God issue
Regarding to the God issue (wether or not He/It exists) what can one say?
First of all, I do not assume that, apart from my mind, and outside and independend of it, a God exists. Not that I can 'proof' that, for how can one proof the non-existence of something not even clearly defined.
How I arrive at that conclusion is that acc. to my mind, we can conceive of the material, objective world as having been there all the time, having no begin or end. Since there is a world now, and we can not possibly conceive of a world popping into existence from nothing, that is why we can not conceive of a beginning of time.
However, reality shows us, that we can not look back infinitely far, all we will ever measure are finit spatial extends and finite duration.
All things that exist (being specific formations of matter) exists within a finite space and time extend. But since all matter is in motion always, there will be always material causes for some specific material configuration coming into existence (for instance the formation of a stellar object, a galaxy, a planet, a bacteria) and all material formations will leave traces of their existence after that specific material configuration has gone extinct.
This is how we observe the world to be.
Now one other thing is that, even when we have good grounds to assume that the history of the universe has no begin, reality presents us with the fact that there are observational limits. So any concrete assumption on how the universe looked like prior to a specific point, becomes less know, the more we look back in time, and observational evidence prior to a certain point even blurs out completely.
Nevertheless we have some grounds to make models and theories for what happeneded before that time, which are not just wild guesses, but bases itself on predictions that can be made from that model, the describe how the current observable universe would look like.
As far as that is concerned, we can at least differentiate between some models, and rule out some possibilities.
There is nevertheless and always will be a limit to our knowledge, even when that limit has been shifted forwards in the course of history.
What to claim then about something we miss factual knowledge about?
It is a well known fact that for our human organism to survive, we must react on dangers and outside stimuli, which sometimes do not provide enough data to make a specific assumption on the thing we observe. Here is where belief comes into play. Our brains are wired in such a way that even when no sufficient data is available, we will make some assumption as to what the nature of the incoming data reflects upon. Sometimes this is done using prior experiences, to make something out of this insufficient data.
Let us face a human dilemma. You are in the middle of a desert without water, and have no clue as to what direction you will find the nearest well. The human mind will then make a 'best guess' even if no data is available to sustain the guess. But we can know for sure that not making any guess will kill us, and making a guess will at least provide for the chance that we picked the right direction.
This means that to 'believe' something, in the absence of real knowledge is the better choice. In the absence of real knowledge about how nature works, the believe in a god could not be considered to be something wrong.
But as we know human knowledge increased drastically. For most things the explenation that 'God did it' will not be a good explenation, since we have actual knowledge that could explain these phenomena.
The question is however, that even when our knowledge is increasing, fact is we will never reach a point in which we know everything about anything. Taking material history to be infinite (without an actual beginning in time, but only a observational limit) would indicate that all we can go for is a limited amount of knowledge.
Not understanding part of the factors that caused us to be here, will always be the case. Does this imply we should then belief in a God, cause we will indeed have an important part of our knowledge missing?
My argument against it would be, that even when a profound understanding of the material history prior to a certain point in time is a fact, even when new developments in cosmology, physics and other sciences, might reveal some more about this history, will be lacking, a belief in God is really not much more then a placeholder for missing knowledge. It's not an actual or factual explenation, it does not make us understand anything at all.
Missing knowledge in the field of pre-big bang cosmology or abiology (formation of the first life forms) and missing links in evolution, are not really a crucial factor in every day life. We will eventually fill those gaps with actual knowledge, despite that we will never conceive of all knowledge about everything, but at least we will have enough knowledge to reduce the amount of "wild guesses" or speculations which absolutely have no grounds, like the theistic doctrines.
Fundamental principles or absolute ideas or deities, residing at the bottom layer of existence, do not make it into the real world as real entities, rather they are fixations of the mind, an idealization of reality itself.
