On God

I spoke before of my belief that no creator exists. This is a critical link in my chain of thought, and if I am wrong here than my arguments would be irreparably destroyed.

I have never been an athiest until recently. I was raised in a conservative Christian household and was made to go to church from a toddlerhood until I moved out of my home at the age of nineteen. Until late middle school I was a devout Christian, at which point I began to drift. I became almost completely apathetic by the age of seventeen and have considered myself "apatheistic" since then, and have always disdained any theological conversation as moot.

During all these periods of time, however, I have suffered with the question of purpose. I did not feel "called" to go into ministry as a youth and I couldn't imagine a God that would make it my purpose to run a company or fix leaky pipes. My strategy for dealing with this crisis (over a stretch of roughly a dozen years) was to continue looking for a purpose while not wrecking my life in such a way that I would be unable to complete my purpose once I discovered it. This was an emotionally exhausting period of my life. The fact that my purpose was unknown meant I could never know if sitting back and watching TV for an hour would make me fail at my purpose! It is impossible to ever relax under such conditions.

So when I came to asking direct questions, for the first time, about the purpose of my life, I followed a reasonable progression. My life would have to be given purpose exogenously ("objective" purpose). In fact, a purpose would be a reason for my life to exist, so my existence must be tied to this purpose. But that implies that I exist on purpose, that some thing purposely created me. 

Here, finally, a theological discussion that was not moot. I should note that my philosophically inclined friends were aware of my aversion to theological debates, so you can imagine my surprise when I quickly and firmly answered of course there can be no creator. It came out as if it was inside me for years, just looking for an excuse to be relevant!

Am I right in thinking that no creator exists? Well, the way I think about it is this: if I was never told of a creator and only had knowledge of physical theories of humanity's origins (evolution, big bang, etc.), then would I feel the need to inject into the theories a metaphysical creator? Is there a hole that needs to be filled or an inconsistency that needs to be corrected?

I can't think of one, besides the problem of ultimate origin: what created the matter that took part in the big bang? Where did that stuff come from? But even here, I see no reason for a creator. If we invoke a creator to explain the origin of all matter, then we have simply raised to a new metaphysical plane the same issue and I can ask "where did the creator come from?".

Injecting a God into origin stories is unnecessary and contrived. This was never of consequence to me until I realized its importance in the question of existential purpose, at which point it became a paramount and critical point.