A better design for God

 I don’t feel the need to prove that there is no god or gods since I believe I could invent a much better god than the one you follow and give much better reasons for following such a god. Here’s what I suggest, and I challenge you to counter my suggestions.

• A god exists, in fact many gods exist but there is only one god responsible for this particular universe.
• Our god - let’s distinguish him/her/it by capitalising as ‘God’ and assume masculinity for no reasons other than keeping things simple.
• God is not omnipotent although he is far more capable than we are at controlling things in the universes since he set the original laws controlling them. He cannot change these rules without invalidating them and the universes he created.
• God is not omniscient. The universes are vast, and he cannot be always aware of everything in them. He can only concentrate on individual items and, although he is better at multi-tasking than we are, there are limits to his awareness
• God is not concerned with us as individuals and does not care for us, listen to prayers, or interfere in our lives.
• God’s purpose in creating the universes is to develop our spirits and advance our morality. Our spirits are in effect his children. God’s aim is to develop his children to the point where they are responsible enough and moral enough to become gods themselves. Could you imagine what an immoral god would be like? In this respect some Morman beliefs are correct.
• There is no Hell or Heaven. When we die our spirits survive but without knowledge of our former existence. In effect the spirit is recycled in much the way of Buddhist beliefs. However, spirits only advance and are never reincarnated as a lesser lifeform.
• The process of life and death takes many cycles to complete. Like the Buddhists believe, the path to perfection is a long one with many setbacks on the way.
• God has no desire to be worshipped. Let's face it, what sort of egotist would want that? God does not care if you waste your time in church or watching football in a bar. He needs no priests, churches, or sacrifices. Those who live off the work of others and profit from religion are taking a step backwards in their search for perfection.
• God sets no commandments. God does not inspire religious texts. Each person has evolved a set of inbuilt guidelines and knows if what they do is right or wrong. Even the animals have a form of this which is why mothers do not kill their offspring. There are a few individuals who do not have this sense of right and wrong, we call them psychopaths. These people are a genetic accident and capable of much harm. God knows about them but does not care. Their spirit is at a very early stage.
• God created three rules which created and govern two universes. We don't know how he did this, and humans may never know but something we evolve into might understand eventually. The fundamental laws governing everything are:
  a) evolution, a process whereby complex structures are built from simple structures. Evolution does NOT just apply to life.
  b) gravity which causes matter to clump together.
  c) entropy which causes eventual death (but not necessarily our 'three score and ten' lifespan.)
• Evolution is the primary law which set in motion the original creation of the universes. God’s timescale is not our timescale. The universe was created from nothing and at the instant of creation coalesced into negative energy moving backwards in time and positive energy moving forwards in time. This means there is an exact duplicate of our universe but the two universes never meet except at the moment of creation and at the ends of time when the universes will collapse into black holes.
  The energy created in both universes condensed to form matter which coalesced to form stars which created new elements and exploded to scatter these new elements. The star we call the sun coalesced from such matter as did the earth. 
• Life first formed from molecules in the earth’s original atmosphere and oceans. A steady progression of chemistry and random chance lead to life then multicellular life followed by biological evolution which led to intelligence capable of accepting a spirit. The fable describing the creation in Genesis is pure nonsense. God is probably delighted that science has evolved to understand this. Evolution is not yet finished.
• There are many potential disasters that face us both on an individual, societal, and species level. Something horrible may happen to an individual, society or species. These events are inconsequential to God. Spirits will simply be recycled as a different individual in a different society if necessary or even in a different intelligent species on a different planet in the universe. God is aware of what can happen due to the rules he set up in the universe. No doubt he would approve if we spread throughout it, making our species more durable. However, it does not matter if an extinction level event wipes us out since there are other intelligences our spirits can move to.
• The ultimate apocalypse will be caused by entropy. Stars will die and collapse. Some may explode. Gravity will draw stars together forming new stars, planets and galaxies. Ultimately all matter will collapse to black holes. Black holes will merge to form a single black hole and at that point a God will trigger a new creation.

Remember this is not a proposal for a new religion. It’s an invention, but it’s more plausible than the gods currently worshiped on earth. Prove me wrong.

Solve these moral dilemmas

I answer questions on Quora. One of the items I frequently see there is from theists who ask how an atheist can be moral without believing in 'God'. Of course this is hotly defended by atheists who say, "I don't need a god to tell me what is right and wrong - if you do then there's something wrong with you."

The role of religion in morality has been discussed for many years. Richard Dawkins wrote about it in his book 'The God Delusion' and mentioned a study done by a Harvard professor of biology who investigated to see if atheists and theists had the same morality.

He proposed three scenarios and asked those involved in the study to make yes or no decisions in each case. There was no 'maybe' alternative. Non answers were deemed to be 'no' responses. The results failed to detect any difference between theists and atheists. This was taken to mean that morality is something we do by instinct and evolved with us long before there were religions.

Unfortunately, since Richard Dawkins wrote his book the Harvard professor involved in the research was discovered to be falsifying data and resigned his position in Harvard. That doesn't make the scenarios less valid but we need to repeat them to see if the results are the same. So here's the scenarios. You must choose yes or no to each one and any non-answer will be taken to mean 'no'.

Before you start we need to ask if you consider yourself to be religious. Yes/No 

First scenario
A runaway train is heading towards five people on a railway track. They will be killed unless you switch the train onto another line. There's a single man on that line who will be killed if you do switch the train. You don't know any of the six people.
Do you switch the train and save five people but kill one person? Yes/No

Second scenario
You are by a muddy pond which is about waist deep. There's a small child drowning in the pond who you can easily save but in doing so you will ruin your trousers. You don't know the child.
Do you save the child and ruin your trousers? Yes/No

Third scenario
You are a transplant surgeon. In your waiting room you have six people. Five of them are very sick because they need different organs. They will die if a donor can't be found. You haven't been able to find a suitable donor. The sixth person is healthy and also a perfect match for all five patients. His organs can save them all.You don't know any of the six people and the sick people's organs are not compatible with each other..
Do you kill one healthy person to save five people who are sick? Yes/No

I suspect I know what you have chosen and it won't matter if you believe in a god or not. Yes/No answers in the comments please starting with your answer to 'Do you consider yourself to be religious?'  Add any further comments on the next lines. I'll start you off:

My answers:
No, Yes, Yes, No.
I used my instinctive reaction for the last one and thereby sentenced five people to death instead of one. Scenario 1 is similar but I'm not near the individual to be killed.