Reasons to believe in God.

Ultimately, it seems to me that given the limitations of our feeble minds, that the best we can do it try to touch, very gently and with the tips of our most outstretched fingertips, the bottom of the foot of God.  Our best ideas and thinking cannot transcend time and space and cause and effect, yet we have been endowed with a capacity--even if it is linked to a physical phenomenon like the brain--to recognize that ideas do exist, independent of ourselves.  And some of those ideas are universal, timeless.  Just as two plus two equals four, so too do some ideas, perhaps even all ideas, exist both with us and independent of us.  And perhaps, just perhaps, our selves are too ideas that exist independent of our corporeal beings and with other people and with God, and to that aspiration I have collected the following thoughts on God.

I have been told that an entire branch of philosophy exists to answering the question of why something exists instead of nothing?  I do not know if this is true, but would not be surprised if it were.  This is a basic, foundational question to the universe, yet one that apparently eludes so many atheists who treat the cycle of matter, life and death, as an issue so elementary, so obvious that it warrants no further inquiry.  As if the fact that we came from disassociated atoms and will return to such, in and of itself, in explanation enough for existence.  As if because the physical world operates so much like clockwork, no other explanation is necessary.

  

Modern man apparently believes that because mass and energy operate according to principles that persist (and which were discovered by man and understandable by man, and therefore under the control of man) without the visible intervention of God, that therefore God is unnecessary, an irrational myth.  Obviously it is quite a leap for one to go from 'I understand the rules by which matter operates' to 'there is no God,' but more fundamentally, why is it that matter, dark matter, energy, or anything exist in the first place?  Why is the universe just not a perfect void, of absolute nothing?  Why is it the case that quarks and atoms and light and man exist?  No one knows what happened before the Big Bang, where a universe’s worth of matter and energy appeared suddenly, as if someone said and willed, let there be light, and from which an infinite and unknowable quantity of matter and energy appeared and spread.  

There are those who wonder whether the universe will end in fire or end in ice.  I have no answer yet to those who believe it will end in ice, with planets spreading so far apart that all energy will become so diffuse that the universe will persist, in dark and cold, throughout endless time.  But this must be untrue, to think that a line can start from apparently nothing at one end, and yet at the other continue unending, for a length that will never end.  

There are, on the other hand, those who theorize that before the Big Bang was another one, creating planets that spread out, then slowed, then pulled together again and collided into a single unimaginably huge mass, so huge that it produced an unknowably profound exploision, followed by a contraction and another one, potentially in an endless loop of stretches of time beyond our comprehension.  Forgive me for saying that it seems only right, given how fundamental a role fire has played in man's history--in the geography of our collective mind--that the universe should end in fire.  And begin in fire.  But not only the imagery; this suggests a view of time where time is circular, not a line, as the Buddhists suggest.  It seems like it must be true that time is circular, because how else can it beginningless time have an beginning, if not in itself?  How is it possible for a line to go on forever and ever without turning back on itself?  How can it be the case that the past, the present, and the future all coexist at once, interrelated but different, except in a circle, turning back on itself.  

2.       Speaking of time without beginning and without end, there is a book, Flatlands.  Flatlands imagines a world where one- and two-dimensional universes exist.  In a one dimensional world, there is only left and right and the creatures only understand these two directions.  Were you to tell this one dimensional being that there is another axis, another dimension of up and down, there is no way that being would be able to comprehend what that extra dimension was.  So too with a world that is two-dimensional; such beings trapped in two dimensions would not be able to imagine a third dimension, depth.  So it is with us.  We are trapped inside space and time and although we know that time is apparently relative, that there is a plane of being in which time was just another dimension through which we could move (like we can move through space, up, down, and sideways), there is no way for our minds to comprehend what this plane of existence might be.  An existence outside of time must exist, we are just too limited to understand what that might be.  Which of course begs the question of why we are placed in a state bound by time.  I would suggest that it is time which makes free will and choice, as we know it, possible.  What to do with that will, is of course the day to day question of our lives.

3.       The law of entropy says that energy will want to move to its most diffuse, least organized state. We see this everywhere--a car battery loses its charge, a pristine cake decomposes and flattens and disappears, a stack of books falls.  And yet despite this law, which would suggest that matter wants to revert to its simplest state, life has come into being.  A simple atom combined and grew into an amino acid, a cell, and so on.  And life defied the law of entropy (apparently randomly) over billions of years, becoming ever more and more complex, until man itself was born, a man whose will to create also commanded him to explore and make and organize things to higher and higher levels.  We are supposed to believe that at every step of our history on this planet, for millions of years, that somehow, however improbable, the universe has improbably moved against entropy once, then twice, then a thousand times, a million, a billion, then a trillion, again and again until we, man, exists.  As if chance itself is sufficient to defy a law of nature.  This is one of many instances where science cannot explain, indeed contradicts itself like all attempts by the human mind to understand the divine.   Life as we know it is made possible by only the most incredibly unlikely series of coincidences, all of which lead us inexorably forward, toward greater order and higher organizations of energy.

4.       Finally, there is beauty.  Why does beauty exist?  Why did early man, an ordinary man of limited language and whose company none of us would find interesting, create images from nothing?  Why the urge to create things that do not serve any useful purpose?  Why did early man create a figurine instead of a spear and, throughout the world and throughout time, come to associate works of art with the divine?  Until modern man became so fond of denying the existence of god, to feed his sense of control over the universe, man’s  great works of art sat in churches and temples.  Even Bach himself viewed every one of his creations as a devotion to god.  And rightly so.  Art elevates us, takes us out of ourselves and allows us to experience something unique.  Music in particular does so not through a physical presence, but through an idea (an idea of the music that is created and transcribed onto pieces of paper) that the air itself carries to our ears, where the idea enters our mind and we feel exalted.  Beauty itself is its own reason, apart from any kind of reason or language or argument.   I challenge any man to fully experience the work of art he feels most beautiful, and see if he can feel the divine through beauty.