Dj Abs on God - Part 2 (a)

Groovers,

So now for the hard part. 

Is there any actual evidence of God? 

And just to clarify, poor DJ Abs has been inundated with thousands of emails suggesting his previous blog on God was illogical and stupid but WITH THE GREATEST AND UTMOST RESPECT to his many critics I don't think they fully understand the point DJ Abs was making.

Which is this:   if there is a God (note the if ), ie. a supreme being, ie a  creator of this universe, then almost by definition, he or she or it will sit outside this physical world, outside time, outside space, outside matter and so direct experience of this God by us mere mortals is impossible.   Just as science suspects there are 10 dimensions of space but we can only experience 3 of them, it is the same with God.

But the fact that we can't directly experience God does not, of course, mean that we should not seek some evidence of God's existence.  Otherwise the question become absurd and God has no more likelihood of existence than the Easter Bunny, Father Christmas or an Honest Lawyer (to quote an old and hackneyed joke).

So what evidence is there (assuming we have no direct evidence eg. burning bushes, voices from up high, miracles, etc)?

Well I don't know if I can do it justice to this in a short sharp blog  but Groovers think about these things:

• the remarkably structured and  ordered nature of the universe and the scientific laws that underpin it (which have an elegant, logical and structured mathematical basis)
• the moral code or conscience that all people seem to have inside them and which appears to exceed reasonable social necessity
• music and other forms of art that have no rational basis in biology or Darwinism
• humour
• love
• the human brain and the fact we have intellectual capacity well beyond what is needed to survive as a specie
• the flukiness that life exists at all - indeed that the universe exists at all*
• the tendency of humanity to gravitate towards greater good throughout history (despite many obvious set backs)

Each of these examples is worth a blog on its own but are examples, Groovers, that you should be thinking about in this Great God Debate.  Put aside for now the God of the Old Testament or the New Testament or the God of any religion.  The simple question is this -  is there a God?  Is there a supreme being and creator of this universe?  In my opinion, the above examples suggest there might be or at least opens the door to such a possibility.

But that is enough for today.

Until next time groovers,

Peace,


DJ Abs



*For example, the ratio of mass of a neutron to a proton is 1.01378841870.  If this ratio, did not exist there would be no atoms, no chemistry, no life.  There are numerous other examples - the rate of the expansion of the universe after the big bang, the ratio of dark energy and dark matter to normal energy and matter and numerous others.  All of these remarkable coincidences do not, of themselves, necessarily prove a God or a divine intelligence or a creator but they, do I think, make the atheist position quite implausible as well.

DJ Abs on God - Part I

Groovers,

Thanks for all the great feedback on my blogs. Glad to know you’re enjoying them. And apart from some quibbles on the correct order for David Bowie’s albums, everyone seemed in complete agreement that the DJ Abs plan for world peace was a.) the right thing to do and b.) never going happen :-). Still one can only try.

So given it is Easter, DJ Abs turns his mind to matters spiritual and answers for you the biggest question of all – is there a God?

The answer is of course: no, yes, perhaps, possibly and not sure.

Indeed this question is so big DJ Abs can only answer in five parts:

1. What is question all about (ie. Why Dawkins et al are misguided?)
2. What evidence is there of God?
3. How could a loving God allow suffering and evil?
4. Isn’t the whole Easter/cross thing a bit silly?
5. Given Parts 1-4 what does this all mean for my life?

I may merge or compress a few of these rants depending on how we go but am told young Gen Y’s can’t cope with too much detail, length or complexity so need to chunk it down – hence a rant in 5 parts.

OK so looking at the initial question - is there a God?

The traditional agnostic view of God - commonly misunderstood as being that you can’t make up your mind – is that knowledge or proof of God is impossible within the realm of human experience. So the question is incapable of answer in the strict sense. And this makes sense to me. If there is a God, I imagine he or she sits in a spiritual world outside the physical world. And as we don’t inhabit that world – we can never know for certain he or she exists or doesn’t exist. And there are plenty of examples even in the physical world of things we believe in that we can’t proof or even experience but we consider likely to exist. Atoms for example. Or deeper than that - one-dimensional vibrating “strings” that are said to make up all matter. Indeed, science now believes there are likely to be 10 dimensions of space plus time but we humans can only ever experience 3 dimensions of them. The other 7 don’t exist for us in any real sense but science is pretty sure they are there.

