Well, since you asked – and since everyone’s just dying to know – my “purpose” is that I enjoy writing on this subject. I enjoy thinking through arguments and thinking about why people believe the things that they believe.
I’m not really out to “convince” anyone, which I recognize as a pretty fruitless endeavor. If my comments help people sort some things out for themselves, that would be nice, I suppose.
I think your reasoning is excellent and appears honestly shared. With that said, have you ever asked why some people do not believe some of the things they do not believe? In such issues as yours for instance, you are not lacking in intelligence, that is clear, yet in the case of the existence of God, you demand physical proof as though it would be a good thing for God to possess the attributes of man so you could experience Him sense perceptibly. Yet the attributes of man are limited and frequently his attempts at making “improvements” self damaging, not at all having a good track record to be considered a creator of all things. Certainly not the “being” to hold confidence in when it comes to the opinion “there is no God“.
The following may sound biased against man but it is not if factually considered, so please bare with me a bit here. As proven through most of man’s endeavors, the majority if not all that we do to “improve” our lives, which more often than not means to make our lives easier and more convenient, results in the destruction of ecosystems, the atmosphere, the overall environment, the unnecessary extinction of life forms, and/or causes side effects or destruction one way or another to ourselves. That is not negativity, but fact. The more “intelligent” we claim to become the more threatening our mistakes become. This is because we, in general, are arrogant. This is not to say man has done nothing to improve his way of life in some ways, but rather to point out those things that have shown themselves beneficial to the existence of man have not been driven by man’s devotion to the production of conveniences, or what methods are most convenient to get to the end result.
Nature (that which God created) has frequently proven to possess more medicinal substances free of side effects (when not abused) than man made chemically based pharmaceuticals for instance, yet the pharmaceutical companies more frequently concentrate on man-made chemical substances because they are more convenient to obtain or manufacture and easier to produce, rather than to locate and identify natural holistic substances.
If you consider these things, you may find that nature has never threatened life, the environment or man to the degree man consistently threatens everything around him and it is most greatly attributed to the quest for convenience. The question should be considered, what is it man has really accomplished with the formation of this “advanced modern society” we have created today, in comparison to what society once was when man relied on that which nature provided alone. Or, worded another way, did we go far off the appropriate course by abusing what God gave us rather than learning and utilizing that which God already provided us? Would we not have advanced further if we concentrated on the identification and development of natural holistic substances and on the quality of life rather than the manufacturing of man made substances and articles of convenience? It may seem an odd pondering but would we and the overall environment not be in a much better state of wellness had we remained more devoted to natural forms of transportation? After all, it has virtually only taken us 200 years to cause the damage we have caused to the environment and man himself with the popularity and convenience of modern transportation and when you consider 200 years in contrast to the span of recorded history of man alone, we have shown proficiency in ignorance.
What I am pointing out, is you deny the existence of God because you claim you do not have physical evidence of His existence, yet you do but refuse to look more deeply into it. You do not hold such stringent requirements to many, many other beliefs you accept also having no physical evidence. This is not to belittle you but to point out to you your disbelief in God is not based on fact or physical evidence or even the same level “qualifiers” you employ in other matters. Man has proven how intellectually ignorant he can be (ignorant due to advanced knowledge), and it is the discovery of that ignorance in most scholarly atheistic converts that leads to their opening their mind and looking beyond the material sense perceptible aspects of life.
Man proves man can do nothing if in opposition to God’s design without causing his own afflictions but doesn’t always realize it until he first recognizes God.
Man also knows nothing can come from nothing yet the path of physics is leading closer and closer to a non-elemental, deliberate, organized origin of the universe limitlessly incapable and far to intricate in the formulation of progressive life sustaining events to occur through happenstance, but possible only if produced by a supernatural intelligence, God.
The fact that there are so many variations to the world wide belief in God is not an indication there is no God, but rather evidence there must in fact be a God and man divided by social boundaries and experiential comprehensions has not arrived at a unified recognition of all aspects of that God. One first must realize there is a God before attempting to determine who has the most accurate understanding of Him or the most intimate relationship with Him.
