In considering arguments proposed by Christians attempting to demonstrate that there must be a God, one of their most common comes to mind: The First Cause Argument. It is startling in its simplicity and sufficient to convince many a believer.

The First Cause Argument says that, since everything has a cause, if we go back far enough we must come upon the first cause, which must be God. Someone must have got the ball rolling.

In modern times we have followed the expansion of the observable universe to a singularity, a point of infinite density and infinitesimal size, but because we as yet have no theory to unify gravity and quantum mechanics (the holy grail of physics), beyond this point we are unable to travel. In other words, we have followed the trail to 10^-43 seconds after the Big Bang, but we cannot (yet) penetrate further.

So when physicists are asked, what happened before the Big Bang, they say, "We don't know." When Christians are asked this same question, they say, "God created the universe." God being the First Cause.

However, if everything requires a cause, as these religionists claim, then God must also have a cause. They will attempt to sidestep this problem by claiming that God has no cause. He is the end of the line. But if God does not require a cause, then not everything can be said to require a cause, and the universe can just as easily be without a cause as God.

This is where the tortoise comes in. In the Hindu tradition, the Earth is said to be resting on the back of an elephant, which is in turn standing on the shell of a tortoise. But what does the tortoise stand on? At this point the Hindu must ask to change the subject.

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I shall begin this post with a quotation from the venerable Thomas Payne:

No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and, consequently, they are not obliged to believe it.

It is a contradiction in terms and ideas to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication. After this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner, for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.

-The Age of Reason

When I converted to Christianity (or a peculiar brand of it), I skipped over reason. I navigated no journey of logical, sensible, or rational cognition by which others may have convinced me that the tenets of the religion (the existence of God, the inerrancy of the Bible) possessed any objective basis by which to lay claim to my life. And yet, I was converted.

As I look back at that period of my life, and the years that followed, wherein life in the church cemented my choices and narrowed my options, I can see clearly that, were I, at that tender age, capable of logical thought, I would have rejected the religionists’ claims of “revelation” outright.

Why do men and women accept as revelation from God words that were not revealed by God to them, but rather, supposedly, revealed to someone else, for which claim we have only this person’s claim, or even less credible, someone else’s claim on their behalf?  “He saw a burning bush that did not consume the bush!” “They saw Moses and Elijah and Jesus together on the mountain top!” “He calmed the sea!” If someone made such claims in the present we would judge them mentally incompetent. God supposedly told Abraham to slaughter his child and burn it? Believable? A mother makes a similar claim in a courtroom (God told me to knife my children to death!) and she is sentenced to a mental institution or lethal injection.

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Just had a relative die. Very religious. His family believes he will be resurrected, receive a new, glorious body, and worship the God of the Bible for eternity in heaven. If this brings his family comfort, all well and good. At the same time, I can't help but wonder about the basis for such a belief.

As far as I know, there is not a scintilla of verifiable, testable or repeatable evidence to justify the idea that life continues after death. The peculiar and specific pattern of neuronal connections that we acquire over a lifetime of being conscious are destroyed when our brain cells cease to metabolize and begin to decay. From what do we build a belief in a Christian resurrection?

Those we interact and bond with affect out own pattern of personality, their consciousness becoming part of our own, such that their cessation causes pain and loss in us. Naturally we long to interact with them again. So believing in a resurrection may bring comfort. But does that make it real?

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