It is a frightening concept for most people to imagine there being no God. No afterlife.
No re-incarnation. Just ... nothing, after we die. What would be the point in our
existence? What would be the meaning of life? Surely believers in a life after death
would conclude that the meaning of life is to learn. That with each life we choose
to live we experience things and spiritually grow from them, until we have finally
learnt enough that we don’t need to incarnate at all and can perhaps become a higher
spirit, what some might call an angel or guardian angel. This would mean people choosing
to incarnate as bad people though, which brings up the concept of ‘what is evil’.
Is it something one is born with, and in the future will it be possible to detect
the ‘evil’ gene and remove it just like it will be possible to genetically modify
foetuses to remove such genes as cancer. For the rich, it could be possible to have
a designer child, with a specific hair colour, say, or a higher intelligence than
they otherwise would have. Is this ‘playing God’; changing the design of a child
which was designed by God? The future will bring a lot of answers, more questions,
and moral dilemmas. But will it be able to reveal the answer to the ultimate question:
Is God real?
Is God real? Does he really exist? Is he a he or she, or a ball of energy? Does he or she look like a human? (The bible states God created man in his / her image, in which case God would be a black woman, as the first humans were African).
Again, it is a question that none of us know the answer to for sure. Let’s look at what evidence we do have. The amount of claims / reports / photographs that exist today of ‘paranormal’ events is extraordinary. Just type into Google ‘ghosts’ and see how many hits you get!
It is worth investigating for yourself some reports of things such as ‘out of body experiences’, such as cases of people ‘dying’ on an operating table, floating from their body, and witnessing things happening in other rooms which they couldn’t possibly have known about, before being revived. There are a few of these cases that would be very difficult to explain, and nobody has yet managed to.
Obviously, the majority of these unexplained ‘supernatural’ reports are made up. A lot of them are mistakes, (people thinking they have seen a ghost when it’s in fact a shadow or something similar). A lot of supernatural reports have scientific answers that we can’t yet explain using our current knowledge. But can we really say that 100% of all these billions of reports are not real? Even if 0.1% of them are real, then that is evidence of life after death. And if that is the case, and we do live on in some way after we die, then surely there is a spirit / energy / being that is ‘in charge’ of all the other spirits. A higher spirit. Or ‘God’.
God is usually depicted in paintings and stories as a man sat up in the sky looking down upon us. It is easy to see why ancient people would have thought this. With no understanding of how the weather worked or what stars and planets were, they looked up into the sky and thought that what they saw was the work of the Gods.
‘The Gods’ is an interesting phrase, because some civilisations worshiped many Gods. The ancient Egyptians, for example, had a God of the Sun, a God of the stars, etc. Some people believed that mortals who died became Gods. This was a popular Roman belief; when one of their great emperors died they would be declared a God, or ‘deified’.
Today, most people in the west believe in one God, who created the universe. Of course, this raises the question, is he or she God to the millions of other planets out there which will have life on them? Presumably yes, but then one would imagine that a God who created the universe would be able to transcend space and time anyway!
There is still a need for God in most people’s lives somewhere, whether it be a sub-