All questions relating to God, Religion and the scriptures are basically viewed through two sets of eyes which is why there is such severe and polarised debate:

• The Traditional Christian view believes that The Bible is fundamentally God's revelation to humanity. Although written by human authors, Christians generally believe it was inspired or guided by God.

• Historical-critical scholarship approaches the Bible primarily as a collection of ancient human documents, examining them using the same kinds of methods applied to other historical sources

I have to state that I lean towards the historical / scholarly view so, unless you are firecely one way or the other, when you read the snippets below try and give them a balanced hearing.

The problem of evil

Though I don’t like it, I would rather accept suffering as a quirk of chance, or the considered evil of some men, than accept that ‘God’ consciously allowed it to happen.

Ultimately, we wouldn’t need Free Will Defence, or any other kind of excuse, if mankind could behave itself like all other living things.

A truly decent world wouldn’t demand such elaborate apologetics to make belief in a good God tenable.

The Bible

The Bible is a collection of books composed by many authors over a span of roughly 1,500 years - from around the 15th–14th century BCE to the late 1st century CE.

Many books (especially in the Old Testament) likely began as oral traditions before being written and edited over time, often many centuries later.

If the same biblical narrative began today, would it get past the scrutineers?

The fundamental core of the Biblical narrative is based on religious axioms. Axioms are foundational, self-evident (or accepted-without-proof) statements that serve as the starting points for a religious world view.

(E.G. "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth")

The Bible contains many unprovable starting points that make Christian belief coherent

Axioms

A religious axiom is a belief accepted as fundamentally true without requiring proof..... or more accurately foundational beliefs, lie at the heart of most religions - Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism, for example. Around three-quarters of the world's population identify with a religion, and many of those religions are built upon ancient scriptures and teachings containing propositions that ultimately have to be accepted without empirical proof.

The fact that billions of people can construct so much of their understanding of existence, morality and the meaning of life upon such foundational beliefs is, to me, utterly extraordinary.

From a historical perspective, many parts of the Bible contain a mix of historical material, theological narrative, legend, and symbolic/mythological elements, and its overall truth is often understood through the lens of faith and interpretation.

Inescapably, The Bible is a human product - fallible authors, imperfect transmission.

There is NO non-Christian independent record of the resurrection.

Religion is a human creation in the sense that humans developed, codified, and interpreted religious beliefs and institutions over time. That is undeniable. No supernatural entity handed down perfectly preserved scriptures or structures without human involvement.

For most of recorded history, religion was not just influential, it was the operating system of civilisation.

Many experts conclude that religion is a human product reflecting humanity’s full range of impulses (good and bad).

Of course, the real problem isn’t religion itself, but how we embrace, wield or use it. The question of how people ‘wield’ religion begs me to ask whether God would be happy to put his faith in the religions that man created in his name.

To believe in God, all you need is to justify faith-based propositions and accept religions foundational statements and beliefs. Put another way, you wouldn’t need atheists/agnostics if people’s initial religions axioms had been rejected - or never invented.

Does the multiplicity of religions, with their conflicting claims about divine will, intervention, and salvation, undermine trust in any one version? In other words, surely, they can’t all be right.

Regarding cosmic vastness or biological complexity, perhaps awe can fulfil the same psychological roles as religious reverence without the baggage.

I’d like to strip away those inherited axioms and creeds, and see if what remains is a quieter, more direct sense of wonder at existence itself. The vastness of the cosmos, the incredible, elegant precision of natural laws, the emergence of conscious life from stardust - these can evoke a profound recognition of something greater without needing to assign it a personality, a set of demands, or a single authorised story.

I feel there is a space out there for my beliefs where God isn’t a singular, Christian figure. The space I seek is in the mystery that science glimpses in equations and telescopes, that poets feel in silence, that anyone can touch in moments of deep presence. No matrices required, no fear of getting the creed wrong - just an open-eyed reverence seen for what is.

