BYTEKLEBIRHAN GEBREMICHAEL
“Why do I have to believe in God without any scientific proof of His existence,” said Zekarias in a philosophy class at Haileselassie University College of Addis Ababa, then run by Jesuit Catholics including Mr. Lucien Matte a Canadian Jesuit, who was actually the President of the UCAA.
Mr. Savard the Philosophy Professor, who also was a Catholic Jesuit, was shocked to hear his own student utter a sacrilege of such crassness.
“What do you believe in?” Mr. Savard almost shouted at Zekarias, waiting to hear what Zekarias would answer to his own audacious query.
“Professor, I believe in myself and I believe in science,” Zekarias said without budging an inch on his apparently deeply ingrained belief.
“Are your parents, particularly your father, atheists?”
“No! They are and have always been ardent Orthodox Christians. In fact, it is their doctrinaire orthodoxy that drove me into a godless heterodoxy,” Zekarias replied.
Then, Professor Savard asked his class to meditate on ontology for about ten minutes before they broach the topic of the existence of God. Some of the students were thinking rather aloud whispering into one another’s ears.
One of them was overheard saying: “How did the universe come into being? It is beyond a human’s mental capacity to even think of such a colossal thing? Was it designed and put in place by some supernatural being or did it evolve from small things?”
“Hush! I wanted you to meditate alone, not discuss anything about the issue with anybody else. The idea is to get every individual’s independent view about the origin of the universe in order to be able to reach some sort of a common perception of this fundamental question,” Prof. Savard said.
Professor Savard’s instructions, far from inducing an atmosphere of quite and serene deliberation, actually instigated an irrepressible desire on the part of the students to ventilate their views on this profoundly philosophical question.
As a result, the students started speaking without taking care to seek permission from the Professor, who was visibly irritated by it all but he was forced to break his own instructions and listen to one apparently brilliant whiz kid who commented thus:
“Professor, there are three ways the universe could have come into existence and they are: one, it came into being on its own and of its own accord; two, it evolved from small particles; three, it was created by a supernatural being.”
Soon the whole class was abuzz with all sorts of speculations, all variations on one or the other of the three possible origins of the universe pointed out by the whiz kid.
Professor Savard, disregarding his own instructions about the importance of meditating alone on most philosophical questions said: “Your curiosity about knowing the likely origin of the universe is really admirable.
However, it can only and should strengthen your belief in the existence of God. There is no way the universe could have come into being of its own accord.
That would be like saying something can come out nothing. Also, the idea that it evolved from small things would elicit the question, where did those small things come from in the first place? This is similar to the so–called scientific big –bang theory. It claims that the universe originated from the big bang which occurred some 15 billion years ago.
But what banged before the big bang? So, the most reasonable and rational thing to believe is that the universe was and is the result of Intelligent Design by the Supreme Being, The Unmoved (Prime) Mover and the First Cause.’”
“But Professor, you can’t escape the question, how did the Supreme Being come into existence,” one student asked.
“That is beyond the capacity of humans to know or understand, but at the level of human logic, the Supreme Being is self –creating,” the Professor answered.
Upon the Professor’s answer, a sudden intimidating silence fell on the class. All sorts of thoughts and ideas danced in heir heads like so many sparklers. Some thought that the universe or systems of universes (parallel universes) are so unimaginably vast that human access to knowledge of their form and substance is so miniscule that it is quite irrational to speak of them with any certainty.
As to the existence of God, applying the far –from –airtight theory of evolution, they imagined, He may have evolved Zillions of years ago in any one of the imagined parallel universes which may have evolved zillions of years apart in infinite time and space!
As if on cue the whole class snapped out of their fantastical reverie when Professor Savard hawked to speak. He said: “The basic problem with humans is that they tend to have the audacity to fathom the unfathomable and inscrutable divine logic with their relatively puny human logic. In science, they more than sense the existence of dark matter but they have still not put their finger on it.