“So what?” I hear you say (or at least some of you say) – just because you can’t prove God doesn’t exist doesn’t mean he does. Yes – good point.

But the agnostic view does at least explain why Dawkins and his supporters are to a large degree barking up the wrong tree when they try to disprove God through an examination of the physical world. The question cannot be answered by science alone.

BTW – and for the record - DJ Abs is not an Earth Worm and does not believe the world was created 10,000 years ago with Adam and Eve*. I think in any rational debate about God we must start with the assumption that we accept all science (acknowledging of course that science has its limits and is fallible).

The important point is that a belief in science does not contradict a belief in God. One is looking for a truth in the physical world, the other a truth in a spiritual world.

OK – DJ Abs is getting a tad mega-physical here. Back to the initial question.

So you can’t prove the existence of God. But importantly this does not mean you can’t look for evidence of God.

Otherwise you might as well believe in fairies and flying mounds of spaghetti and anything that takes your fancy. My key point though is that in looking for evidence of God, you will never get a completely convincing answer to the initial question. As God, if he or she exists, sits outside the realm of actual human experience, evidence can only ever point or hint to his or her existence – never actually prove it. Some faith is required.

Thus ends Part 1 of this rant. Part 2 next week.

Until then groovers,

Peace. Amen. Respect. Love.


DJ Abs

DJ ABs on David Bowie and a World Constitution

Groovers,

When we last left off I was going to explain how to eliminate world poverty but in the last few months got a bit distracted by the important issue of the top 5 David Bowie albums of all time and this reminded me that I did also promise to blog on the title "Why one should never meet one's heroes - The sad tale of David Bowie and DJ Abs" and then someone rather unkindly pointed out that this suggested I had actually met David Bowie and since I hadn't, this made DJ Abs and his blog somewhat disingenuous but surely you understand I was speaking metaphorically not literally and really just wanted to make a point about hero worship, male emotional retardation, the cult of the celebrity and the phoniness of it all and then move on to a deeper point based on that new book by Malcolm Gladwell "Outliers" that suggests that what is behind most successful people is (more often than not) luck and opportunity rather than superior genes and then say something about executive salaries and the whole moral bankruptcy and unfairness of our modern reward and recognition system but then that was all getting a bit complex so I refocussed back to just settling once and for all the top 5 David Bowie albums and in the process reconciling the deeper emotional issues that DJ Abs has with David Bowie and whether one could ever forgive him for Tin Machine, Blue Jean, his appearance on Rove Live and Extras, etc, etc so without further ado, and after some 25 years of careful deliberation and research, I herewith present to you David Bowie’s Top Five Albums of All Time:

1. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
2. Diamond Dogs
3. (somewhat controversially) Hunky Dory
4. Scary Monsters
5. Low (with Aladdin Sane a close sixth).

OK - glad that issue is finally settled.

Time to move on and eliminate world poverty.

So, it seems to DJ Abs that the fundamental failure with most developing nations is not just a lack of resources (after all the greatest resource of all is people) but the failure of government within those nations. And without reforms to that government, these economies will never get off the ground.

Development aid is important - no doubt. But there is a growing body of evidence that suggests development aid is not enough and indeed, in some African countries, extreme poverty and associated measures such as life expectancy, infant mortality, literarcy, etc have been going backwards despite increases in aid over the last two decades.

Going back to the Magna Carta, it seems an important, if not an essential pre-cursor to any successful economy that it has a stable government supported by a strong independent legal system that secures basic human rights, including private property rights. If people are going to build houses, grow crops, work hard, etc they need to have the confidence that their private property rights will be respected and enforced.

You only have to look at Zimbabwe to see how quickly a society can be destroyed by the absence of a functioning legal system. DJ Abs visited Zimbabwe just over 10 years ago and let me tell you groovers it was the jewel of Africa. Black and white living prosperously in peace. A modern, first world nation. Clean water, traffic lights, shopping centres, parks, schools, nightclubs - the whole kit & caboodle.
And then Mugabe started acquiring land without compensation, setting prices by executive fiat, printing money to prop up his power base and pay his government and the economy collapsed. An entire nation destroyed was within a matter of years with 80% unemployment and millions left starving.

