That’s how I felt back then. But I was also a sincere seeker of TRUTH. Faith is the assurance of things HOPED for (Hebrews 11:1) — or put another way, faith is the culmination and actualization of wishful thinking..

Our reference reading for today is a Newsweek article: Can Science Explain the Concept of Heaven? - Newsweek.com – and the truthful answer can be called, literally, a no-brainer.

The thesis here is very simple: heaven is not a real place, or even a process or a supernatural event. It’s something that happens in your brain as you die.

When you get into actual research instead of relying on the many and varied stories people tell themselves, it starts to get very simple. In fact, basically, this is one of those things that is so obvious that nature is rubbing it in your face. It’s just that the meaning is too uncomfortable for us, so we run to our fantasy fiction tales instead.

I sympathize with the strong desire to believe that we are worth more than just a lifetime; that we have to have an existence beyond this or life would be pointless. I was an ordained minister, after all, because I believed in all of that. If you care about the truth, though – I mean, REALLY care – then you need to move beyond your comfort zone and look at the evidence.

You know how conscious you are in dreamless phases of sleep, right? When you dream, you’re in your own alternate reality inside your head. But between REM dream states, there is a whole lot of nothing. This is evidence from your own life, which you can test on a daily basis.

The Empirical Evidence: If you’ve ever been under general anesthesia then you have an even bigger clue. Full anesthesia is as close as we ever come to death while being able to tell others about it – and here is what we learn: When your brain isn’t working right, you don’t exist. Even time doesn’t pass. The Anesthetist tells you to start counting backward, you get a couple of numbers out and then you notice you’re staring at the ceiling of the recovery room …and it’s like 8 hours later. With just a little chemical inducement, your conscious existence ended. You were extinguished. Your mind ceased to exist. And it stayed extinguished until the chemical wore off.

What kind of leap of back-assward logic does it take to say that – sure, you cease to exist under deep anesthesia, but once your brain is completely gone THEN all of a sudden you are going to be conscious again!”?

That doesn’t even rise to the grade of retarded logic. Seriously. BUT we have a strong personal incentive for denying what is in our face and readily apparent when it makes us uncomfortable..

We all want to believe that our lives are bigger than the here and now, even though that belief is demonstrably false. So we cling to these things anyway and will even become angry when someone points out the patent absurdity of our beliefs. It is not uncommon for religious people to even threaten to kill those who point out the truth and sometimes they even act on their threats. That’s how desperate they are to avoid the facts in evidence.

I know because I was one of them.

Back to the article: It’s sad to see scientists shucking and jiving in the way you see in this article: They can’t just come out and say, “yeah, we do know what happens when you die – you can even figure it out for yourself with no help from anybody if you think about it for 5 minutes.”

They can’t do it because they would be publicly vilified, probably threatened with violence, and perhaps even actually targeted with violence. So they say they can’t prove it (yes you can) and “we can’t be sure” (yes you can!) …because they are afraid. That part makes me very sad. But I also understand that there are believers out there who are willing and even eager to kill anyone who challenges their fantasies with facts. It’s something a reasonable person should fear, I suppose, but it certainly says something unfortunate about the state of human intelligence.

With that in mind, we take a look at New Scientist’s guide: How to spot a hidden religious agenda.

This article deals primarily with the backdoor “Intelligent Design” jihad and covers such secret jihadist terms as “irreducible complexity” and “scientific materialism.” Rather than explain these terms in detail here, you should read the article. I will expand with my own thoughts below…

I will only add briefly to the discussion on the subject of irreducible complexity since the author glossed over it.

Irreducible Complexity is a philosophical argument from ignorance: Stripping away the verbiage, it all comes down to “I don’t understand how this could have happened, therefore it could not have happened naturally.”

Favorite Creationist/Intelligent Design arguments for complexity often involve things such as bananas and eyes. Bananas are supposed to be perfect for human consumption… but IDers apparently don’t realize that wild bananas are far from  “ideal” for humans; they have tough skins, nasty seeds, and aren’t very sweet. Selective breeding brought us the bananas we see in the store today. People did that, not some diety.

Meanwhile, the eye seems pretty complex until you realize that all its components exist separately in nature: The shape of the eye is created by the well-known natural process called envagination (same as your stomach and every other pouch-like part of your body). Light sensitive cells exist all over in nature; creatures with pockets of light sensitive cells but no lens and even light-sensitive bacteria. In other words, no irreducible complexity here! And so it goes, always coming back to “I don’t know how that works, so God must have done it.”

Now let’s bear in mind that Intelligent Design/Creation science (hereafter referred to as “ID” for short) is not in ANY sense a science: There are no creationist laboratories, no creationist experiments. What would they test in such labs? New circular arguments?

ID consists solely of linguistic philosophical arguments which attempt to poke holes in scientific theory. ID’ers act as if the only alternative to evolution would be some god. They want you to believe in a God creator – that’s why they do what they do and that is why ID is religion not science – but since ID only tries to delegitimize scientific evidence and does not offer any proof of a particular alternative, you could just as well believe that life on earth arose because of advanced aliens, alternate-universe intrusion or the Flying Spaghetti Monster – should you choose to accept their arguments.

The typical ID argument is based around some vague idea that “life is just too complicated to have evolved…” Yeah, sure, life is too complicated to arise spontaneously… so then what… God created it? If that’s true, then wouldn’t such a God be even more complex than mere earth life, being infinite and all-powerful?

So if earth-life is too complicated to have evolved, then so must a living God be too complicated and therefore must have been created by an even more powerful super-being. ..who of course must have been created by yet another even bigger Super God.

Oh no, they would say, God just exists; he is perfect, infinite and eternal. He wasn’t created.

Okay, then life on earth wasn’t created either. Earth life is far from infinite and is nowhere near “perfect” so it is much easier to believe that life “just is” than it is to believe some unseen non-material Superman-God “just is.”

This would be obvious if you didn’t start your debate from a pro-religion bias.

And by the way, try explaining the perfection of creation to someone with a genetic disorder. Look at the baby born with no brain, or half a heart, and tell me how perfect it all is.

That’s right, if you bother to look around very much you’ll see just how imperfect, flawed and half-assed it all is. Life works, but barely. In every given population of anything, there are a lot of genetic failures. The religious person just refuses to open his eyes and see. In other words, if someone or something created all life, then he/she/it did a very crappy job. Evolution is what makes the most sense when all this information is taken into account.

As a philosopher and theologian, I love arguments along the lines of “why do I exist?” and “what is the meaning of life?” They’ve been my “bread and butter” for decades. These are philosophical arguments, however, and the attempt to turn such arguments into anti-science crusades will, ultimately, only bring harm to both religion and science ..as well as humanity.