Random Thoughts

By Alexander Villarasa M.D.

I titled this book Random Thoughts overtly tongue-in-cheek because, as I have argued in the introduction and preface, I do not believe in anything random about why and how we exist in a nonrandom universe. I strongly believe in creationism, one that does not deny the factuality of evolution in that creative process. The way I see it, the universe and our existence was schemed, designed, and finely-tuned by a transcendent supremely sentient impulse""God""who is not into acts of futility. The essay titled "It's All about God" specifically argues the idea that God's creation of sentient beings""us""was His act of utmost utility because if we are not here to perceive, experience, and witness the universe in all its glory, it would just be cold, dead space out here, there, and everywhere with neither usefulness nor timeliness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781644587461

Book preview

It’s All about God

A question: Is God just a man-made concept? A lot of folks believe that God is just the product of our overactive imagination, an entity so far removed from physical reality that there is just no way that his existence could be proven empirically.

If we assume that this belief is beyond reproach, then how do we explain the existence of other nonmaterial realities that affect us physically? As an example, gravity. Einstein conceptualized gravity as simply the warping or bending of space-time fabric by objects with enough mass that then affects the path of light, curving it significantly. There is enough empirical evidence that prove beyond doubt that gravity is not anything that is susceptible to being detected by our five physical senses, but nonetheless lead us to conceptualize it because it affects us materially. Another example… justice. It is just a concept with no physical form, but because we defined it and gave it formal utility, it also affects us materially. Both exist in the way God exists—not in any physically proven reality but in the way they affect our everyday actions, which we might otherwise not do if they don’t exist.

Someone suggested that conceptualizing the existence of God is a sign of intellectual weakness, a language symbol that, when invoked, serves as an alarm or a warning sign of bad logic ahead to which someone added this observation: God is a concept born out of ignorance and fear which taken together become a hindrance to our destiny of being able to unlock the mysteries of the cosmos. For still others, God simply is a name used to describe fate or destiny in the context of a metaphor that embodies the thing that affects us and because it does, we reflexively put a name to it.

What proof(s) can one offer to the above rambling thinkers that God does not just metaphorically but also literally exist? The fact that the universe exhibits a rational structure that follows logical rules, effectively imparting it with meaning, purpose, and utility is proof enough that a transcendental mind exists. This is what I would call critical thinking that demands the presence of postulates which, when examined through the prism of precise introspection, can only lead to an intuitive but nonetheless logical conclusion.

A friend suggested to me that theistic belief is not intuitive but in fact counterintuitive for the simple reason that it increases when people are exposed to what he termed death primes—a scenario in which people tie together the notions of death and God by assuming that belief in God means belief in an afterlife. In this case, the comforting belief in an afterlife encouraged a related belief in God to retain cognitive consistency.

In my book, being consistently cognitive is never counterintuitive. What was truly counterintuitive was when someone painted with a broad brush people with theistic belief as cowering fools and idiots for even thinking that a deity exists and then becoming dependent on him for their emotional sustenance and at the same time fearing that he would punish them for their sins.

I would argue that there is nothing more counterintuitive than atheism despite its proponents’ contention that it is based on pure rationality. Logical reasoning by itself could not decide for or against the existence of God. Since the question is of such singular importance, we must decide somehow. Several arguments (twenty of them, in fact) have been forwarded by folks with varying philosophic and scientific leanings. Taken together, those arguments are proof enough that God exists, not physically but transcendentally.

One of these arguments is Pascal’s Wager or bet which posits that humans bet with their lives that God either exists or does not exist. If you bet that God exists and it turns out he doesn’t, your loss is minimal. But if he does exist, you stand to gain everything, including God’s grace, eternity, heaven. Stated more succinctly, if you win, you win everything, and if you lose, you gain nothing. You win all because of your intuition that God exists. Nothing counterintuitive about that.

The universe and everything in it was schemed, designed, and fine-tuned for one purpose alone—creation of life, the utmost manifestation of which is intelligence and sentience. Scheming, designing, and fine-tuning are all methodologies (a.k.a. algorithm in computer parlance) in the process of creation. Creation is the sole purview of intelligence and that intelligent creator does not reside in the natural world.

The British poet and novelist D.M. Thomas said this: Since the universe is so harmoniously organized, I have to see a mysterious creative impulse behind it. One might as well call this impulse, God, as anything else. Evolutionists argue that natural selection is a sufficient explanation of organic life. Yet it seems common sense that if an organism moves toward greater complexity, self-consciousness, and intelligence, then it is because those qualities are desired.

Harmonious, according to an atheist I have debated on HubPages (an online blog website), is not what he would use to describe Earth and the universe. He mentioned violent volcanic eruptions on Earth and exploding supernova millions of miles away as examples of the chaos that he said pervade the universe. We know, of course, that Earth and the universe are not static in their essential structure since their overall predisposition is constant motion. Motion always implies some degree of disharmony, but disharmony that does not destroy that essence and skew that predisposition.

