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Update on 6-6-09: This essay was originally written in about 1987 and revised in
1998. I had been reading and working on a major expansion,
in 2002-03, and have large quantities of notes and materials for
it, but the project was forced to a lower position on my priority
list. Now I can only hope that someday I'll be able to
finish it. Unfortunately, even just to make needed
improvements to the existing essay is not possible for me
now.
FYI, the idea that God created the universe and the world, but then stepped back and
does not interact with humanity, began with Voltaire in the 18th
century, if not before. That is not my point. Basically,
given the absence of any direct information about God, because he
has provided none, I'm just trying to deduce things about what
would God be like if he did
exist, theoretically, based on the evidence that is readily
available to all, and not on "holy books" that all just
happen to serve and glorify the particular people to whom God
supposedly gave them. A true, just, infinite,
all-encompassing
God would give himself, and knowledge of himself, equally to all
people, or to none.
In a word, my feeling is that the evidence strongly suggests
that God exists. I learned in school that nothing can come
from nothing under the laws of physics, which govern everything
that exists. For matter itself to exist – forget the
question of the world and mankind and how we got here –
could not
have happened unless it was put there, it seems to me. Among
the questions with the Big Bang, besides the one of where did the
stuff that went bang come from, are why was there only one Big
Bang? Why aren't there Big Bangs every time you turn
around? What was so unique about the one location from which
the Big Bang emanated, and from which everything is now expanding,
that those same conditions wouldn't occur in many locations?
The fact that there was only one strongly suggests to me that it's
because the whole thing is under
God's control.
Certainly this is not a religious belief for me, and it does
not in any way validate anybody's particular religion and
beliefs. If the choice were up to me, with my current
feeling, there would be no God. To me, eternal life would be
an eternal responsibility, no matter where you are, to have to
fill all that time. Speaking of the present time in Heaven,
from which our loved ones are presumably watching over us, it's
hard to imagine that they could be experiencing much joy and
tranquility, seeing all the bad and unhappy things their loved
ones are going through. My own very fond hope, if God does
exist, is that we are all just like flowers and birds and bees and
everything else, doing what we do and being what we are, and then
passing on in peace into nothing. Anything else would not be good, I'm
telling you.
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