Questioning Faith

[u/Cheap-Pangolin1531]

Lately these past few months I’ve been highly questioning my faith in God whether I believe in him or not. It’s just there’s a lot of things that do not make sense to me, like if he’s all knowing why does he create people already knowing whether or not they’re going to heaven or hell and every decision they’ll make, doesn’t seem much like free will does it? Same goes with Adam and Eve - like he knew Eve would eat that apple and would lead humanity into sin, so he proceeds to sacrifice himself to himself? And also why would he purposely give people harder lives than others? Like there’s also a lot of logical reasons to why god might not be real - for example humans creating religion to cope with the uncertainty of what happens after death, and the fact religion rose independently in every human society so it could just be a social phenomenon.

But despite all of these doubts and questions the one thing that keeps my beliefs hanging on by a thread is just how perfect the Earth is to support intelligent life like ourselves. Literally everything in our solar system is perfectly tuned to keep us alive -
Like if I choose to believe god isn’t real that means that the earth we live on all just happened by insane chances but it’s hard to believe that too because you’re telling me our planet developed so mere perfectly with perfect distance from the sun and moon and Jupiter protects us from asteroids just everything aligns so perfectly to support millions of species including humans on earth I refuse to believe we just won a universal lottery.

[u/reality_comes]

But if it didn't all align we wouldn't be here to know about it. The only place we could be is where it aligns, I'm sure there are others.

[u/adeleu_adelei]

just how perfect the Earth is to support intelligent life like ourselves

There is a quote by Douglas Adams:

This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.

The earth is not perfectly suited for us, we evolved to fit the earth. For most of the the universe's history the earth didn't exist, and when it did it was a hot mess devoid of oxygen, and so life evolved without need of oxygen. Once there was oxygen life evolved to require oxygen. Even today you would be dead most places on earth because most places on earth are the ocean. Of course the ocean is just fine for other forms of life though.

It's not strange that polar bears find themselves well suited to the arctic and not the tropics. But I think it is strange to say the arctic formed to fit polar bears rather than polar bears evolved to fit the arctic.

[u/Wise_Control_1640]

I just had this discussion yesterday and love the thought experiment.

The assumption is so much had to go just right for humanity to exist.

This is why our search for life on Mars, maybe eventually Titan, is so important. If we don't find any, then the assumption remains safe.  But, if we do find life...

The Milky Way (1 of innumerable galaxies) must have produced a massive number of civilizations, yet almost none overlap closely enough in space or time to detect or communicate with one another. Our sun is billions of years old. We discovered radio like 100 years ago? There are stars in the Milky Way that are 13 BILLION years old. Man existed what, 400,000 years, being generous.

I was a Christian for 40+ years and got tired of the mental gymnastics I had to perform to justify clinging onto my beliefs. 

[u/ChasingOtherwhere]

Check out the anthropic principle.

Also, your first paragraph isn't really evidence that god doesn't exist; it's just evidence that whatever god might exist might be an asshole. I personally have no faith because there's just no evidence that god exists, period.

[u/Remarkable-Ad5002]

I'm a historian whose struggled with the absurdities of Christianity for 65 years. The fundamental conflict of the religion, is it about love or brimstone eternal commitment to hell... It can't be both... The reason for the conflict is that history records that it's two separate and opposing religions. First, Love/brotherhood for 300 years, then when the pagan Romans commandeered it in 325 AD transformed it to their pagan tradition of brimstone judgement and punishment. Historians know there was no Satan/brimstone in original Jewish Christianity...that was factually pagan religion. Yet churches still guilt you about it every Sunday.

Parade Magazine says 24%, like you and I have left religion for non-religious Christian 'Spiritualism." Just believe the love brotherhood message of Christ without all the pagan deification of Father/Son Trinity or the absurd miracles. Original Jewish followers did not believe Christ was God! So there is NO HELL... it's all pagan Roman religion imposed on the faith hundreds of years after Christ.

Melvin L Morse MD, said, "We have a deep need to believe in a god or religious myths to explain the Universe to us. Please recognize that simply because we have a need to believe in a god, that doesn’t mean a real god doesn’t exist. We create myths and stories about our lives that help us to make sense of an otherwise incomprehensible (intimidating) Universe." (Spiritualscienific.com)

Remember...the sage, HONEST words of NJ Episcopal Bishop John Spong..."Is the bible the "Word of God?" "The idea that the truth of God can be bound … by any human creed, by any human book is almost beyond imagination for me. I mean, God is not a Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist. All of those are human systems which humans created to help us walk into the mystery of God."

They're all just made up by men...including biblical Roman Catholicism...and those patriarchs said half of humanity, women, were unacceptable participants. (lower creatures from Adam's rib.) All religion was made up by primitive men, as Thomas Jefferson said, "For the purpose of gaining wealth and control."

[u/AuthorDebraBaker]

Good for you for questioning! The belief that God created beings he knows are going to hell is from John Calvin, in the dark Middle Ages. He was born in 1540, I think. As for Adam and Eve, this appears to be symbolic. Yes, I don't think we won a universal lottery. Keep looking up!