The Faint Blue Dot

When Voyager 1 was two billion miles from the sun, and moving away from the solar system into deep space it photographed planet Earth.  The image produced by NASA showed a faint blue dot in the cosmos, a tiny speck orbiting a star in a remote part of a galaxy containing billions of stars, itself one of countless numbers of galaxies. On this dot a strange coincidence happened in a soup of molecules and the eventual result was the myriad of life forms that exist on Earth today.
The ancients thought the Earth was the centre of the universe, Galileo know different but could he have imagined what an insignificant speck we were?  The Doppler effect shows that the universe is expanding outwards, and that means it all started with a big bang estimated to be about 13.8 billion years ago.  What happened before the big bang, was there a before?   We don't know, but does this mean that I believe in a deity?  The short answer in no.
St.Thomas Aquinas tried to prove the existence of God in his Summa Theologica  but it was doomed to failure because it is one of those things that cannot be proved or disproved.  His five proofs don't stand up to critical analysis, but let us assume for the sake of argument that believers are right and that God exists.  In that case it would be impossible to know the nature of such a being, but Christians, Muslims and Jews profess to know the nature of deity and ascribe to it all kinds of human attributes; love, mercy etcetera, and even in the Old Testament jealousy!
Where do they get this information?  They get it from prophets, and from Jesus.  These men have a direct line to this God, they speak to him and he gives them answers.  Jesus is said to have a filial relationship with this deity, has been put on Earth for a purpose, and has magical powers.  I could go on, but the point is there is no credible evidence that any of this is true, certainly none that would stand up to scientific scrutiny.  If these prophets really could communicate with a deity they would know that far from being the centre of everything we were just a faint blue speck, and that at unimaginable distances away there were other worlds, possibly with other creatures that may, or may not be like us.
31.07.15