THE ANGRY OLD MAN

A SUPREME BEING

This is a paper I wrote while in college

Is there or isn't there a supreme being?

An honest answer, We just don't know. Nor do we know the how or
 the why behind life on earth, particularly the how and the why
 that this reasoning creature we call Homo Sapiens originated.
 Neither do we have enough information to know if life is unique
 to just this small ball of dirt and rock that we call Earth or
 is it abundantly spread throughout the universe. These are
 questions that have baffled man since his earliest days and are
 no closer to being answered today than they were in the beginning.
 But being man, this ignorance, this lack of knowledge, hasn't
 stopped the theorizing and the making of conclusions, often with
 disastrous consequences.

These consequences, in the form of wars, persecutions and prejudices
 are often the result of  just one of these 'conclusion'  about man's
 origin. Its advocators call it 'Divine Creation', a hypothesis that
 claims man's origin, as well as the earth and the entire universe, is
 the work of a supreme being, a divine providence or God. One problem
 of this hypothesis, and one which has resulted in a history of wars,
persecutions and prejudices , are the divergent views that man has on
 the how, when and in what shape this divine intercession has taken.
 Yet the divine creation hypothesis, in its various forms, dominate
 man's thinking.

Why has man clung to this viewpoint in light of all the pain and sorrow
 it has brought? And if the divine creation idea is so acceptable, why
 the divergent views?

Many philosophers and historians theorize that a belief in a supreme
 being fulfills a basic need of man. They see early man as insecure,
 weak and afraid, unable to control his environment and in most cases,
 his own life. The beauty of a belief, especially one in an all powerful
 supreme being, is that it has the power to explain everything. Once the
 'supreme being' is accepted as the first cause of everything that
 happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance or change. A
 belief, regardless of what form it takes, is one of the few infallible
 ways of responding to the world's vagaries, because it totally
 eliminates pure accident. For the true believer, everything has a
 purpose. We hear this today, when someone says "It's God's Will".

An important, if not the most important, attribute of man is his
 ability to reason and ask questions. We want to know Why.
 "Why does the sun cross the sky" Why does the wind blow"
 Why am I here?

And it wasn't long before someone had an answer.

The sun, man was told, was being ridden by a supreme being, a God.
 The wind was the breath of another such God. And as for man, he
 was placed here to serve those Gods in whatever fashion they
 deemed. And man was assured this by a new and special class of
 humans, a self appointed group of messengers, the priest class.
 And regardless of the form, multiple Gods or single, human,
 animal or otherwise, there has always been a priest class to tell
 us what the God or Gods wanted from us.

Man, with his needs and weaknesses',  eagerly accepted this. No
 longer was he an accident of nature. Instead, he now saw himself as
 the product of divine providence, something special, and even more
 important, he was being watched over by this divine providence. He
 is told, and accepts, that the harshness of his life has a reason,
 one that only the divine providence can know or understand. Thus a
 flood, a drought or death becomes a "Will of the providence" and is
 much easier to accept.

Sigmund Freud believed in basic needs and held the theory that
 religion (and the belief in a supreme being) "arises from the oldest,
 strongest and most insistent demands of mankind-the desire for
 security, for peace, for welfare." He also felt that the secret of
 religion's strength is the strength of man's passionate desire for
 safety. So does George Brantl, who wrote in his book 'Catholicism',
 "Deprive man of his God, and he will either create one or die of
 meaninglessness."

As we study the early days of man we can see that the basic need for
 survival ruled his life. Thus a religion or set of gods was in direct
 relationship to man's environment. A hunter needed a god to help in the
 hunt, a grower of crops needed a god to help control the weather, a god
 to make the ground fertile. A harsh but simple life in need of harsh but
 simple gods.

But man wasn't stagnant, he grew. And as he advanced to higher levels of
 social development his needs, both physical and spiritual, changed. One
 such major change took place in ancient Greece with its highly
 developed social order. The Greeks saw man as the center of the
 universe, the most important thing in it.

With this strong self-image, the Greeks were the first to make their
 gods in their own image. Prior to this time man's gods held no
 semblance of reality, only one of function. In Egypt we find the
 towering colossus, immobile, a representation of the human shape
 deliberately made inhuman, as was the monstrous, mysterious sphinx.

From this much simplified and condensed history of man we can see that
 divine creation has played a major and an important role in man's
 existence. And while it's form and ideologies change, the basic
 hypothesis remains to the present.. Man was created by a supreme being.

But it is not the only hypothesis.

Throughout man's history there has been those who weren't satisfied with
 the mystical view of man's origin. Instead they sought scientific proof.
 Instead of making the facts fit the circumstances, they wanted the
 circumstances to fit the facts.

One such individual was Charles Darwin. His hypothesis was that evolution
 happened by natural selection, over millions of years. What began as
 simple single-celled organisms would and did, over many years, evolve
 into the complex plants and animals of today. 

While Darwin didn't speculate on just exactly how man began, many others
 did. In 1903 Svante Arrhenius speculated that life on earth was a result
 of spores or other stable forms of life coming to earth in a meteorite
 or driven to the earth by the pressure of sunlight.

