The Talk about Faith
With all the evils prevailing in the world, why do I still believe in God?
“If there is a God, wouldn’t he be able to stop all these from happening?”
Dissecting my personal views on the popular question
“Does God Exist?”
“ And you still believe there is a God? Doesn’t make sense does it? Unless you think its all just made up by people who use it as a means to control others. The rest are just being gullible to believing in things they want to believe, even though there is no truth to it”
That was a question that was given to me a while ago when I posted something about making sense of faith in the world we live in today. To which I answered, “I still believe in God. I just don’t believe in people.”
To begin, it is people who exploit the vulnerabilities of others in the name of God who are I am against. We can all agree that somehow, the ‘concept’ of God (regardless of how it came about) has been widely abused for vested interests. However, validating whether God is a concept created by man or God as an ever-present divine being warrants a separate discussion below.
Everyone knows that the word ‘God’ today will lead one to an exhaustive and diverse list of religions where God is portrayed and worshiped differently based on the collective influence of belief and cultural systems; and also worldviews that constantly evolve to relate humanity to spirituality. Even within one religion itself, there are various sects and denominations that perceive the character of God in a different light from another. With this premise in place, it is hard not to infer that ‘God’ (or Gods) is after all, just a man-made concept. However, this inference may be an over-simplification which doesn’t quite explain why millions of people felt the need to subscribe to a certain religion when fundamental logic and rationality are essentially the drivers of today’s civilization.
My general take is this: the concept of God thrives in the concept of divinity. Divinity is something unexplained by empirical science and evidence. Divinity is what makes God a God as we know it. And to both believers and non-believers, the divinity of God is perceived as a trump card to all questions that we do not have answers for. This is where faith comes in, as it is described as believing in something where there is no evidence that it exists.
Paradoxically, faith can be both assuring and appalling at the same time.
Now let’s take this a little further by putting spirituality into the picture. Spirituality has always been rather vague and ill-defined but in general terms, it can be loosely regarded as a sense of interconnectedness with the universe, and the awareness of the purpose and meaning of life, which includes personal and absolute values. And at some point in everyone’s lives, we delve into spirituality during our inner reflections about life — however fleeting that moment was.
But is there a difference between spirituality and religion? In some definitions, spirituality is personal, whereas religion is an institution. People who believe in God are spiritual, but not all spiritual people believe in God.
But like religion — spirituality has no tangible or measurable manifestation. What we understand about spirituality is constantly evolving along with new discoveries and there are plenty of questions about spirituality that we have no answer for. Therefore, does spirituality constitute as a divine concept based on the similar conditions mentioned to describe faith? Or is spirituality short of being yet another man-made concept with the absence of God as an axis?
It seems to me that divinity can only be debunked, not proven. If divinity can be proven by empirical methods and tangible evidence, then divinity in its essence cease to be relevant to begin with because it contradicts its very element of being an unproven entity. This is why it is easier to debunk God than to prove that God exist.
There are a lot of circumstantial evidences today out there to prove that God does not exist but a tool created by men to gain power and control over others. Yes, religion has been in the forefront that waged civil wars, oppression and ethnic cleansing. But despite this madness, these were not substantial enough to shake the foundations of faith established around the world, and still there are people who believe in this divine being called ‘God’.
So this brings us back to the question: why do I still believe there is God despite knowing what I know?
It seems that for some of us, there is an innate spiritual void within that seeks to justify that there is a higher being that created the world we live in today. What if the presence of God as a divine being can only be acknowledged when it fits into our own preconceived set of conditions of how God is supposed to be like? Perhaps this ‘God’ can only manifest when the conditions that we want God to fulfill are met.
So in my own terms, God doesn’t need to appear in person right before me to be qualifying as God.
