Thank you for sending me the video about the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The science involved in identifying the site of the asteroid impact, and the analysis of the resulting extinction of 70 per cent of all life, was fascinating.
Then you asked, “Did God say to him/herself, ‘Oh hell, that didn’t work. I guess I’ll have to try again.’”
I suspect you were needling me, because you know I believe in something I call “God,” and you don’t.
Or at least, you say you don’t. But your question implies that you’re convinced that “God” must be some kind of supernatural engineer with a master plan for evolution who could control that asteroid’s trajectory to suit his own needs.
As it happens, I don’t believe in that God anymore. In over a thousand columns, over more than 20 years, I don’t think I have ever advocated belief in such a God.
But it seems that you’re less willing to let go of God as a heavenly puppet-master than I am. Isn’t there something contradictory about hanging onto a “God” you insist you don’t believe in?
Bill Nye, ‘the Science Guy,’ argues that top-down organization is unique to humans. We are, he says, the only species that has to have a general or CEO directing everything.
Sponge cells do not need a master-plan to clump together. Ants and bees do not expect their queen to define their working orders. Flocks of starlings and schools of herring have no leaders, but still manage to move collectively.
Rather, says Nye, nature works on a bottom-up principle. Tiny variations in algae work their way up the food chain to affect the apex predators. The predators don’t set the agenda.
The God you insist you don’t believe in is clearly a top-down God. And therefore, I suspect, a human distortion of the reality we seek to understand.
But just because humans got it wrong doesn’t mean there’s nothing there. Galileo’s proof that the sun and planets did not revolve around the Earth didn’t require denying the reality of a solar system. It merely required a re-thinking of prevailing preconceptions.
In the same way, just because an outdated model of God no longer works for you, doesn’t mean there’s no God at all.
I wonder if you’re more open to re-thinking your preconceptions about God than the Inquisition was to re-thinking astronomy in 1615.
Could you believe in a God more analogous to gravity, an invisible force that acts equally and impartially to affect everyone and everything? Or a God who is more like thought, capable of shaping attitudes and responses but not of acting directly? Or perhaps—to borrow a favourite word from the Christian lexicon—a God who is like love; persuasive, motivating, but with neither the ability nor the desire to enforce anything?
Love is a powerful motivator. Love can also have expectations..
Surely you wouldn’t argue that there is no such thing as gravity, or thought, or love?
Could it be that you cling to your image of an almighty and capricious God, because if you didn’t, you would have nothing to rail against?
