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The Taboo of Questioning Religion and Irreducible Complexity

     Why is it that we are not supposed to question religion? Some one might get offended? I have personally never understood the idea of feeling offended. The most applicable definition of 'offend' from the Merriam-Webster online dictionary is exactly as follows:

"a : to cause difficulty, discomfort, or injury"


     Now why would honest inquiry contradicting a belief cause difficulty or discomfort? Well, I am quite certain I am about to test the boundary of offending a person. As it was discussed by Richard Dawkins in "The God Delusion", I contend that being offended by these questions is to be embarrassed by the answer.  These questions appeal to rationality, and highly irrational and inexplicable answers leave one feeling ignorant or unintelligent. I do not believe that of the vast majority of people I have encountered. They may be ignorant on the subject, but that isn't an insult, we are all ignorant of certain things. They aren't necessarily unintelligent though. More likely, they have never questioned these institutions and doctrines of faith because of the social stigma and negative connotation that goes with it. 


     Telling those close to me who I know to hold conflicting beliefs that I am in fact an atheist was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. Being an atheist is a quick path to being laughed at and become the subject of anger and discontent. It can immediately render a person as unsuitable to enter a relationship with. You will automatically be considered a bad person to varying degrees by many people without a second thought. Family can instantly become appalled and ashamed of you. Simply because you view the universe in a rational sense. Your standing in a community and how people perceive you can change in an instant. According to the Bible you are instantly as sinful and bad as anyone on the planet for rejecting God. 


     Now, the theories proposed on the origin of life are still very simple. And they will always remain simple. Just as evolution is simple but results in complexity. The hypothesis of God requires God to be an extremely complex being, which then subjects him to the same question as life, what created it? The human consciousness is simply not capable of understanding the origin of life at this point in our evolutionary progress. Things like lower back pain are attributed to being overweight, sleeping in an odd position or lifting something incorrectly. However, we have evolved to walking upright over billions of years of walking on all fours. If we still walked on all fours, we wouldn't encounter this. These things will disappear in future phases of evolution, just the same way the appendix has become a non-essential organ that is more hazardous to us than anything. Our complexity is a product of something vastly more simple. For me it was an awe-inspiring and even life changing revelation when I began to understand evolution. Ultimately having concrete answers was very enlightening. And I find it eternally enlightening to know that even when my scientific heroes die, and even when I die that science will carry on in the quest for truth. 


     The fact that we are composed of the exact same elements that make up the universe is enlightening, and it's just further proof of these scientific theories. The problem is that it's not 'cool' to like science and math. For all of my lifetime and for quite a while before, those who take interest in these things are labeled as geeks. I certainly am a geek, and I am proud of that. Remember, without geeks you wouldn't be reading this right now. Because not only would you not have the internet, you wouldn't even have the computer you read this from if it wasn't for those with a great appreciation of science. 


     So if something can not come from nothing, what made God? More specifically what made such a complex God? Only a being even more complex could have created a being with such complexity. Shouldn't we be simplifying things as we trace it back (especially knowing all we know of how life evolves to be more complex not the other way around) rather than tracing it back to a more and more complex being? Shouldn't we avoid the infinite regress? Every thing in this world has a simpler origin, not a more complex one. There is no known exception to this rule. Creating one by inserting God as the answer to all of the universe's origin leaves you constantly scrambling to answer an infinitely more complex question with a more complex answer. This is contradicting to everything we know about how the world works and how life emerges.


     I don't ask you to change your beliefs, I ask that you think about it rationally and logically and subject every thing to criticism and questioning, and to remember that we are composed of the same elements as everything in the known universe. That isn't a hypothesis, it is proven and irrefutable fact.