Either phenomenon is supernatural in my book; and for all I know they may be one and the same-or for that matter, figments of our imagination (though I doubt it). I've come to think it's more important to try to draw conclusions about what we honestly think about the universe than whether or not we believe in some unspecifiable notion of God.
Most people haven't come close to contemplating our place in either time or space; but if one does, any parochial notion of God is difficult to sustain intellectually.
Pick up some magazines with a total of about 200 pages, say two typical Smithsonians. Imagine each page covered with text. Count the characters and you should get about 5,000 per page. So 200 of these imaginary pages contains a million characters. Let each character be one year. The earliest Homo sapiens, our species, are thought to be 160,000 or less years old-less than 1/6 of our 200 pages, in terms of characters representing a year! Do actually try this if you want to get a gut feel for what I'm saying.
Yet the age of the earth is 4.6 billion years old. Given that each 200 pages is about ¼ of an inch, we'd need a stack of magazines close to 100 feet high (ten stories) to represent the age of the earth! And the age of the universe is around 3 times that! To put it mildly, we ain't been around very long, and we clearly are just one tiny part of the organic wholeness of the universe, not necessarily something terribly special.
Regarding our place in space, just spend a little time poking around and contemplating these two sites, and the notion of a personal God is not that easy to hang onto:
Our place in space
Another view of our place in space
Read up on exobiology (or even marine biology) if you want to get some idea of other life forms that may be out there, "intelligent" or otherwise. Study a little about the octopus, if you want an example of serious "intelligence" in action.
Still, given all this, I cannot BUT believe in a personal God, when I look at the miracles of, for example, my two sons, my dog, or the cherry tree in my back yard-especially these days, when it's in full bloom. Is there an intelligence behind every quark and muon? How else could these things be?
Yet how can there be such human misery-for example our Iraq War, kids without food and water-and such frightening chaotic events in the universe-black holes, roaring nuclear furnaces thousands of times larger than our own terrifying sun, supernovas-at the same time?
Since I'm on my second life, with a 19 year old heart in a 59 year old body, and thus don't give a Flying Fig Newton what anyone thinks about me, I'll therefore tell you this (which like anything else in this article, feel free to take or leave): I've seen God while tripping on lysergic acid diethylamide 25, better known as LSD, and here's how it is: We are awareness, God is everything else (in a light that is golden yellow, and every bit as described in Life after Life by Raymond Moody and countless others), and possibly our own awareness as well. We can't know the final answers in this lifetime, and we may or may not know the final answers ever.
As Emma Wedgewood said to her husband, Charles (again paraphrasing due to my leaky memory), "There may be things in the universe we are just not meant to know through intellect alone." In fact, no one seems to know why Charles mentioned the word "God" in the first edition of his monumental book, "The Origin of Species," or why the word disappeared thereafter. But in my humble opinion, Emma's single sentence is more important than what her husband wrote, or the countless volumes anyone ever wrote or said about what he wrote.
(However, if you want a riviting synopsis of evolution, check out the seven part video or DVD series Evolution, by PBS, or the book about the series. In fact, if it were up to me, watching this series would be mandatory for the human race, as it shows how we got here and our interconnectedness to all life on earth.)
Last but not least, my answer to Albert is this: We certainly appear to be in good hands, and we damn well ought to be taking better care of the planet we're so privileged to be on. And likewise, to be respecting and helping our brothers and sisters around the world instead of blowing them to bits or screwing them in every way we can think of. Whether you believe in "God" or "Something Else," I think it's clear enough that we humans hold the keys to Heaven or Hell in our hands. So the question that matters most, in my estimation, is, "What do we really want?"
Answer here with your own "H" word: _______________
Then we damn well ought to start acting accordingly, because this journey IS for real, and the time to act accordingly is rapidly running out.
Most people haven't come close to contemplating our place in either time or space; but if one does, any parochial notion of God is difficult to sustain intellectually.
Pick up some magazines with a total of about 200 pages, say two typical Smithsonians. Imagine each page covered with text. Count the characters and you should get about 5,000 per page. So 200 of these imaginary pages contains a million characters. Let each character be one year. The earliest Homo sapiens, our species, are thought to be 160,000 or less years old-less than 1/6 of our 200 pages, in terms of characters representing a year! Do actually try this if you want to get a gut feel for what I'm saying.
Yet the age of the earth is 4.6 billion years old. Given that each 200 pages is about ¼ of an inch, we'd need a stack of magazines close to 100 feet high (ten stories) to represent the age of the earth! And the age of the universe is around 3 times that! To put it mildly, we ain't been around very long, and we clearly are just one tiny part of the organic wholeness of the universe, not necessarily something terribly special.
Our place in space
Another view of our place in space
Read up on exobiology (or even marine biology) if you want to get some idea of other life forms that may be out there, "intelligent" or otherwise. Study a little about the octopus, if you want an example of serious "intelligence" in action.
Still, given all this, I cannot BUT believe in a personal God, when I look at the miracles of, for example, my two sons, my dog, or the cherry tree in my back yard-especially these days, when it's in full bloom. Is there an intelligence behind every quark and muon? How else could these things be?
Yet how can there be such human misery-for example our Iraq War, kids without food and water-and such frightening chaotic events in the universe-black holes, roaring nuclear furnaces thousands of times larger than our own terrifying sun, supernovas-at the same time?
Since I'm on my second life, with a 19 year old heart in a 59 year old body, and thus don't give a Flying Fig Newton what anyone thinks about me, I'll therefore tell you this (which like anything else in this article, feel free to take or leave): I've seen God while tripping on lysergic acid diethylamide 25, better known as LSD, and here's how it is: We are awareness, God is everything else (in a light that is golden yellow, and every bit as described in Life after Life by Raymond Moody and countless others), and possibly our own awareness as well. We can't know the final answers in this lifetime, and we may or may not know the final answers ever.
As Emma Wedgewood said to her husband, Charles (again paraphrasing due to my leaky memory), "There may be things in the universe we are just not meant to know through intellect alone." In fact, no one seems to know why Charles mentioned the word "God" in the first edition of his monumental book, "The Origin of Species," or why the word disappeared thereafter. But in my humble opinion, Emma's single sentence is more important than what her husband wrote, or the countless volumes anyone ever wrote or said about what he wrote.
(However, if you want a riviting synopsis of evolution, check out the seven part video or DVD series Evolution, by PBS, or the book about the series. In fact, if it were up to me, watching this series would be mandatory for the human race, as it shows how we got here and our interconnectedness to all life on earth.)
Last but not least, my answer to Albert is this: We certainly appear to be in good hands, and we damn well ought to be taking better care of the planet we're so privileged to be on. And likewise, to be respecting and helping our brothers and sisters around the world instead of blowing them to bits or screwing them in every way we can think of. Whether you believe in "God" or "Something Else," I think it's clear enough that we humans hold the keys to Heaven or Hell in our hands. So the question that matters most, in my estimation, is, "What do we really want?"
Answer here with your own "H" word: _______________
Then we damn well ought to start acting accordingly, because this journey IS for real, and the time to act accordingly is rapidly running out.
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