God... Truth or fiction?

Nowizard, then I feel truly sorry for you! :eek: Poor thing thinks his ancestors were Adam and Eve. That dinosaurs and all sorts of trilobites never existed at all. And you're probably waiting for the Last Judgment.

I want to give an example. In the USA, 70% of the population are believers. However, not like most Russians, who are believers in words only and view church holidays as just another excuse to drink. Americans firmly believe that the end of the world could come tomorrow and live every day as if it were their last. Furthermore, 30% of adult Americans believe that God created humans and all animals. And only 5% of Americans adhere to the theory of evolution.

And such widespread belief in god among them is not due to high spirituality, but rather to general illiteracy and ignorance. Most Americans have simply never heard a word like "evolution," let alone know who Charles Darwin is or what australopithecines are.

So much for belief in god...

Mugais, with this very post, you have declared your own ignorance. Belief in God does not deny evolution. It seems you've never even held a Bible in your hands. Firstly: the claim that people in Russia believe in God only in words is complete fiction. Yes, such people exist, but they are overwhelmingly fewer among Russian Christians. Secondly: our ancestors, though they were intelligent people, had never heard of what evolution was and took the phrase "creation of the world in seven days" too literally. After all, for God, an entire era is like a single day. So there are your seven days: Jurassic, Cretaceous... You need to think with your head, not take every written phrase on faith :p

And as for Darwin and everything else...

This opinion is completely erroneous. In our Russia, it is a legacy of the perceptions of superficially educated people of the 19th century, cleverly used by modern propaganda of godlessness. This opinion can only be held by people unfamiliar with the way of thinking of the greatest scientists.

From ancient times to the present day, among the most prominent scientists, the number of believers has always significantly exceeded the number of non-believers. Even in the middle of the 19th century, when materialism reached its highest development, those at the pinnacle of science were mostly believers in God. Not all of them belonged to one particular Christian denomination, but they recognized God as the Creator of the universe.

When the spread of materialistic ideas intensified particularly in the mid-19th century, it seemed to many that materialism was capable of solving all the world's mysteries, explaining all obscurities, and thereby turning the universe into a giant machine controlled by human will. The dissemination of such a view was greatly aided by the unprecedented development of technology over a relatively short period, which allowed for the boldest assumptions about the future and fostered the boldest hopes.

During this time, well-known materialists such as Vogt, Büchner, and Moleschott wrote their books. Their books seemed new and important then, but in our day they have completely lost their significance. The main works of Marx and Engels also belong to this period, whose views are now just as outdated as those of the aforementioned materialists. Their philosophical worldview retained significance only because it was linked to certain political currents that managed to attract many supporters who adopted the materialistic convictions of their mentors.

Furthermore, in so-called Marxist "dialectical materialism," the materialistic essence was skillfully masked by a dialectical method borrowed from the idealist Hegel. This method allows dialectical materialists to defend their theory even now, when its materialistic foundations have been, one might say, half destroyed by scientific development at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, when the very possibility of a scientific defense of materialism was called into question.

The splitting of the atom, the conversion of mass into energy—that is, the destruction of what from the point of view of consistent materialism was considered matter, the basic substance and foundation of all materialistic philosophy—the theory of relativity, which shook the building of classical physics, and much more: all this would probably seem like some "devilish delusion" to the "classics" of materialism of the last century. It is clear that the modern development of science led to a mass departure of scientists from materialism, for they became convinced of their idol's impotence to withstand the pressure of the newest scientific discoveries. In any case, this can be said about people who have not lost freedom in thought and action.

Materialism as a teaching based on scientific data should have been buried long ago, but it remained the official worldview of the Marxist party for a long time. It is clear that wherever this party held power, materialism was proclaimed the most advanced and scientific worldview. Of course, under such conditions, none of the Soviet scientists dared to openly declare their religiosity or their belief in God as the Creator of the world, thereby renouncing materialism. Only the greatest scientists with world renown, which protected them to some extent from repression, dared to do this. Among such scientists, the most famous is the renowned Russian physiologist I. P. Pavlov ( 1936 ). After his death, Soviet propaganda tried by pitiful and ridiculous means to prove his atheism and disbelief in God. But anyone who knew Pavlov also knew of his deep religiosity, which he maintained until the end of his days.

There were many such cases among famous professors of medicine, whose persecution would have been undesirable for the Soviet regime. Their religiosity was simply kept quiet, and no one knew about it except those close to them.

In the 30s, a survey on belief in God was conducted among the most prominent representatives of science and art—members of the famous French Academy of Sciences. It showed that the number of non-believers there was completely negligible. This survey was conducted quite freely: there could be no question of pressure in France. If we assume that some French academician hid his godlessness out of shame to admit it, this can only serve as proof that in our time disbelief in God represents something shameful for scientists.

True, the process of realizing the backwardness and unscientific nature of the atheistic-materialistic worldview, after its thorough collapse even in the last century, is gradual; among mediocre, ordinary scientists, the percentage of non-believers is still quite high; it is even higher among semi-scientists, people with a superficial education, but gradually the revolution in scientific perceptions is influencing them as well.

The remarkable, comprehensive mind, German scientist, philosopher, mathematician, and philologist Leibniz said in his work "Confession of Nature Against Atheists" that a superficial engagement with science creates a deceptive impression of the imminent possibility of knowing all the secrets of creation and distances man from God. On the contrary, deepening one's knowledge of science leads a person to recognize the Divine Reason governing the world.

The famous English philosopher F. Bacon held the same opinion. Indeed, it is enough just to look through the names of the greatest minds, the most prominent scientists of ancient and modern times, to be convinced that the overwhelming majority of them were believing people who recognized God, the Spiritual Principle, and the Supreme Reason as the beginning of the world. From the multitude of judgments of great scientists on religion, we will provide a few as examples.

Aristotle, the greatest mind of antiquity, says: "By the testimony of all mankind, God is the cause of everything" [Metaphysics. II, II, 820]. Plato, Aristotle's teacher, asserts: "The sun, the earth, the whole world, the change of seasons prove the existence of a Deity" [Laws. Book 9]. This is the voice of two of the greatest minds of antiquity. And here is what Nicholas Copernicus, the father of modern astronomy—whose teaching, according to godless people, supposedly refuted the truth of Christianity—says: "Who can gaze upon the wonderful order of the universe governed by God and not feel an urge to contemplate above all the Creator Himself" [Copernicus N. On the Motion of the Celestial Bodies].

Louis Pasteur, who created the science of bacteria and gave modern medicine a scientific foundation, said of himself that he believes in God and in all divine truths like a simple Breton peasant. He emphasized that it was precisely his scientific pursuits that gave him the basis for such a deep conviction in the existence of God. It is common knowledge that luminaries of physics such as Newton, Pascal, Faraday, Volta, and Ampère were all deeply believing people.

The famous naturalists Linnaeus and Cuvier believed in God, as did Lyell, the father of modern geology. Even Darwin himself, whose name was so often abused by godless people for their own purposes, by no means denied the existence of God with his theory, but on the contrary, considered Him the first cause of everything, the first impulse of beginning evolutionary development.

The striking Russian natural genius Lomonosov, who was our "first university," was never the non-believer that Bolsheviks often wish to depict him as. He was a religious man, as is evident from his "Reflections on God's Majesty." These verses of his, set to music, were even sung in Old Believer monasteries in his homeland.

As we have already said, modern great scientists for the most part believe in God; among them, let us name such figures as Einstein, Bergson, Planck, Ginne, Lodge. From this, it is evident that the claim of anti-religious propaganda regarding the incompatibility of belief in God with scholarship is completely unfounded.