The Incredible Shrinking God: Reasons Not to Believe #1
Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 03:05PM 
Since the beginning of time, man has never been content with not knowing. We, as humans, want explanation or closure for every little thing in our lives. Because of the limitations of science, past generations have attributed these things, things beyond our explanation, to the supernatural, or to God. As our limitations decrease and the capabilities of science increase, we find ourselves with a case of 'The Incredible Shrinking God'.
In the beginning, man created God. God was created to explain the inexplicable. We didn't understand weather, so it was attributed to God. Once we understood weather, we moved on to illnesses. God caused it, only God can heal it. Now that we understand illness, it's moved on to consciousness. Now that we're beginning to understand consciousness, where does God go?
This argument is commonly referred to as 'God of the gaps'. Whatever we don't understand is where we insert God, or whatever supernatural deity is the most common of the day. Mencken once wrote an essay titled 'Where is the Graveyard of Dead Gods?' in which he lists all the gods of the past. 'All were omnipotent, omniscient
and immortal. And all are dead'. No longer necessary.
Imagine a huge diagram with everything imaginable on it. Illnesses, earthquakes, volcanos, rain, the brain, blood, fossils. Every one of these has a line below it that has a corresponding explanation. Every one of these once had God under it. We've used a large amount of white out correcting our mistakes and faulty assumptions, gradually diminishing the place of God.
A quote from Ebonmuse from Ebon Musings sums it up perfectly: 'Where the Bible tells us God once shaped worlds out of the void and parted great seas with the power of his word, today his most impressive acts seem to be shaping sticky buns into the likenesses of saints and conferring vaguely-defined warm feelings on his believers' hearts when they attend church'.











