One of the most commonly used defenses in arguing for the existence of God is the idea that something cannot come from nothing. As long as there is nothing, then something can and never will appear unless someONE (in this case, God) uses his infinite magic to create someTHING (in this case, the universe) to fill the nothing. How does this idea hold up, exactly?

One of the most important laws of the universe is the conservation law, otherwise known as the first law of thermodynamics. The conversation law basically says that matter never appears or dissappears, but is constantly being changed from one form to another. This is how some particle physics too complicated for my English major to adequately describe ended up producing the very first matter that eventually was changed and transferred and broken apart and put back together, eventually turning into me typing this blog entry. My carbon-based lifeform is made up exactly the same elementary particles as those bright things that hang in our night sky. To quote the great Carl Sagan, "We are made of starstuff."

The discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation  in 1964 led to the conclusion that the universe is in a constant state of expansion. The tracing of that expansion in reverse leads to the idea of the Big Bang. Like science has always been prone to do, the Big Bang threw another curveball at the theists of the world. Go ahead, google the Big Bang. You'll get a thousand pages explaining complex particle physics discussing matter, antimatter, dark matter... it's a whole lot more complicated than "Let there be light." I mean, technically there wasn't even actually light yet, seeing as how the stars hadn't even formed.

Still, the theists persists. "Yeah, well what came before THAT? Had to be God." they say. "Had to be."

Well, no. Not really. The truth is, we don't know WHAT the hell happened before the Big Bang. That's what we're trying to figure out. The universe is an enormous place, but it is entirely knowable. We know a lot more as a people than we did when the first lines of Genesis were being thought up by some angry pyramid builder who was tired of living to get his ass whipped by a bunch of dickhead Egyptian slavedrivers. But we're not done. There is still a whole lot we DON'T know. But just because the answer is blank doesn't mean we have to write 'GOD' in the blank. Just leave it blank. It's a lot easier to write an answer in an empty space than it is to have to use a bunch of ugly-looking correction paste.

So if energy cannot be created or destroyed that can only mean one thing; energy has always been there. Always. It was there before the Big Bang and it was there after. It'll always be here. If that's too much to wrap your head around, then consider the source of God. Where does God come from? Has he just always existed? And if that's the case, why can't the universe, which is infinitely more knowable and just as complex as God, always have existed? We don't know how or why exactly that is, but we know it's HERE. We can SEE it. We can't SEE God.

I know, I know, but you don't see God, you feel him. No, that's not God, that's just you. Go ahead, ask God a question. He never answers, and if he does, do you ever wonder how amazing it is that he says exactly what you think he's going to say? Does the fact that we're able to predict God in that manner make us more powerful than God himself?

I'm getting ahead of myself. My point is, ignorance is no excuse to buy into the words of a bunch of ignoramuses who thought seeking knowledge was a sin for which THE ENTIRE HUMAN RACE should be punished. I mean, seriously, what does the story of the Garden of Eden teach us? That seeking knowledge is BAD. Stay ignorant, everybody. Go, Team God!

Because ignorance keeps people in line. It's a lot easier to keep people straight when the penalty is eternal damnation. By the same token, nobody wants to believe that we don't live our lives for SOME kind of goal. We want to live safe with the idea that if anything were to happen to me at any given moment, we would be alright.

One of my good friends once told me he had to believe in God because he didn't want to believe that his mom wasn't going anywhere good when she died. I can understand what he means. Back when I was still struggling with my beliefs, I used to be terrorized by the idea that I would die before I figured out what the hell it was I believed in. One of the biggest sell-points in religion is the afterlife.Christianity promises streets lined with gold. Hinduism promises a class upgrade. There's always some sort of badass incentive for worshipping the way you do.

I used to have this idea that heaven was whatever you wanted it to be. At the time I was in sixth grade, and had just started surfing and jumping off of cliffs a lot. I dreamt of an endless ocean that I could just surf and swim and do pretty much whatever it was I wanted. Had I been driven enough, I could've decided this was EXACTLY what was waiting on the other side of death, and tried to get people to hear me out.

Almost two decades later, I still feel the same way. Heaven IS what you make of it. It's whatever you want it to be. Only it's not waiting on the other side of death. Heaven is NOW. Heaven is here. Life is heaven. Life is supposed to be awesome. We're supposed to experience shit, question shit, test shit, and learn shit. We are the only intelligent species in the universe that we know of, and we owe it to ourselves to put aside the asinine belief that the world was created by an omnipotent deity who created us for the sole purpose of loving him and worshipping him.

Besides, the Bible doesn't say anything about jiujitsu. That's just not right.