the warm slip of our skin. It’s a place gorged in sunlight, flooded with the promise that all our trials here on Earth were designed by someone greater than anything we can imagine. We are here for a purpose.

It’s not that the maze of religion is an innately unkind or unsightly place — it’s that this place is rigged.

One of my favorite paintings of all time. In “The Incredulity of Saint Thomas”, the artist Caravaggio shows us the figure of Christ guiding Thomas’s finger into an open wound on his body. Upon feeling the realness of God, Thomas’s doubts in Christ begin to subside. This painting is a grim, fleshy, and yet emotionally moving depiction of religious belief.

I say that all exits and entries disappear because there is nothing one can do to prove to a believer that God doesn’t exist. There is no evidence, past or present or future, which can work against God once he has blossomed in someone’s mind. Every phenomenon of this world is seen by the believer as one of the creator’s many designs. It doesn’t matter whether or not science can explain what we’re witnessing, God will have created it either way. When one brings up questions not addressed in the Bible they’re…