Seeing God Through Science
Kabir Castellanos Vega
HAVANA TIMES — When I was a child, my mother and I would talk about scientific discoveries that were increasingly revealing. This made us affirm one thing: Science would prove that God exists.
This hypothesis was somewhat funny, but recently I learned about it in one of those documentaries on the Discovery program, one narrated by the actor Morgan Freeman.
They presented very interesting details. For example, it’s known that an object falling to the ground goes through a phase of disintegration. But some scientists now say that, according to those same laws of physics, reintegration is also possible.
This is something that can also be applied to humans in the old dream of being transported in space, disintegrating in one place and reintegrating in another more distant location. But because of the strong attachment we have to our bodies, and the fear of the destruction of our physical lives, no one seems willing to test these theories.
Another new finding is that, according to these scientists, time isn’t unidirectional or irreversible and that it’s also natural to travel through it, like we’ve read in popular science fiction stories. It’s possible to reverse time just as much as it’s possible to regenerate damage to the body, the planet or the ozone layer.
I never accepted the extinction of faith as Marx once described, but nor do I want to deny science. I believe in God but I accept science as it is, and I dream that one day they’ll merge. Though they seem opposed, they’re closely linked.
It’s exactly like in many cases described in science where one force is equal to the other. One expresses the desire and the other (what materializes) cooperates mutually for its own development.
Well, it’s one thing, Kabir, to believe in God (a higher power), and another thing to believe that this higher power is an old Hebrew potentate that flies around “poofing” the material Universe into existence–a very unscientific proposition.
Both the Hebrew Torah and the so-called New Testament are full of flaws that would make an intelligent person question all of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam).
For example, I accepted a friendly challenge recently and picked up the New Testament. Right on the first page of Matthew there jumped out a gigantic flaw that might, if followed to its ultimate conclusion, blow Christianity out of the water, so the speak.
The first page says it is the genealogy of Jesus Christ. It then vaults through forty generations, from Abraham to David, to the Babylonian captivity, to Joseph, the husband of Mary. And so, Matthew seeks to impress the Jews of his day with the bloodline of Jesus as being from Abraham and David.
But Joseph is believed not to have contributed any genetic material to Jesus, because, it is believed, the Holy Spirit made Mary pregnant. And so, Jesus supposedly had no human DNA from either Joseph or Mary. Hence, Matthew is not depicting the genealogy of Jesus, at all, but that of his surrogate dad Joseph.
And so, while this does not prove that Jesus was not divine, it does prove that Matthew was either making up a geneological fairy tale for the gullible, or was simply a numbskull.
The New Testament can’t claim, on the one hand, that Jesus descends from Abraham, King David and Joseph, and claim, on the other hand, that he was or is the “Son of God.”
By the way, Mark also says that Jesus was descended from David, backing up Matthew. And so, both Matthew and Mark establish that Jesus was the biological son of Joseph. This doesn’t jibe at all with the story of immaculate conception, which is at the heart of Christianity.
The problem with believing in God, Kabir, is that creative writers and cynical religious entrepreneurs might sell us a phony bill of goods, and create all sorts of mischief for their personal gain.