Chapter 1 - Creation

In The Beginning

I was born. This was the beginning of the universe for me because I personally know nothing before that event. I have to rely on the humans that came before me for anything that has happened before I became me. I must rely on the universe around me for clues as to what is true or false in regards to what my fellow humans tell me. I will not take any story from my ancestors as an unquestionable truth just as those that come after me should not take my word as an absolute truth.

It was just in the past century that Copernicus figured out that the Earth revolves around the Sun and published that discovery in 1543. This fact was finally established despite what everyone else mistakenly thought at the time. It took much time for this simple truth to spread and be believed because of long held beliefs that stated otherwise. Our understanding of the universe is increasing, but our knowledge is still relatively young and very incomplete. We are still very primitive in our understanding of the universe and how it works. We are not even remotely close to knowing and understanding everything about this universe or anything that could be beyond it or before it.

Modern humanity does not possess the full knowledge of the universe as it exists or how it was created, even though we know much more now than we ever have. Human theory for creation currently centers on the Big Bang theory. But this doesn’t ultimately explain from what or why this could have occurred; it's just a theory of how it all started from the vantage point of those that currently exist in it. It doesn’t explain the root cause or source for the origin of the universe and is still an incomplete creation theory for me.

Our history is full of creation theories. Before science conceived of one, these theories came from religion. We know humanity has been creating religious beliefs for as long as we have been intelligent enough to record our history. With the advances of humanity we are creating fewer religions that people take seriously and are now mostly left with the ones we created when we were even more in the dark than we are now. Many people believe that these religions have the answers to our questions about the universe even though the people that gave us these answers knew even less about the universe than we do now.

I believe these religions survive because they have no basis in our reality such as a Mount Olympus that could be found on Earth. Anything that could be shown to disprove them are out of our physical reach. They cannot be proven true or false by scientific methods and rely on faith alone as their truth. They also claim to answer that feeling in each of us that there is something bigger than us out there somewhere that exerts control over our world. Many of us have the hope that some sort of universal justice is controlling everything and strives for goodness. The truth may be that a lack of control is real and there is no universal justice dictating what is good and evil. The power that we feel that may be out there may only be the power of energy and physics.

Most religions believe that everything was created by a supreme being. But this thought is even more incomplete for me than the Big Bang theory. It doesn’t answer the question of where the supreme being came from and where that entity is right now. If it can be easily said that God always existed without a creator then it could just as easily be said the universe has always existed without a creator. This is because a creator would have to be at least as complicated and powerful as the universe itself in order to be able to create the universe. The complication of the universe is used as the argument that it could not just exist on its own, yet it is the same argument that could be made as to why a supreme being could not just exist on its own.

Creating the Creator

Here is a common thought experiment. Would you know the same creator as you or your neighbor might believe in today if you were born on a small island and were isolated from the rest of the world? Religions are very much a product of geography and the teachings you receive from your family and the society found at your location.

Where your family originates from and what your ancestors believed in is a strong determinant in what you believe. Each religion has a geographical area of origin and was spread from that origin to the rest of the world. This is because religions are created by humans and spread from person to person and parent to child just as languages are taught from parent to child. People are converted to new beliefs in the same way that people learn a new language.

If I tell you that biblia is the Spanish word for this thing you are reading you will just have to take that on faith as a fact if you have no knowledge of Spanish. If enough people tell you this, then it is easier for you to believe and you may even pass that translation on to others as a fact. But once some other people say it is libro, then what do you do? If half of the city is saying one word and half is saying the other, what do you believe?

That is where we have arrived at with religion and the various competing translations of a belief about the universe. We are left trying to figure out who is right. Perhaps none of them are right and the real universal truth is something that none of us actually know. Maybe none of us can even speak the right language or formulate the right thoughts to ever describe or comprehend what created the universe.

A person developed in isolation would have no understanding of religion or their creator. There is just the vast unknown of the universe and the vast unknown of that person's knowledge. The person may humanize the unknown and create a god in his own likeness to make him feel less alone and to explain his existence, but this is just a person creating the creator. If he passes his idea of a creator on to someone else who believes his stories, then he creates a shared belief which can grow into a religion. Religions exist as simply as that. They are creations of humans just like the thoughts in this book.

Our Creator

It takes a great leap of faith to believe we were created by an intelligent creator of an unknown origin and that our primitive ancestors did not develop this idea out of ignorance. It is much easier to believe that humanity created the gods to try to explain the unknown just as we are now grasping at the Big Bang theory as the new scientific answer to the question of our creation. None of it may be the complete explanation by itself.

My belief concerning our creation is that beyond my own personal creation, humans do not possess the answer, either from science or religion. The complexity of the universe does not automatically mean it had to have been intelligently designed. It can be summed up in this excerpt on intelligent design from UCTAA:

If one accepts intelligent design and tries to understand it, then the logical conclusion is:
This intelligent designer is so complicated and complex, it could not have come about through natural causes, there must be an intelligent designer of the intelligent designer.

And then logically follow on with:
This intelligent designer of the intelligent designer is so complicated and complex, it could not have come about through natural causes, there must be an intelligent designer of the intelligent designer of the intelligent designer.

And so on ad infinitum, or generalized: IDⁿ is so complicated and complex, it could not have come about through natural causes, there must be an ID⁽ⁿ⁺¹⁾.

Perhaps our finite minds are forever unable to grasp the complexity of the universe and may never understand its entirety and origin. Our ultimate creator may be lost to us somewhere in an infinite unknown. All I know with certainty is that I do not know.

Chain of Creation

We only know as an absolute fact that the creator of each of us is our parents. Their parents created them, whose parents create them and so on, until we pass beyond recorded history and we have no real knowledge of how the first human developed or why. If we are willing to accept that we don’t really know our ultimate creator, either in being or concept, we are free from having to put faith in a god or a lack of god as that origin.

The truly knowable part of the chain of creation starts with ourselves, traces back to our parents, and continues to our children. Our place in that chain is much more important and worthy of our attention and efforts than the question of how the chain of creation was initially started.

Articles of Faith

These three articles of faith are from the Apathetic Agnostic Church and adequately reflect the basis for my belief concerning creation and our creator:

1. The existence of a Supreme Being is unknown and unknowable.
To believe in the existence of a god is an act of faith. To believe in the nonexistence of a god is likewise an act of faith. There is no evidence that there is a Supreme Being nor is there evidence there is not a Supreme Being. Faith is not knowledge. We can only state with assurance that we do not know.

2. If there is a Supreme Being, then that being appears to act as if apathetic to events in our universe.
All events in our Universe, including its creation, can be explained with or without the existence of a Supreme Being. Thus, if there is indeed a God, then that god has had no more impact than no god at all. To all appearances, any purported Supreme Being is indifferent to our Universe and to its inhabitants.

3. We are apathetic to the existence or nonexistence of a Supreme Being.
If there is a God, and that God does not appear to care, then there is no reason to concern ourselves with whether or not a Supreme Being exists, nor should we have any interest in satisfying the purported needs of that Supreme Being. However, our apathy to the question of God's existence does not necessarily mean we are apathetic about promoting agnosticism.