Being part of a religion is a safe place to be. Each religion is a family of co-believers singing from the same hymn sheet (not necessarily in tune) and reciting universal prayers with the aim of reaping the rewards offered by their particular religion.

Over time, my focus has shifted from not whether I can trust God but can I trust man? According to religious tradition man is either is God’s earthly messenger - or something I don’t necessarily want to find, God’s earthly inventor.

Ultimately, mainstream religions are so determined to defend their ideologies they go to war to prove which is the more peaceful and which right or wrong!

Ultimately, the question remains in the realm of history, philosophy, and personal experience rather than laboratory test tubes and double-blind studies - much like large swathes of The Bible.

Let’s assume that God, via his biographers and emissaries, is responsible for fashioning our earthly pathway. An interesting question is whether his instructions have been passed on the way the original writers envisaged. And indeed, would mankind’s stewardship of God’s expectations meet with his approval.

‘It’s probably not God’s fault’.

This was one of the lightbulb moments where I realised I may have a passport away from atheism’s murky realm.

What the Ten Commandments do is introduce religious control blended with morality. The fact is, one has to believe in God to believe the Ten Commandments and whether from a Jewish, Christian or secular point of view, penalties for committing violations can be severe, even capital.

Actually, within The Old Testament in Exodus and Deuteronomy there are multiple versions of the Ten Commandments (Decalogue), with variations in wording, order, rationale, and even content.

Religions don’t slaughter one another to promote a beautiful hereafter do they?

I very much doubt that paying earthly reparations for forgiveness was God’s idea. (Indulgences)

Without any religion, we could be unconditional friends. With religion, it appears we can only go so far.

The fundamental question: do I need a religion?

One final thought for now - the life we lead can be fraught. For the likes of my Brother-in-Law, latterly at least, his deterioration was heartbreaking for us and barely tolerable for him.

BUT - and here’s an unsettling one …………………… what if the afterlife is worse?

We don’t know do we? Oh lord!

Very little is known about Jesus’ life up to the age of about 30. What we do know comes almost exclusively from the Gospels of Luke and Mark.

There are no detailed contemporary non-biblical records of his childhood or youth - Jesus lived in a relatively obscure part of the Roman Empire, and his public ministry (starting around age 30) is what drew wider attention.

It is almost universally accepted (including by me) that Jesus did exist, and that Jesus of Nazareth was a real 1st-century Jewish teacher from Galilee who was crucified under Pontius Pilate around 30–33 AD.

One important thing for me is that should I find a God in whom to believe, I want his existence and history to be unmolested by mankind - if that’s possible.

Belief in God and adherence to a religion are not the same thing. For me, and many others, faith in a Creator comes more easily than commitment to a particular religious tradition.

I do have a dilemma. There is no definitive, universal proof that God exists, instead he exists within interpretive, philosophical realms. Ultimately the reason why I’m against the notion of a Biblical God / Trinity is that the recording of it and interpretation of it has been done by man. Do you really trust man?

And as far as I’m aware, no wars have been fought in the name of Spiritualism.

Michael Egnor’s recent book, The Immortal Mind, argues from clinical neurosurgery and modern neuroscience perspectives that the human mind cannot be fully explained by the physical brain alone.

Egnor contends that humans possess an immaterial, spiritual soul that accounts for reason, free will, personal identity, and consciousness, and that this soul is not produced by brain tissue. The central claim is that materialist accounts of the mind fail to match what surgeons and neuroscientists actually observe.

I would love to work with God as a constant companion rather than an entity that promises and threatens.

Moses dies on Mount Nebo (in Moab) “aged 120 years, still vigorous: ‘his eye was not dim, nor his vigor abated’” after God shows him the Promised Land.

God himself buries Moses in an unknown location.

There is no reliable independent evidence that Moses existed as described in the Bible. He may have been a historical figure whose life became heavily mythologised, a composite of several traditions or individuals, or an entirely legendary figure. We simply don't know.

