A senior corporate executive and atheist once disturbed my mind quite unnervingly. But in his defense, if you hardly use your hands, pounding fufu is a hurtful experience. So my mind hurts, for my own benefit.

It is easy to take our beliefs for granted until it is questioned.

His avowed position is that God is the sum total of our ignorance. That what we do not know, we call God. And as the veil of ignorance is removed through man’s vast sources of knowledge, God will be stripped naked. Worse, God is a dog, only dead. God is nothing. God is our ignorance; knowledge, our cure.

We called simple diseases a curse from God till science gave us a cure.

The founder of MIT’s Media Lab and One Laptop per Child Association, said in a TED talk that we will be able to swallow pills to learn languages and works of literature in the future.

You're going to swallow a pill and know English. You're going to swallow a pill and know Shakespeare.’

‘And the way to do it is through the bloodstream. So once it's [the information in the pill] in your bloodstream, it basically goes through and gets into the brain…and the different pieces get deposited in the right places.’

And the incontestably great strides we have made in science, is dwindling our fantasy with mystery and our fear of the unknown.

y+5=x. Find x. y= knowledge. And the more we know, the less x [God] becomes a hard math exam.

“I am an atheist”, he concluded with an impressive air of a man keen on books and knowledge.

God – "a mythical, unobservable, non-verifiable, imaginary being, residing in a mythical, unobservable, non-verifiable imaginary place, that rules over humans with supernatural powers”, somebody wrote in Yahoo Answers

Fine.

Until I heard a colleague at work who has become a dad, talk to me about his barely 6-month old daughter.

Isaac said leaving for work had become as practiced, a routine as a thief enters his victim’s house - stealthily.

He prowls by the walls, tight-lipped, tip-toeing around the house in the hope that the baby will not burst inconsolably into tears because her dad is leaving for work.

And while she inexplicably enjoys the father’s presence, the child lights up not at his voice, or his smile but by the mere sensing of her father’s presence. Any attempt he makes to withdraw from the room triggers another round of tears.

How she senses that or knows her father’s shadow, her parents do not know.

This raw dependence on her father is only because she is less than six months old. Surely she will grow out of this chronic need. She will get to the stage every teenager gets to when her father drives out of the house for work. It is the greatest moment and signal that she is free – free from errands and instructions, free to watch T.V, invite friends over and use the telephone abusively [that was during my time].

Life becomes boring when daddy is home.

Decades later, she will celebrate her independence from her dad on her wedding day, excited she is going to spend her life with a man who is not her brother or her father. She has a Phd now and her dad doesn’t understand the new application forms online, so he always depends on her for filing forms and understanding the extremely digitized age. And he needs help to understand the drugs he must take. 'Call your sister for me', he would say.

Her independence is complete, his dependence has only begun. In an era of knowledge, her father’s level of information amounts to nothing, her Phd amounts to everything.

So this lady as she is sitting in a class in Bonn, Germany, a white lecturer walks in and introduces a topic that a father is a product of our own ignorance. That they do not exist. What she doesn’t know she calls father. When she knows, she should realize that there really wasn’t any father after all.

She raises her hand to voice a feeble, confused protest but the other students look at her in bemusement. ‘This should be simple to understand’, they give her a look of cluelessness. She looks at them, her colleagues, they must be delusional.

"I have a father at home, in Ghana. I knew him when I knew nothing. I can’t disown him because I know something today. I don’t just know he is my father, I have sensed that he is my father even when I did not know what sensing anything means. Knowledge may increase but it can never erase the memories, the reality, the unspoken truth, the sensed fact, that Isaac Essel is my father!"

She would rush out of the lecture, the new knowledge has touch a raw emotion, her tears at 6-months resurface under her eyes again to remind her as she picks up her plane ticket for the next flight to Ghana. She needs to see her father and cure her delusions.

The problem with my atheist friend’s position is that God is not knowledge. No. He is not the sum total of knowledge too.

If by discovering knowledge, man has no need of God, man cannot claim to reject God because he has not even found him yet. You cannot reject what you don’t possess or throwing away a coin you don’t have.

With all due respect to every Christian sensibility on earth, if the parts of God’s body are to be identified, knowledge would be his butt, his backside.

His mind would prove to be empty of any knowledge. His mind is full of love. It is his butt that is full of knowledge.

And when he excretes it, men find it and beat their chest, ‘I have no need of God. I have all the knowledge’.

No. You have in your head, God’s fecal matter.

It’s the same with a cassava plant. What the plant rejects and stores away under the earth, we call it life-giving carbohydrates – recommended by doctors for those who do hard work.

Atheists enjoy fufu on weekends too. And while they lap up the soup with the whitish substance, they are only consuming what a plant has rejected as needless.

Now to search for a man’s heart starting by identifying his butt is such an odd way to start your investigations.

Sure, you could reach your destination, but that would be after an awful rummage through pretty unmentionable things and places, up the slimy intestines and juices until you hearing the thumping beat of a muscle that looks like a fist – that’s the heart.

What a way to find a heart, when you can dissect the chest within minutes to locate the heart, red with blood, beating with life.

In that heart, there is no knowledge, there is love. In fact every other part of God’s body is labeled love. His food is love and when it goes through that lovely system of his intestines what comes out is knowledge. And this knowledge is pushed out with a stamp Made-In-Love.

Pushed out to eager men for their own use.

That is why a book we keep at home and read at church, which I am sure you find people at least on Sundays clutch jealously while they go to church there is a verse in it that reads

"Add to love, Knowledge". It was written by a fisherman called Peter. Not love to knowledge to love. But to knowledge to love. Meaning love is the foundation of any real knowledge. Better still, love is more important than knowledge. Or best; Love will outlast knowledge. You should be proud of how much you love not how much you know.

The reason why God does not express himself through the size of his knowledge is the same reason why a cassava hides its excess materials under the ground or why no man enters the loo and comes out grinning from ear to ear.

But man finds great pride in discovering what has always been hidden.

Don't get me wrong. Knowledge is good. Knowledge is great. But to take pride in it and dismiss God is like a man who goes to market, drives a good bargain for a desirable product, comes home and damns the manufacturer while reveling in his buy.

It is so self-inflicting. So shooting one's self in the foot

These are light matters. We have not gone on to mentally torturing writings from J.K Chesterton. We are miles away from proving the Christian God.

But this idea that God is a product of our ignorance is an attempt to toss a coin you don't have.

There is a way to find God. Different from the way you find the temperature of a stone or listening to the internal sounds of an animal or human body using the stethoscope. When you want to find anything or discover something, you need an instrument. But when you want to find God, the human being itself is the instrument. It is when you immerse your mind, soul and spirit in a rentless search for him.

 

Christian Apologetics is concerned with making believers think and thinkers believe. 

Edwin Appiah is a Christian apologist, a youth worker and an upcoming author.