A more acceptable theory is that of Alexander Oparin, who proposed
 in 1938 that the first living organism arose spontaneously, not out
 of inorganic material, but out of the large quantities of organic
 material that he proposed were present in the oceans of a primitive
 earth.

Basically this is the theory of evolution, that instead of some divine
 act creating man, man evolved from a simple, single-celled animal
 to his present position through natural selection over millions of
 years.

As you can see, evolution is in direct conflict with the religious and
 creationism view. While they claim that man was created by GOD, and
 offer only spurious evidence and ask you to accept their arguments on
 faith, there are those who want more proof. They, like Darwin, attempt
 to understand the unknown by observing facts and accumulating data.
 They call themselves scientist.

A scientific conclusion is not the result of the ability of scientific
 theories to answer all questions, but in their ability to withstand
 the most severe criticism, both theoretical and experimental. They 
 do not make the facts fit the circumstances, rather they attempt to
 make the circumstances fit the facts, as they are known at the time.

While this debate is going on between the creationist and the
 evolutionist about which view is valid and which is fiction, we
 have a third hypothesis which is slowly gaining support. As of yet
 it has little scientific support and therefore is often dismissed
 as pure speculation. But to those who have taken the time to
 examine the 'evidence' and aren't afraid to ask 'What if', then
 the idea becomes a valid alternative to the other two.

This alternative hypothesis simply asks the question, "could man be
 a product, accidental or by design, of extraterrestrials". Could
 man have been placed on earth as a social experiment. Or is man a
 colony of some distance civilization. Could we be the accidental
descendants of some ancient extraterrestrial astronauts who were
stranded here. Doesn't the bible say that the "daughters of man
mated with the sons of the gods".

Sound preposterous, far-fetched. No more so than saying that man
 came from space as a seed, or evolved from monkeys. And the idea
 of man being created from nothing at the whim of a supreme being
 defies logic. Yet these are popular views.

To be accepted as a theory, a hypothesis must present supporting
 evidence. And the ET hypothesis does, from much of the same source
 material used by the more popular views. They are: man's history,
 his legends, the vast amounts of religious writings and to some
degree, relics.

One seemingly unlikely place to start is the Bible. If you can
 overcome your prejudices, preconceived notions and programmed
 thinking, then the Bible becomes a rich source of information.
 We will look at just a couple.

If you are open to alternative opinions, then ask yourself,
 what did the writers of the bible mean by "the sons of God
 mated with the daughters of man" or what did Christ mean
 with "I am not of this earth, but from above". This is open
 to discussion.

To early man any 'visitors' from space would seem like Gods.
 When Christ said "I'm not of this world" what if he meant,
 instead of being from a mystical heaven, he meant he was 
 from another planet circling a distant star.

How do we describe something new? We use words and symbols of
 objects we are familiar with. Thus, the cloud that led the
 Israelites out of Egypt, talked to them and defeated the
 Egyptian army could, in reality, been some sort of flying
 vehicle. What if the hundreds of instances where clouds
 were involved with some action or event were simply the
 term given to the ships of the ET visitors. In fact, in
 Psalms it says that the cloud was the Lords vehicle.

What if the cloud that descended to the top of Mt. Sinai was
 some sort of rocket ship. If you read the account, with the
 noise and smoke, then compare it to the blast off of one of
 our space vehicles blasting off, the similarity becomes
 clearly apparent. Even the glowering faces of those who
 dared to get close. Were they exposed to extreme heat or
 some form of radiation?

But such stories aren't unique to the Bible. Throughout
 man's religious writings and legends we hear of Gods des-
 cending to earth in flaming chariots, wings of fire, etc.
 Are these to be ignored as exaggerations or blindly accepted
 as 'acts of god'. Or do we scratch our head and say "What if".

One last example is a report that is in the Book of Dsyan,
 an ancient chronicle of India dating back to around 3000BC.
 It tells of a war using space-age weapons by a small group
 of beings who came to earth many thousands of years ago in
 a metal craft.

It tells how differences arose among these beings and that they
 divided. After a while one group rose in the air in a huge
 shining metal vessel. From a great distance they launched a
 great shining lance that rode on a beam of light. The city
 was destroyed. People near were burned. Those who entered the
 destroyed city became ill and died.

Do we just ignore this account and the hundreds like it as the
 ravings of some ancient mystics or nuts. Or do we take it for 
 what it is, an account of something that happened thousands of
 years ago. We don't have to explain it or justify it. It doesn't
 need any mystical meaning. Just admit, we don't know.

BUT...WHAT IF?

In reality our answer to the question, IS THERE A SUPREME BEING
 has to be, We Don't Know! We can speculate and theorize, but we
 can't be sure. We can accept the creation hypothesis and feel
 secure. We can accept the evolution theory and continue to look
 for answers. Or, we can accept the extraterrestrial hypothesis
 and hope that they come back some day. Which ever view we chose
 depends on our own personal needs and feelings, not on fact.