God, how smart we are

As usual, science has got it all wrong. According to researchers at Ulster University, Northern Ireland, atheists are likely to be more intelligent than those who believe in God. Not only that, but according to Italian scientists brainy people (atheists according to the Ulster researchers) thanks to the SSADH gene that they possess tend to live longer, by as much as 15 years, than non-brainy people (who believe in God, as defined by the Ulster lot). Pure poppycock. According to this view, atheists, like scientists, must possess the intellectual rigour of constant scepticism. They take nothing on blind faith, but demand to see the evidence.

So let’s take a look at the evidence as presented by the daily news. Cannibalism, Josef Fritzl, the Austrian who kept his daughter chained up for 24 years and fathered seven children from her through repeated rape. Murder as a spectator sport more exciting than sport itself. Wars. Terrorism. A world which spends $1,339 billion a year on arms, $202 for each person on the planet.

What sort of God made such a world? An all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, all-dogooding God? Or a bungling, bumbling, amateur deity, a sort of God who couldn’t even put after his name ‘BTech (failed by the grace of God)’ because, heck, wasn’t he supposed to be the God by whose grace he’d failed himself ?

Atheism requires no special brain power. It’s as easy as falling off a log. It’s believing in a God who — omnipotently, omnisciently — creates all these horrors, and more (Hitler, Hiroshima, Mao, Pol Pot, the AIDS virus, sickle cell anaemia, Alzheimer’s, polio etc, etc), which requires adroit intellectual footwork. (By sending us all these plagues he’s only testing our faith, you see. The more our faith is tested, the stronger it gets. But why couldn’t God — who can make everything — make our faith strong to begin with, and come with a lifetime guarantee? Go figure.)

It’s not atheism that presents intellectual puzzles, it’s belief which does. According to believers, ‘intelligent design’ (i.e., God under an alias) created the cosmos and everything in it, from the rainbow glitter of the dragonfly’s wing to the gossamer web of galaxies spanning the darkness of space. Neat, huh?

So how did it all get there, all in that particular order and no other? When asked this, the atheist shrugs mental shoulders, maybe mentions the Big Bang theory, Darwin, Stephen Hawking, then walks away, whistling, to see if there’s another nice murder on TV, or at least an air crash. The believer, on the other hand, has to contend not just with crashed airplanes but also with metaphysical flights of fancy. The possibility of life originating on Earth without intelligent design (God) is like thinking of a tornado sweeping through a junkyard and, by random chance, assembling an airworthy 747 jetliner, fuel surcharge and all. So far, so God. But what ‘intelligent design’ (God) created the ‘intelligent design’ (God) which created the 747 (life on Earth)? And so on, ad infinitum. It’s like playing sudoku on a Rubik’s cube. You have to be real smart in order to do it.

Far from being a no-brainer — as scientists like Richard Dawkins and others would try to convince us — belief in God is an all-brainer: it requires constant, counter-intuitive reasoning and indefatigable powers of mind. For instance, just thinking of a God who apart from creating and maintaining everything in the universe, from electrons to supernova, has time to read every thought in your head every second of every day and on that basis determine whether you should subsequently go to heaven or hell, or be reborn as a cockroach, requires ingenuity of a very high order. Like conjuring a 365-day, 24x7 BPO with just one Operator.

No doubt about it. Unlike the dumb atheist, you’ve got to be brainy to be a believer. Which is why only believers can work out why God makes them live on an average 15 years longer than atheists. Considering that there are far more believers than atheists, could it be thrift?

Hell, you know what rents are like these days.

Source: http://timesofindia.com