Why Was God Invented?
By Bob Lafferty

        OK.  That’s pretty harsh, “Why was God invented?”  That’s sure to raise the hair on the back of the neck of many folk.  But, you have to start somewhere.  If you are one with a bristly neck, stick with me for a bit and maybe we can straighten it out.
        Let’s begin with some pretty simple logic.  Either God exists or He (She, if you prefer) doesn’t.  The existence of God has been argued for centuries by the believers.  What they have to say is familiar to most, so there’s no need to repeat it here.  Instead, let’s take the other side and see where it leads. 
        One of the first difficult questions most kids come up with is, “Where did I come from?”  Once you get past the birds and the bees (or perhaps, “Cleveland”), the answers become more detailed and difficult to put together.  And as we get older, even the questions become much more complex.  “Where did we humans come from?”  “Where did all this come from?” referring to the earth and sky, stars, sun and moon, etc.
        Here is one of the biggest, and apparently unshakable, concepts man has devised -- everything has to have a beginning.  But, logic tells us, if everything had a start, something must have started it.  It couldn’t, we believe, have just appeared without help. Now comes the dilemma. Whatever started the world had to itself be started. So what started the thing that started the world? And, then what started that? And so on. As long as we are dealing with physical beings, this becomes a problem.
        If physical beings require a beginning, what can exist without a beginning? There is a solution, or to stay with the heading, something has been invented. A spiritual being. Because we have never seen or had any direct dealing with a spiritual being*, it is much easier to believe it can have infinite existence -- no beginning and no end. While physical things seem to have a beginning, a spiritual being, in this case God, does not need one. In fact, that's a large part of the definition of a god: a spiritual being that has always existed. That we can believe. We have solved our problem and can sleep well tonight.
        But what if there's another answer? Now were going to mess up our little theory. What if, instead of a spiritual being, stuff has always existed? Matter, energy -- the stuff of which we are made. Of course it hasn't always been in the form that we see now -- the earth and sky, stars, sun and moon, etc., mentioned earlier. Some huge amount of time ago, some billions upon billions of years ago, there's a great possibility it was nothing but a big blob in space.
        So how did it advance from that big blob to what we see around us today? Of greater importance, how did we humans emerge from that big blob to become the sentient beings that we are? Here we have science to help us -- everything from the big bang theory to evolution. It's very logical and understandable, but that's a conversation for another time.
        Of course the beginning of everything is not the only question answered by the invention of a god. Any question involving a physical occurrence that does not have an easily deducible answer can be quickly solved by creating a spiritual one. For instance, "It was a miracle!" As humans, it appears we would rather have an illogical answer than an unanswered question.
        If your life until now has been spent hearing and believing that the only way we could exist on this earth is if a spiritual being is in control, accepting another answer can be extremely difficult -- a sudden 180 degree turn at 60 miles an hour. It doesn't take the belief in a spiritual being to answer the question of what has always been. It is just as possible that stuff -- matter and energy -- has always existed, continually evolving and reforming. Our existence here can be logically explained, understood and believed without the need for the invention of God.

* The believer will say of course he deals directly with God on a daily basis. Just look around. Everything you see He has made. But that is faulty logic. You have to believe that He made everything around you before you can say that is proof of His existence. If you don't believe all was created by God, then what you see around you proves little more than your own existence.