So how do we encourage corrupt, lawless, despotic nations to reform themselves in a way that will enable their countries to get off the poverty line and develop economically and sustainability.

Well – it is hard and probably unethical to simply externally impose a system of government on a nation even if its leadership sucks.

What I propose (and have been proposing for some time) is to look at a way of gently and slowly encouraging reform from within. The way to do this is by making developing nations comply with a basic set of human rights as a condition of access to the world trading community.

These rights would be set out in a simple document which I call a World Constitution. Compliance with the World Constitution will be a pre-requisite to access the world trading community.

The rights in this World Constitution need not be complex or detailed. I’ll quote my man Barak Obama on the key ones: the right to free speech, the right to worship how or if we wish, the right to peaceably assemble or to petition the government; the right to own, buy and sell property and not have it taken without fair compensation; the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures; the right not to be detained by the state without due process; the right to a fair and speedy trial; and the right to make our own determinations, with minimal restrictions regarding family life and the way we raise our children.

Most would consider these rights universal and indeed many are currently enshrined in the UN Charter of Human Rights (which many nation states have already agreed to).
But where my idea differs from others is its needs to be more than a well meaning statement of nothing.

For a start, all nations will need to comply with this Constitution to be accepted to the World Trade Organisation or similar federal trading body. And if, over time, a nation fails to comply with the Constitution, it needs to run the risk of enforcement action in the form of economic sanctions or ultimately expulsion from that community. And to prevent abuse and ensure legitimacy, such enforcement action should only be taken with approval of a World Court - a Court independently constituted by eminent jurists to adjudicate on compliance with the Constitution (similar to America’s Supreme Court or Australia’s High Court).

This might all sound like pie in the sky stuff but there are precedents for this idea.

After all the United States of America is a federation of smaller states built on a constitution that contained all these rights. It is no small coincidence that it is now the largest economy in the world - an economy built by impoverished immigrants and outcasts from Europe (which was then way and beyond the most powerful economic block in the world). In my view, America’s Constitution, its Supreme Court and its system of government helped secure and enforce the basic human rights necessary for economic development.

Turkey is another good example. It is transforming itself into a modern, secular and tolerant society and developing rapidly. A key reason for this is its leaders understand Turkey’s economic future lies with admission to the European Union. And the EU will not tolerate breaches of human rights amongst its member states. So Turkey’s improvement in human rights is partly motivated by its desire to join the European Union.

Indeed, what I am suggesting already happens to a limited extent through the United Nations. Nations seek to impose sanctions on errant nations such as Zimbabwe or Burma because of human rights abuses but any action gets bogged down in inter world politics precisely because there is no clear, independent and objective way to adjudicate on these human rights abuses.

A World Constitution would provide that legitimacy.

It would also provide a powerful incentive for despots and human rights abusers around the world to lift their game. What the Mugabe’s and the Kim Jong’s recognise (and if they don’t, their supporters ultimately will), is that their survival, and that of their nations, depends on economic prosperity. And that won’t happen without trading access to the wealthier nations of the world (forget what some anti-globalisation people may have told you - time and time again the evidence strongly suggests poorer nations have the most to gain from free trade with wealthier nations).

The other benefit of a World Constitution is that the more a country’s economic fates is tied to its trading partners, and the more interaction and trade between them, the less the prospects of war. The chances of the United Kingdom, Germany or France ever engaging in major war again are virtually nil and the European Union is a powerful reason for that. The same with the United Nations (or States) of America.

So there you have it – how to permanently eliminate world poverty.

The problem is not just lack of resources – there are ample resources to feed the world - but lack of basic functioning legal systems and human rights in many developing nations. A World Constitution – a set of basic human rights that all nations are required to comply with - is one way of encouraging the necessary changes to enable these economies to grow and develop. And for those of you that think there aren’t sufficient resources to feed the world, I remind you the number one health issue in the developed world is obesity – hardly a sign of food shortages. I am fond of saying we live with the ridiculous irony that about half the world worries about eating too much whilst the other half worries about getting enough to eat.

It is time to fix that problem.

Until next time Groovers,

Peace, Love, Respect and Amen.

DJ Abs