The ‘We Are God’ Argument

The argument goes like this:

The universe is made up of matter and energy.
We are made up of matter and energy.
Therefore, we are the universe trying to understand itself.
Therefore, we are God.

That argument doesn’t make any kind of sense. First, just because both the universe and human beings are made of the same “stuff” does not mean that we are the same thing. In fact, as Lawrence Krauss has so poetically pointed out, the stuff that we are made of didn’t come from the Big Bang. The stuff we are made out of came from the nuclear furnaces of dying stars. Krauss added that we should forget Jesus, stars died so that we could live.

Second, isn’t it a little arrogant and egocentric to claim that the universe is us? I mean it is one thing to say that we are made of the same stuff as the universe. That is actually true to a certain extent, but it is another thing to say that the universe needs us to understand it self. That’s just a way of trying to make human beings more significant than we are. It is a false attempt at creating a cosmic purpose and it is bullshit.

We are not God and the universe is not God either. Gods are imaginary. They are a byproduct of our evolutionary need to find patterns and our imaginary need to anthropomorphize things we can’t understand. Human beings are self-centered. We think the universe revolves around us and as a result, we once thought that if there was a rain storm, it must have be our fault for either pissing off some deity or not pleasing some deity enough. Fortunately, we have learned a lot since then and we now know that deities don’t control the rain. Allowing gays to marry didn’t cause the rain storm and throwing a virgin into a volcano won’t prevent a rain storm.

The view that the universe is somehow sentient is just a last ditch effort by some to hold on to religion even after those people have come to realize that the stories of various religions are bullshit. This is simply a way to cling to religion after one has rejected religion. Sure Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. are man-made, but there is still a god, right? Wrong!!!

The universe is not a god. Gods don’t exist. The universe does. The universe is not sentient to our knowledge and until someone can provide some valid evidence that points to a sentient universe, I am going to reject the claim.

We often talk about how the planet is alive, but it would be a leap to jump from this view to a claim that the planet is sentient. To our knowledge, it isn’t! In the same sense, the universe is alive, but not sentient to our knowledge.

This is all just new age crap in which the believer can self-aggrandize his or her self over both theists and atheists. The think is that religions maybe silly old myths, but atheists can’t prove that some kind of God doesn’t exist. Sorry, but the world doesn’t work that way. We use the scientific method to help us understand the world around us. We can’t just re-define God to be something that we know actually exists and then assert that we proved our claim. Any asshole can redefine stuff into existence. I really hate leprechauns. They climb up your leg and bite the inside of your ass and stuff. They fucking suck.