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I don’t mean to make this post religious. At least not in the conventional sense of Christianity, Islam, blah blah blah. Indeed, I have realized that I do not ascribe to any of these faiths. In my view the only reason people ascribe to faiths is because of the accident of where they were born. Anyway, I digress, I had important thoughts on God, the universe and life. These thoughts, to be honest have been assailing me, but today, I have reached a place where I have settled these matters in my mind.

GOD

I know there is a God. What is my reason for making such a bold statement? My reason is the universe and life. My reason for belief in God is NOT the Bible, or the Quran or any of those ancient books. In fact I think those books limit the true understanding of God. My reason for belief in God is the fact that we have a universe that is so amazingly consistent that we know that we have planets that revolve round our Sun and that our Sun is just one of many other stars forming our galaxy, the Milky Way, which in turn is just one of many, possibly an infinite number of galaxies. To me, it is absolute nonsense to believe that the universe just came into being. To me, the laws of our universe are so precise that someone intelligent must have designed it.

It is unlikely, at least for the foreseeable future that Mars would crash into the earth or that the Sun will suddenly explode, or that the black-hole in the centre of our galaxy will suddenly swallow all the stars. Everything operates under such precise laws that it is believed that life can only emanate from what some scientists call the “Goldilocks zone”, or that it is known that the earth travels round the Sun at the approximate speed of 67,000 miles per hour or that the Sun revolves round the centre of the Milky Way at the approximate speed of 250,000 miles per hour! As far as I am concerned, God is responsible for this precision. I believe there is a God because I have observed the universe and life and I know that these cannot be random things.

THE UNIVERSE

The universe is huge. Very Huge. To have some perspective, when I drive my car from Mombasa to Nairobi, it would take me about six or, preferably, more hours to drive. The distance from Mombasa to Nairobi is about 484 kilometres or 301 miles. This is a pretty long distance. However as long as that distance may seem, it would take light much, much less than one second to travel from Mombasa to Nairobi. Speaking of distances, I once took a flight, on Japan Airlines (I believe) from Amsterdam to Tokyo. The flight took 17 hours, plus. The longest damned flight I have ever been on and though the flight was comfortable, more than any airline I have ever been on, I couldn’t wait for it to end. The distance from Amsterdam to Tokyo is about 9,292 kilometres or more than 5,700 miles. It would still take light much, much less than a second to travel from Amsterdam to Tokyo. In fact, it would take light much, much less than a second to travel round the world. If you gave light a second to travel around the world, light would travel around the earth 23 times! Eat your heart out, Jules Verne! I should have boarded light from Amsterdam to Tokyo, instead of Japan Airlines!

Now with that perspective, it will possibly be easier to conceptualize that light takes about 2.46 seconds to travel the 356,500 kilometres or 221,500 miles from the moon to the Earth, or that it takes about 3 minutes and 46 seconds for light to travel the 61 million kilometres or 38 million miles from Earth to Venus or 8 minutes and 20 seconds to travel the 149.6 million kilometres or 93 million miles from the earth to the sun! Yet these distances are puny. It takes light years to travel to some places. In fact the distance that light takes to travel in a year is called a light year! A light year is some 9.4607 trillion kilometres or 6 trillion miles! The Sun which is just one of the many stars in the Universe, has, as its closest stellar neighbour, the star named Proxima Centauri. Proxima Centauri is more than 4 light years away! Yes, it takes light more than 4 years to travel from Proxima Centauri to our Solar System! And THAT is the NEAREST star to the Sun! The Milky Way Galaxy is about 100,000 light years across, and the nearest Galaxy to the Milky Way, i.e., the Andromeda Galaxy is about 2,000,000 light years away! It goes without saying, we are not travelling to Andromeda, any time soon! Indeed, the observable Universe (yup the part of the Universe we are able to observe because our limited technology cannot enable us to observe more), is said to stretch more that 93 billion light years in diameter! The Universe is huge and whoever put it together must be truly Almighty!

However, apart from being huge, the Universe is precise. Our solar system for example consists of the Sun at the center, the eight planets, the dwarf planets and rocks in the Asteroid Belt, the dwarf planets and rocks in the Kuiper Belt and the probable dwarf planets and rocks in the hypothesized Oort cloud. Mercury travels round the Sun in precisely 88 days just as the Earth does her trip round the Sun in precisely 365 days. The Universe is so precise that it is possible to say when the Sun will expand into a red giant and when life on earth will finally come to an end! The fact that everything works under precise laws is all that I need to know that an Almighty God did this!

LIFE

Speaking of life, isn’t, life magical and really special? The fact that we have YET been unable to find life anywhere else apart from the earth, makes life even more special! Life, i.e., organisms that are self-replicating and probably self-aware! How can life even be explained? Wikipedia describes life as being “a quality that distinguishes matter that has biological processes, such as signaling and self-sustaining processes, from matter that does not, and is defined descriptively by the capacity for homeostasis, organisation, metabolism, growth, adaptation, response to stimuli, and reproduction.” So life is contained in matter and makes this matter have biological processes etc. The fact that life exists at all, is all I need to know that there is an Almighty God!

To me whether life came about by evolution or otherwise is neither here nor there. Evolution is an, as yet, unproved theory, but probably the best explanation for the process we call life. But evolution does not, in my view negate God. Indeed, it amplifies the Almighty.

CONCLUSION

Thus, in my view, we cannot restrict God to what some ancient Jews wrote in the Torah and the Bible, or what some ancient Arabs wrote in the Quran, or to what some ancient Hindus wrote in the Vedas. God is Almighty and must be understood as He is. We must try to seek God from the perspective of God and not the perspective of old Gurus, Priests and Prophets. God gave me the power to perceive reality and it is upon us to seek God and understand Him as He wants us to understand Him! I therefore reject our fixed systems of religion! They cannot get me to understand the God who created the Universe and life. I am not Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jew etc. and I reject these religions and indeed, all religions.

I believe in the Almighty God. The Almighty God will, if He wishes to, tell me His name and will, if He wishes to, tell me more about Himself in due course and all I have to be is patient and obey what He is telling me to do. Today’s blog is my first step in doing this.

I dedicate my life to discovering the greatness of God!

Praise God!