How I perceive God to be

Warning! The following is covering religion. I’m going to discuss religion today. If you want to skip this post, I’ll see you tomorrow.

Following Wednesday’s post, and yesterday’s post today I’d like to delve into how I perceive God to be.

I suppose I should start by saying that I don’t know for certain there is a God. I don’t know for certain there isn’t a God.

I would like there to be a God. We live in a solar system that is pretty staggeringly amazing. That solar system is only a very tiny part of the galaxy we inhabit. That galaxy is only a very, very, very tiny part of the entire observable Universe. As Douglas Adams put it “Space is big. Really big. You might think it’s a long way down to the corner chemist but that’s just peanuts compared to space.” We can really only study our own little planet in any great detail because we can’t (yet) get to all those other places. I realize we may never get to those other places, certainly not in my lifetime, but one can dream. We’ve made a few baby steps to Mars and some of the other planets in our solar system. I would like to think there is a God that created all that.

God is described as being a Creator. He created light (“In the beginning, there was nothing. Then God said ‘let there be light!’ and there was light. There was still nothing but at least you could see it.”) He went on to create the Heavens (all that other stuff out in space), the Earth, all the plants and animals, and finally, humans. For the most part, he did a pretty amazing job.

Like most Creators, I’m sure God is probably sitting around his celestial realm, wondering if anyone likes what he created, just like most creative people want to know if anyone likes their work.

I mean, take water, for instance. It is pretty caliwandalous stuff. It’s two tiny atoms of hydrogen linked to one tiny atom of oxygen. It can be a solid, a liquid, or a gas, all within a relatively narrow band of temperature. We can observe it in all these states fairly easily. It is infinitely malleable, taking any shape it can be contained in. It is infinitely divisible. It moves when agitated by a outside force, yet returns to perfect calm when that outside force is removed. It is fascinating to watch when ripples spread out in a pond, or waves roll across the ocean, or waterfalls cascade down a mountain. As far as I’m concerned, God could have stopped with creating water and He would have already created something utterly fantastic. If God wants to know if He did a good job all I could say is “Dude! Caliwandalous job!”

He didn’t stop there, though. We have all these other things. We’ve got plants. I’m pretty fond of his trees. They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. They’re green. The rest of his plant domain is pretty good too. I enjoy eating many of them, as well as just viewing their beauty. I take delight in the many animals in the world. I’m especially fond of most of his mammals. I get a dopamine hit just seeing dogs and cats, and even more interacting with them. I love seeing His other animals in their natural environments. We’ve got rabbits, deer, chipmunks, squirrels, cattle and groundhogs, to name a few, living in our area. I love seeing them as we travel around. That’s not even beginning to scratch the surface of all the diversity of life in the world.

There are birds, reptiles, insects, arachnids, and fish as well. If you want diversity of life look to the insect kingdom. There are thousands of species of insects, ad life as we know it, wouldn’t survive without them. If you want truly unique creatures, look in the oceans. There are so many different colors, shapes, sizes, and abilities throughout the entire aquatic realm. Reptiles. Have you ever watched how a snake moves across the ground, let alone climbs a tree?

And what about all the underlying forces beneath all these things? Physics is fascinating. Gravity is pretty useful. It helps keep all my stuff in place where I leave it so it is still there when I come back. We understand mechanics so we can build useful machines that let us accomplish so much more than we could without them. Chemistry let’s us preserve food and create medicines. Mathematics lets us understand so many things, from making buildings, to flying planes, to computer networks and the infancy of artificial intelligence. And all those things we don’t yet understand? I’d like to think they are puzzles God put here for us to work on, sort of like Him saying “hey, here’s a little conundrum, see if you can figure it out.”

And then there is us. Given all the things that need to come together to have life, let alone us, it is so devastatingly unlikely that we should be here at all, yet we are. And we can reason, and perceive, and emote. We can tell stories, and laugh and cry and contemplate the wonder of the Universe.

All of these things are truly miraculous to my mind. I’d like to think God created it all so we could marvel at it. We can look around and say “Man, that’s some awesome stuff.”

And God can reply “If you think that’s amazing, just wait until you see the other stuff I have to show you.”

If it turns out there is no God, it is still mind-bogglingly astounding that any of what we have around us is even here.

Reading back over this, it sees like a rather poor rendition of my thought processes on the matter. I’m not sure I can properly express what is going on in my mind when it comes to God. All I know is that the way I think about God is vastly different than what I am presented with in church. I have difficulty reconciling the two.

Well, if you’re still with me, my Hordeling, I appreciate you letting me ramble on about this topic for the last several days. Come tomorrow we’ll be getting back to more stuff about life, my dogs, and my writing, not necessarily in that order.

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