The word harmony, when applied in its broadest context to the inner and outer working of the universe, invokes the idea that matter/antimatter or mass/energy are neither static nor passive. The fact that volcanoes erupt, stars explode, and space-time fluctuates do not in any way debunk the idea that it was the stabilizing harmony, what empiricists call the laws of physics that led to the creation and evolution of intelligent and sentient life on Earth.

Paleontologists tell us that primates diverged from other mammals about 85 million years ago. The hominid family (apes) diverged further some fifteen to twenty million years ago. Approximately fourteen million years ago, the African great apes (Homininae) diverged; the Hominini subspecies (humans and chimpanzees) diverged eight to nine million years ago, with humans and chimps separating four to seven million years ago.

I am assuming that the deviation or separation of humans and chimpanzees occurred in environments that were pretty much uniform or similar and they were both subjected to the same evolutionary pressures for adaptation and survival. So why then did the human branch progress much further cerebrally than their simian cousins if they were subjected to the same evolutionary demands? The answer to the questions of why and how we are more intellectually attuned may or may not be answered via empirical methods. We can only try… we never know what we might uncover or discover.

Meanwhile, why not intuit? My intuition tells me that it had to do with our prehistoric ancestors’ progression from simple gatherers to supreme hunters in the wild. Hunting, to be a successful activity, should be tied to social interaction and cooperation undergirded by complex cognitive skills, high levels of motivation and self-awareness. These led to the development of mental capacities to learn, understand, and reason, including the capacities to comprehend ideas, plan, solve problems, and, finally, language to communicate.

If as nonbelievers say that human evolution was all related to macroevolution which they characterize as pure random event, the question for them is: why would random events, sans intent and purpose, produce intelligence which in its basic integration (or algorithmic formulation, for that matter) shouts intent and purpose?

As intent and purpose go, our intuition that we, being the most intelligent in all earthly creation, are here because whoever created us—call him God—is not into acts of futility. For what is more futile than creating something with no one to witness that creation in all its glory?

In other words… it’s all about God.

Angels and Other Strangers

The adage that angels are our guiding light is neither tenuous nor specious. Angels, being ethereal creatures, could be perceived to affect our lives only in so far as they manifest themselves in some form or the other that neither surprises nor perplexes. The laws of physics notwithstanding, these heavenly sentries do not seem to mind being pulled this way or that way in manners less forceful than the slightest tug to their pure white sleeves. However, we might wish that they never return to their heavenly moorings, they could not possibly illuminate all the nooks and crannies of our everyday lives even if they are able to respond to our most thoughtful wishes.

Biblical narratives provide us with insights into why and how angels have been given the divinely inspired responsibility of communicating with us. I heard someone say that angels are spirits visiting us to pass on to us directives from God… directives in the form of tasks, duties, objectives that we must carry out prior to our leaving earth and being allowed to pass through the heavenly gates. This got my attention because of its implications that we do not have free will, as was not the case of Adam and Eve in the garden when they freely and willfully went against God’s command not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

Now some people may not believe the historical, or even the metaphorical, veracity of those biblical stories, thus suggesting that those stories are nothing but myths sewn by ignorant folks who didn’t know anything about the laws of nature. They emphasize that, in this day and age of empirical discoveries including how those laws work to keep nature going, still believing in the existence of anything that is not tethered to the physical and material is delusional. Thus, angels and gods or a God did not exist then and do not exist now.

Going back to the subject of angels and free will. According to the biblical narrative, the first inkling of the existence of free will was when some angels led by one named Lucifer decided to get involved with what we now might consider a power struggle with their creator—God. As a punishment for their free-willing ways, God sent them to a place called hell where they continue to be banished. Absent divine grace, hell must be one heck of a riotous and anarchic place. Likewise, some believe that the current sparsity of goodness on earth is the reason why chaos and anarchy is now unfolding right before our eyes. The choice between good and evil is so totally in our mind’s free-willing purview, in the same way that it was in Adam and Eve’s time.

Based on the above biblical narratives, be they historical or metaphorical, I would argue that the existence of good and most importantly evil in the world is fully our responsibility. Now some have argued that there is no such thing as free will, but then if it does not exist, personal, or for that matter communal, responsibility should also not exist. The existence of free will and its adjoining responsibilities and the results of not assuming those responsibilities are real and to deny that fact is both irrational and illogical.

The irrational and illogical, perhaps, could aptly describe the weirdness of the quantum world. Albert Einstein was quoted as saying, "Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secrets of the old one. I, at any rate, am convinced that God does not throw dice." If the greatest empirical mind of the twentieth century, or of any century for that matter, is convinced that there is a