You can imagine how infinitely more difficult and mysterious it must be to even begin to understand how the Holy Spirit in the human form of Jesus can turn water into wine instantly!
The still controversial Darwinian theory of evolution applies mainly to biological evolution but the existence of God is conceived in the wider context of cosmological scope, which cannot be explained by ‘The Descent of Man’ or the ‘Origin of Species,’ however seminal and monumental these works are.
If out of curiosity we try to apply the Darwinian theory of organic evolution to see if it can shed some light on the existence of God, we would come to the exciting conclusion that given that time and space are infinite, it does not make much sense that the apex of the process of matter evolving in infinite space and time is the human brain, for if we extend the process indefinitely we must of necessity meet beings far superior to humans, who we may designate as demigods and gods.
If we then conceive of the Holy Spirit as the final concentration of energy in whatever form at the imaginary end of that evolutionary process in infinite time and space, would it not be wonderful to proclaim ‘Lo and behold! Neo-Darwinism proves the existence of God in the past, the present and the future!
How true are the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent and ubiquitous characteristics of the Holy Spirit, also known as God, the Almighty and Jesus Christ!”
Professor Savard’s delivery of his lecture on ontology and the existence of God was so powerful that the whole class looked decidedly spellbound and looked up to Prof. Savard not just as a respected philosophy lecturer but also as a missionary on a par with Billy Graham.
Yet there were a few students, Zekarias being the most noticeable among them, who just could not think out of the usual rational box of human logic. Hence, Zekarias raised his hand to ask the following question.
“The issue about the existence of God is merely a speculation without an iota of credible scientific evidence. Why should we spend so much time trying to prove its existence and construct massive belief systems all around the globe involving billions of people and billions of dollars.
Is it not a waste of precious resources which could have been better utilized in eradicating poverty and educating billions of people all across the world?”
“Good question, but isn’t probability theory based on solid statistical inferences from chance occurrences; In relation to our topic, using the still controversial Darwinian theory of evolution, which is really based on human logic, wouldn’t the existence of God be highly probable in the general context of matter ( never mind the origin of matter for the time being) evolving in infinite time and space and wouldn’t the implied assumption that the human brain and mind are the ultimate pinnacle of evolution be highly questionable? And wouldn’t this lead us to a theoretical apex of evolution as being the Hegelian Absolute Idea which may well be equated to God,” Professor Savard said.
Zekarias was more confused than convinced and said with a bit of ire in his tone;
“Professor, with all due respect, I can’t be forced to believe in God when there isn’t a shred of evidence to substantiate the belief. So, I am sorry if I am hurting anybody’s feelings but I want to declare in front of you, Professor, and my classmates that I am an atheist and I don’t think I will ever be convinced of the existence of God.”
Professor Savard felt rather sorry for Zekarias because he knew that if anyone drove the God of Good out of his/her mind, it is a simple matter of dialectical logic that the void thus created will be filled by the god of evil and that this would be devastating to the person in question. Hence, Professor Savard said to Zekarias:
“Yours is a young mind and brain and so it is highly likely that it would succumb to the temptations of this god of evil, with horrendous consequences, including personality disorder, tendencies towards criminality, neurosis, psychosis, schizophrenia and above all emotional callousness and eventually death,” Professor Savard’s warning was perhaps the most serious the class had ever heard, but Zekarias was steadfast in his stance on the matter and replied thus:
“I am never going to be intimidated by such implicit curses of damnation and purgatory. I am an atheist and I will remain so to the end of my life, and stop kidding me about the existence of an afterlife. There is no such thing, period!”
Years later after Zekarias dropped out of university because of an unacceptably low GPA, he saw Prof. Savard walking down the sidewalk at sadist Kilo and accosted him by saying:
“Prof. Savard, where is the borderline between good and evil? If money is all that matters in this bloody, f….ing world, what difference does it make how you get it if the objective is to get it?
“Make it to get it! That is the difference. But I doubt if an atheist can make the distinction,” Prof. Savard said and resumed his walking.
The Ethiopian Herald February 23/2021
