God: The ultimate engineer?
A few years ago, I was browsing through an introductory book about General/Special Relativity and found myself praising the author for explaining rather complex topics in simple terms for idiots like myself. I skimmed through a few chapters and didn’t really pick up the book again. I did, however, found myself thinking about reference frames and speed of light in the coming days, seeing how it made sense and helped me understand the universe around me a bit better.
Being a Muslim back then, I did occasionally come across the verses from the Quran. On one occasion I came across a verse that mentioned something about God being the all-knowing and it sent my mind on a tangent.
I started to think about human experts in their respective fields and how they try to cram a lot of knowledge and ideas into their books to help the audience understand things better. I also noticed that they don’t spend a lot of time talking about themselves and their own awesomeness, they convey it through the content, ideas and explanations. There are good and bad engineering/science books but in most cases if you are a newbie, you end up coming across something new that would give you the tools to understand the world around you better.
Given that God of the “Holy” books like Quran and Bible declares himself as the ultimate expert/scientist/engineer, I started to look at these books from that very specific perspective. Is this book written by a good engineer or is this written by someone pretending to be what they are not?
Another interesting aspect about the Quran is the fact that God declared it to be the final word, the last book and Muhammad being the last messenger. So I started to think …
If I knew and created everything and I was sending out the FINAL manual/book (that is eternally valid and helpful) for an entire species that I love, what kind of book would it be?
The more I thought about it, the more disappointed I became.
Some reasons for my disappointment included:
- No functional specifics about anything whatsoever
- God likes to talk way too much about himself and brag way too much
- God for some reason had no ideas about where diseases actually come from. An engineer would definitely tell you to steer clear of known bugs/issues. It would have been great to point out about microscopic organisms and at least give us a heads-up about how they mess with us in our everyday lives.
- God doesn’t talk about the universe that much and what’s in it. When he does, he gets it wrong.
- God doesn’t talk about Transgender people at all, after all He created them. He likes to talk about the rights for men and women but what about those that are different?
- God doesn’t talk about the brain or how different people have it wired differently
- God doesn’t at all talk about natural elements occurring in nature and how we need Oxygen to survive etc
- God doesn’t tell us to stop slavery
- How old is the earth? When did it all start?
- How Adam and Eve ended up populating the earth? As the entire notion is disturbing and problematic given that it involves incest
- Why weren’t there ever female prophets?
- Why do women have less rights than men? If it’s because of Eve and how she was less capable of deciphering the devil’s plan, becoming the reason humans were kicked out of heaven, then by that logic Adam was even dumber because he was emotionally forced into eating the fruit.
- If He knows everything, then what’s the point of me being born? If I really have free will then He doesn’t know everything.
- Why put little children through so much pain with diseases? Just to teach their parents a lesson? That just seems stupid and cruel.
There is an endless list of things that could have been included rather than repetition of historical events and stories that were already prevalent at the time. There was not really any new ground-breaking information in there which people hadn’t already discovered on their own based on observation.
Conversely, I started to think about the kind of author would write this kind of book? The answer there wasn’t much fun either.
- An unknowledgeable hack, who just compiles and re-hashes old ideas and calls them their own
- A dictator like figure, who wants to scare us into doing as we are told because “I said so”
- A mortal man who wants to ensure that men continue to rule over women
- Someone who doesn’t want to mess too much with status-quo by outlawing slavery
- Someone who wants to talk in vague terms so meanings and definitions can change over time and then you can say “See, I told you so already”
- A lot of magic and things just happening indicates again someone who has no real idea of how things work and just wants to call themselves an engineer
This is just by no means an exhaustive list of things I went through in my head over the next few months but it lead me to the conclusion that the Quran (and other alleged holy books) are just books written by unknowledgeable men who may have had good intentions of bringing some order to the society but ended up dividing us for centuries.
