Thinking out loud on why the existence of a Creator is just as likely as not

 An attitude which you often hear is: ‘The only way to know, or experience, or believe in a Creator, would be through the human construct of material scientific evidence. We have no such evidence and so can conclude that no Creator exists.’

Now, while this is understandable on a basic level, I suspect that this is human-centric, hubristic, single perspectival thinking, which is almost the definition of foolishness, in cognitive science terms.

So here are my thoughts & conjectures.

My eyes can only capture a limited spectrum of light. My ears can only hear on a limited spectrum. The human brain is limited to the concepts and modes of thought that it is capable of reaching.

Think of an ant colony in the desert. It has neither seen a human nor can conceive of a being so long lived and so much more intelligent. We are beyond their comprehension. Yet we exist.

The universe is so vast, it is inconceivable to me that we are the only sentient beings capable of self-awareness, and high-thought functioning.

A Creator may be to us what we are to the ant colony. A Creator maybe in a space or have an existence our brains simply cannot comprehend. Other sentient creatures in the universe may have evolved further than us and may have a closer more direct knowledge of, and link with, the Creator.
We only have human language & human symbols to explain our understanding of what the Creator is to us, but they are not likely to be accurate representations. Maybe if we evolve to a higher level of understanding and consciousness, we will become more directly aware of the Creator and see the Creator more clearly.

Maybe, as our life span is to a mayfly, so our concept of time is but the blink of an eye to the Creator.
Maybe the Creator is one of a species of beings beyond our understanding.

But I think it's narrow minded hubris to look at this in a purely human-centric materialist way and say, like doubting Thomas, ‘unless I can touch it or feel it or see it or measure it, it doesn't exist. In fact it CAN’T exist.’

It's much simpler to think that way of course. Simple perhaps to the point of naivety and intellectual laziness. But in a universe this large and this unlikely, that way of thinking is probably human-centric hubris.

When those who don’t believe in a Creator/God say, ‘I’ve never seen a miracle’ OR ‘a good Creator would stop anything bad happening to anyone’, they are being superficial & simplistic.
Firstly, some people both throughout history & now, claim that miracles HAVE happened to them. Dismissing them as delusional or charlatans is an ideological not open-minded position. Miracles can take many forms.
Why is that so hard to accept?
And why should each individual not be able to decide for themselves whether or not an experience they’ve had is a miracle?
Why do the materialist atheists get to decide?

In terms of a Creator intervening to stop bad things happening, there are times when we interfere with lesser cognitive creature & times when we don’t.
So, we intervene in the lives of animals, we intervene in the lives of insects, birds etc but at other times, when we could intervene, we don't.
Does that ‘sometimes we do intervene, sometimes we don’t’ behaviour mean we're de facto evil beings? Does that mean we've ceased to exist?

People try and say that you either believe in evolution and rational scientific materialism (the doubting Thomas principle explained above) OR you believe in a Creator. But I don’t see that these things are in conflict unless you have a very narrow way of looking at the world and the universe.

Why is it so unbelievable that the Creator put the evolutionary process in place?
Remember, to the Creator, our experience of time may not be theirs. We think the Earth & Universe are incredibly old but it may be a matter of minutes to the Creator.

Why could it not be that the Creator is pleased that we are finding out how his creation works? Maybe even wants us to?
Maybe this is a journey of discovery that leads us to see the Creator clearly.

Science does NOT clash with the existence of a Creator unless we arrogantly & hubristically assume that we are the highest form of BEING, of knowledge & consciousness, and also that what we know now about the laws of physics for example, is as much as we can ever know; people 1000, 2000, 3000 years ago thought the same.
And why could it not be that there is another dimension where the laws of physics & time are wholly different?

Then there are those who claim we don’t have freewill. That the universe is simply the equivalent of a highly sophisticated pre-programmed computer game.
But a hypothesis like that, which serves no practical purpose, indeed is counter-productive, is what my father called ‘trying too hard to show how clever you are’.
We certainly behave, and MUST behave, as if we have free-will, so I see no practical benefit in claiming we haven’t.

BUT there is a downside to a Creator giving his creations freewill of course, which brings us back to the, ‘a good Creator wouldn’t let bad things happen’ trope.
The downside of freewill is that we will make mistakes, do bad things from time to time. However, these are hugely outweighed in number by the good things we do.
There are far more pleasant, nice, fair, honest, kind transactions between people every day across the world than bad or nasty or UNkind ones.
However, because the good outweighs the bad, because friendliness, kindness etc is the norm, we tend to ignore it; familiarity breeds contempt; we take it for granted to the point of forgetting about it.
The commonplace ‘good’ is ignored and the rarer ‘bad’ emphasised. Just look at the news every day.

And there is the possibility that for this world and our lives to be ‘real’, (i.e. meaningful), there has to be a genuine danger of failure and suffering. Further, to achieve ‘true reality’ that failure and suffering has to be actual, not merely pretend or threatened.
The spoilt brat has never known suffering and is the poorer, less societally useful person for it.

So, in summary, when we look at the vastness of our universe, it seems to me that a Creator, & one who intervenes sometimes & not others, is perfectly possible, even likely. We just can’t properly comprehend them, as the ant doesn’t comprehend us. And we are likely missing the point when we complain that the Creator doesn’t behave how we would want them to behave if they were human – they are NOT - any more than we are an ant.

All of my ramblings here are off the top of my head conjectures, of course, but then again, so are the theories of what sparked the creation of the universe, and what was there before.

It’s conjecture that there IS no more than our universe, and that there IS no more to the existence of the universe than the laws of physics as we know them.

But of course, we won’t truly know any of this until we die – what an adventure!