As a whole, the Bible took 1800 years to write, collate, edit and first canonize. Though there was never one universal, simultaneous act for the entire Bible across all traditions. This seems a fair, agreed upon summary of a long, complex historical process. Its authorship ranges from ‘traditionally attributed’ to ‘unknown’ to ‘scholarly debated’.

But let’s be clear, these are only my musings and I would never try to dissuade anyone from a religion when it is obviously such a huge part of who and what they are. It probably becomes more important in later life. Regular worship, and the friendship and companionship that goes with it, is undoubtedly the most important thing in some people’s life. On a local, social level, that cannot possibly be a bad thing. I would never knowingly compromise that for anybody else, my ideas are my own and it was being close to some pretty awful things that started me asking questions.

I didn’t want excuses or retrospective homilies, I wanted help or answers when I (we) needed them. Looking back, it feels like I was simply being naive. Pray to God we’re told, and if that doesn’t work, pray harder and if that still doesn’t work, well never fret, it was all in God’s great plan. You’re supposed to suffer, just like the one who’s dying, but have faith.

Ultimately, my unanswered prayers to my original God severed my ties to him.

Richard Dawkins, a ‘proper’ atheist, said:

“The universe we observe has exactly the properties we should expect if at bottom there is no purpose, no design, no evil, no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.”

A troublesome thought does occur, at least troublesome to someone who still has faith in a Biblical God: how would you describe ‘God’s’ reaction to my succession of desperate, unanswered prayers? Would ‘blind pitiless indifference’ fit the bill?

In effect, mankind was seduced into structured religion, beguiled by promises and coerced by threats - and subliminally, it’s been pressed on me.

Organised ‘mainstream’ religions, in the sense of shared deities and texts, began somewhere between 4000-8000 years ago. The invention of writing around 5,000 years ago means that from that point onward we have records of religious texts and institutions. But REALLY BIG religions started a couple of thousand years ago when Christianity inherited the Jewish God, Yahweh.

God was mentioned in Exodus in the Old Testament, though precisely when that was written is not clear - as we’ve said, somewhere between 1500 and 500 BCE seems to be a best estimate, even then it wasn’t fully ratified for another 700 years or so.

I was born into being culturally religious, so I can be described as, “someone who identifies with a particular religion primarily through its cultural, ethnic, or social elements rather than active belief in its doctrines, regular practice of its rituals, or personal faith in its supernatural claims.”

I think one lesson to learn is that, unchecked, powerful organisations, religions included, can manipulate and influence matters theistic, moral or political on a personal, national and global level.

Throughout religious history, there is much to laud, but there is also much to despise, seeded by interpretation of respective texts by the unscrupulous. So, in my mind, even if I can accept Christianity’s axioms, because of modern man’s influence on religion, I’m forced into a degree of scepticism, or wariness at the very least.

Ultimately, it’s much healthier making up one’s own mind than being told what to think and blindly believing it.

Why did God, through Jesus, wait so long to announce himself? Allah even later. Jesus arrived nearly 300,000 years after the arrival of man.

Science is introduced

Origin of Life (Abiogenesis) is the biggest foundational gap. Biological evolution begins after life exists, but explaining the transition from non-living chemistry to a self-replicating, metabolising system (LUCA — Last Universal Common Ancestor) remains unsolved.

Here’s an interesting one: Tyrannosaurus Rex is many people’s embodiment of the age of the dinosaurs. The earliest dinosaurs appeared about 230 million years ago. The period between the appearance of those first dinosaurs and the emergence of T. Rex, is about 160 million years. The period between the extinction of the dinosaurs and the emergence of homo sapiens is about 66 million years, meaning that in temporal terms, we are much closer to T. Rex than he was to his earliest cousins. That just indicates the success and endurance of the dinosaurs and highlights the relative infancy of mankind.

