This is an edited summary of a speech byThe Public Debate Club In the discussion about God
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By Israel - economist and analyst

According to all the definitions I've heard here so far for God, I wouldn't believe in such a God either. These are descriptions of a self-interested God who has desires and needs that ignores the true nature of God's existence - the fact that He gives meaning to the world and to the lives of each of us.

Therefore, in this speech I want to deal more with the essence of God. I want to present its meaning as a reason for everything, and I want to explain how the lack of a reason for things leads us to the big bang and beyond without understanding what we are actually doing here.

God as the cause and the mover

Everything that happens has a reason. As soon as we remove the reason for it we remove its meaning. Whether the water in the kettle boiled so that we could have tea or the water in the kettle boiled for no reason significantly changes the essence of the boiling of the water in the kettle. The meaning is that randomness causes the loss of meaning of everything, therefore the absence of God and the transfer of control of the world to the randomness of evolution and quantum theory creates a worthless world.

For this reason every person needs to have meaning, and therefore every person needs to understand that there is a reason why they are in the world. Once we have agreed that there is a reason for our existence, and that there is a creator who started everything, it matters less what we call him and what religion we believe in. From the moment you choose to see that your life is not a chance meeting of one sperm in a billion with the egg that happened to be in the cycle that month, you become a believer in God. From here you have to see which God you accept - the Jew, the Christian, the Buddhist or any other name. It will still be God.

Is there a reason for the big bang?

The search for meaning takes a different form in science. He tries to take us so that every question has an answer with a reason that precedes it. But this process is endless, and it always leaves us questioning the meaning of the universe. It's a bit like running towards the horizon - no matter how much you run you will stay exactly the same distance.

Today the horizon of our knowledge is the big bang - we think that the universe started with a kind of explosion on a scale beyond all imagination that happened about 13 billion years ago. But we have no idea Why This big bang happened, what caused it and what happened before it that caused it.

What we do know is that the Big Bang is a moment after which the material world exists and before which the material world did not exist. But if there was nothing material then what was before the Big Bang is necessarily spiritual, and from this it follows that even in the Big Bang we believe in a spiritual essence that created the material being that was not there before it. I call this essence God. Science has not yet given her a name, but that does not matter, because the name it will give her describes the same God.