If you blame God for anything read this!

I’ll start by saying I’m not an expert on this, and I might be completely wrong – these are simply the personal conclusions I’ve come to over more than 25 years of thinking about it.

God is described as the one who created the systems that produced the universe we know, and for many people that’s extremely hard to grasp for all kinds of reasons. This is something I’ve reflected on for a long time and I want to share what I’ve learned. The Bible talks a lot about God, but we need to remember that when it was written and compiled, most people had very little education in the areas of knowledge we now take for granted. Trying to explain, back then, the kinds of things the Bible touches on was almost impossible in technical terms; imagine if it opened with “Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe,” then went on to define elements and explain astrophysics in detail. Communicating that to people without that background simply couldn’t have been done in a way they could understand, and even if it were technically possible, it would have taken dozens of massive volumes and the simple core messages would have been buried under mountains of technical detail, which would not have been effective or even realistic.​

I know some people reading this will immediately ask why people die such painful, tragic deaths, how terrorism can flourish while God seems to stand by, helping some but not the rest of us, why a best mate dies of blood cancer, and how a loving God can watch all this when he has the power to fix it. Believe me, I think there is a very simple answer.

If you dig into it, you’ll find that many religious sources say that when God was creating the world as we know it, one of his first actions was to meet with those who existed with him – angels and so on – to explain how things would work. A long discussion followed, where God’s children, so to speak, raised many concerns in a kind of extended Q&A, and these discussions reportedly became heated, with strong arguments on all sides. One of the voices in that debate was the one we now know as Satan. Roughly 31 billion years ago, Satan was part of God’s upper administration or management, effectively second in charge, with the title “bringer of love and light,” and he was then called Lucifer, one of God’s favourites. He argued that the whole plan would be a huge disaster, a bloodbath and a terrible mistake that would bring unimaginable pain and suffering. God, however, doesn’t operate on guesses; he knew those fears would never actually be realised, but the argument still planted doubt in the minds of those who heard it. This doubt led to intense conflict, and a group that had once been united split into many factions and separate camps.

​I’m a bit fuzzy on exactly how that “war in heaven” played out at first, but afterwards, once the world and the earth had been created, God placed a mysterious “tree of knowledge” in the garden he made for Adam and Eve, the first humans. He gave them one clear instruction along the lines of “If you eat the fruit of this tree, you will surely die,” though I’ve come to think there was a deeper meaning than just physical death. That deeper meaning became painfully clear to me as I reflected on what happened when they did eat from the tree. The story says Lucifer began speaking to Eve, telling her striking and tempting things – that she should eat the fruit, that she would not die, and that she would become strong and wise. From what I’ve read, the original idea seems to have been for humans to exist more like animals such as cats and dogs, with the crucial decisions of daily life “hard-wired” into them as instincts, just as animals follow their instincts.

​If we zoom out and look at the bigger picture, it’s reasonable to think that if humanity was ever going to destroy itself, God effectively handed over, on a silver platter, the very tool that could start the so‑called mistake and bloodbath. It’s also recorded that Lucifer played a major role in that “forbidden fruit” episode, offering persuasive reasons to break the rules, and so Eve ate the fruit, then gave some to Adam and encouraged him to eat as well, which he did. When I step back and consider this, and then add in the fact that, after eating, humanity gained the ability to make real choices, the free will that would go on to “write” the story of destiny, it seems obvious to me that God was actually setting out to show that Lucifer’s fears were unfounded. Lucifer was heavily involved in the very event that, on the surface, seemed to ruin God’s whole tree‑of‑knowledge experiment, because his deception and persuasion led to the fruit being eaten and to humanity gaining genuine free will.

To me, it’s easy to imagine God having a serious “tantrum” at that point, for understandable reasons, and deciding to escalate things. To erase the doubt that had sparked the conflict and split his family into many rival camps, he allowed human free will and human choices to become the proof that would show whether Lucifer was right or wrong. By then, Lucifer had been expelled from heaven and was known as Satan. It appears that Satan wanted everyone to see that his concerns were justified and that God should have taken him more seriously, but we have no way of knowing exactly what was going through God’s mind at the time. What does seem clear to me is that God was deeply upset and declared that he would not interfere: he would not touch anything, he would not override human free will, and he would not step in to help humanity survive; instead, everyone would see for themselves who was right and who was wrong. Somewhere – I can’t recall exactly where I read it – it’s said that if the good people of the world were ever forced to hide in the shadows the way evil seems to do now, and the truly bad people walked openly and freely, then God would bring everything to a halt, take the remaining good‑hearted people to heaven, and Satan would inherit the earth along with all the bad people.

​So here’s my answer: Satan had a lot to gain by pushing things toward that outcome as quickly as possible, whereas God, as I said, doesn’t act on hunches and probably wanted to tell everyone to ignore the fear and trust him instead. I’m not convinced that simple reassurance would have healed all the divisions and brought his splintered family back together after the damage Satan caused. It seems to me that God chose instead to prove a point that could only be learned and believed by seeing it unfold. Satan caused deep hurt, and what we now have looks like a huge experiment in which human free will and human choices settle the argument once and for all. I’ve often felt like I’m being used to make a statement, but there’s more at stake than just a statement; in my view, this is the only way to remove the doubt Lucifer introduced and maybe the only way God can reunite everyone. God told Satan that if evil ever became the majority, Satan would become the new ruler, effectively the “god” of the earth.

​Yes, that means God now appears to stand by while terrible things happen, but if he intervened, Satan would be the first to say, “Look, God is rescuing people from his own big bloodbath of a mistake‑world”. So if something involves good and evil, or even extending people’s lifespans, God cannot step in, because doing so would make the entire dispute meaningless and would waste thousands of years of history that were supposed to prove something. In that sense, it’s actually crucial that God does not interfere; don’t hate him for that.

​Modern science, in my view, has now shown that DNA cannot simply evolve and has undermined the theory of evolution, and I personally don’t believe we just appeared by some random fluke of nature and circumstances. You only have to look at a cross‑section of a blade of grass under a microscope to see the astonishing systems at work: that grass is absorbing light from a star 150 million kilometres away and combining it with water and carbon dioxide to produce oxygen and energy in the form of sugars that help it grow. I find it very hard to believe that all of this is just random; to me, it seems far more far‑fetched to claim that it is.