The Many Super Reasons to Pretend in God

From the tooth and claw of the Savannah, to the playing fields at Oundle, 'survival of the shrillest' has moulded the evolution of the New Atheists. But has their militant stridency blinded us to the many super reasons to pretend in God? Have we perhaps missed the nuanced insights of our cruciphiliac friends? Have we overlooked the genius of sophisticated feelogians such as D'Souza and WLC and that bumbling taffy twat? Let us consider now the many super reasons to pretend in God:-

1) The Somethingfromnothing and the genocide handbook

It must be hard to bother to make something from nothing, especially when there are no laws of Physics to prevent it happening without you. -1+1 is a tricky sum requiring a supernatural magic mind beyond our comprehension. What then if your fingers were invisible? If you couldn't see your hands? Why then even a book would be difficult to make. Not that it wasn't a super idea, to make a book when you can speak directly into people's minds – the whole world at once! - to make a book when no one can read? It was a super idea, and you could have managed it, but dictator seemed more your natural role.

2) The miracle of Life

Life from non-life takes scientists many hours, yet you needed only 1 god-day to do it! And you made more than a mere cell, which doesn't count at all. You made all the beasts of the land and the fishes of the sea. Each one sub-optimal even within the laws of physics and improvable with a moment's thought, but nonetheless a super day's work. And fun too! You know – when the teeth go in the zebra! When the worm goes in the eye! 0.01% species success rate! Although so far everything's died.

3) Absolute Morality and Forgiveness

Imagine life without God's absolute morality standard that lets us say torturing children is right! Without the God-given logic and morality that tells us torturing children to death with gruesome incurable diseases is a good thing! Why we wouldn't know what to think! And the blessing of forgiveness. No sin can't be forgiven – with God all is permissable – retrospectively! How would the priests have forgiven themselves on the choirboys without God's blessing? And the bombers on the planes – how would they have forgiven themselves?

4) The fine-tuning and the not-bothering with the ontological

How fine to be so magnificently tuned for decay and death. And those constants. Why, if one changed by absolutely any amount, the others adjusted would give the same result. And what a result! Not quite as good for life as it could have been, even without magic. And of course, with beings able to exist immaterially, there was never any need for material anyway. But perhaps you omnisciently forgot you could exist.

5) Pretending it real and the Hitler/Stalin/Mao

If we go through 'Mein Kampf' striking out 'God' and replacing it with 'Darwin' then that makes it real. But are silly ideas always silly? I don't know – I'm mutilating my children's genitals! Is too much critical thought and not enough blindly following holy orders a bad thing? What if I heard a voice telling me to sacrifice my son? Why without God I may as well just ignore it! If History teaches us anything it is surely that too much rational enquiry and not enough belief in silly ideas has been the problem. Hitler! Stalin! Mao! Pol Pot! The other one! Too much clear thinking and not enough faith! Too much rational enquiry and not enough dressing-up! Not enough belief that they were right in spite of the evidence! Pretending it real! This is surely what God wants us to teach children and people who can't think very well.

6) Heaven and hell

We all yearn to go to heaven and meet God. Perhaps you are the indoors type who likes harps and angels and dreary organ music, or perhaps you are the outdoors type who prefers fields and badly drawn tigers – like the Jehovah's Witnesses. There is something for everyone! Everything is perfect like it would be back home if His representatives had a bit more of the Earth-money God needs! And don't they do an efficient job? Hardly a penny left for palaces! But perhaps the most super reason of all the super reasons to pretend in God is our blessed deliverance from Earthly worries. War, famine, disease and suffering, death itself – these are difficult problems to face with reason alone. And though we might eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and become as Gods attempt to solve these troubles, how much better to instead turn the other way and face upwards, wailing to an empty sky?



REJ is away. Trying to work out how to do an index. Anyway, the FT's new.