We still haven’t answered the question, where did it all come from? We’re back to the possibility of a Creator and the recent (scientifically endorsed) shift to a belief in God as a creator and ‘Fine Tuner’. Yes, science, though not steering the ship, may at least have a finger on the tiller.

The Cosmological Argument is a family of philosophical arguments for the existence of God (or a first cause) based on the core idea that the universe (or chain of causes) cannot explain itself and requires an external, uncaused first cause - often identified as God.

The cosmological argument doesn’t prove the God of any specific religion, but it strongly suggests a transcendent, uncaused, necessary, timeless and powerful first cause — which aligns with the classical concept of God.

The Cosmological Argument is based on two premises and a resultant conclusion:

“ ‘Nothing comes from nothing’ and ‘The universe exists’. Therefore, something outside the universe must explain it.” This may be God. Not necessarily a ‘Mainstream God’ but something matching classic theistic reasoning.

Some scientists are coming to believe: “The chances of life existing at all on this earth or in this universe are so infinitesimally small, that there must be something else. Neither chance nor physical/chemical necessity nor a combination of the two, can produce the exquisite, almost limitless number of parameters necessary to create that first living cell. BUT, we do know of a cause that has power to produce those circumstances, and that is intelligence. Intelligence is the only thing (that we know of) that has the requisite power to produce the requisite effect.”

Darwin’s Origin of the Species never actually talks about origin. He talked about changes in existing life, but not where life first came from.

One interesting question arises: How much genuine creative power does the Darwinian theory have?

In the great scheme of things, we are miniscule dots in a huge universe. To give you another idea of size, there may be up to 2 trillion galaxies, each containing up to 100 billion stars! Vast numbers that are matched within us - we each have at least 30 trillion cells, each containing 100 trillion atoms! Every one of those atoms was created during the forming of the early universe, either during the big bang itself or within stars that lived and died billions of years ago before their supernovae exploded and blasted the ‘stuff’ that made us out into space.

Looking forward billions or trillions of years, by the time the universe has either collapsed back, or keeps going, frozen, on and on and on…….. all those atoms from which you and I were made will still be there with the same mass, though at that point we’ll be dust and gas.

Senses are heightened when we lose someone and many of us ask questions about what comes next. After a funeral, at the crematorium or a graveside, when we leave someone behind for the last time, we know it’s the final earthly separation and we hang on to the hope that our loved one will be OK. I’ve come to believe that we do go on, so I think my forebears are OK, as will I be when the time comes.

Since the typical human body is made of around 30 trillion cells and each cell had 100 trillion atoms, there is a lot of ‘empty space’ between the outlying electrons. If that empty space inside all atoms could somehow be removed and the remaining nuclear matter packed together, the entire human species would fit into a volume roughly the size of a sugar cube (while still weighing the same, hundreds of millions of tonnes) because nearly all mass is in the nuclei.

Early on in my musings, I discounted the traditional view of a biblical God, the image-rich, single deity on a throne which is an anthropomorphism - ‘a human term used as an accommodation so finite people can grasp something of the infinite’.

Yes, consider and compare the flawed creature that is man, who’s self-interest and basic brutality can make you cringe. We try to change the order of things to suit ourselves. We bully other creatures and torment nature itself, behaviour that creates conflict rather than balance. Man fights the natural order of things for material benefit - and that may be the thing that eventually destroys us.

In fact, the way we’re going, we may destroy ourselves before we discover where we came from!

I’ve decided I need God but not religion.

I am a spiritual person - in fact, far more so than when I was a nominal Christian.

Believe it or Not

“God is the name of the blanket we throw over the mystery to give it shape.”

Here are a few thoughts and paragraphs taken from the book. Most are my own, but there are a few quotes and religious, theistic and scientific snippets too.

I discovered so much while writing and have come out of the project wiser and clearer of direction but with a bit of a dull headache having to concentrate!

The phrase is a famous quote by Barry Taylor, a former road manager for the rock band AC/DC who later became an Episcopal priest and theologian.