by Mary W. Matthews

Created on: September 16, 2010

For a human being to speculate about the nature of God is a little bit like a bacterium speculating on the nature of YOU, the person reading this – only much LESS useful, since if God exists at all, God is infinitely farther above you than you are above a bacterium. Can a housefly explain “e=mc²” to you? Can an earthworm explain football to another earthworm? No? Then what makes you think ANY human being has much of anything useful to say about the nature of God?

Most people have two main ways of thinking about God: holy writ, or its interpretation by the leadership of your faith community; and personal experience. Many people are content to rely on holy writ or their pastors. But which writings are holy, and which are sincere but mistaken? The Hebrew Scriptures? The Hebrew Scriptures plus the Christian Testament? The Qur’an? The I Ching? The Tao? The Hindu Vedas? “The Lost Manuscript,” the novel by Solomon Spaulding that most people call the Book of Mormon? “Dianetics”? Mary Baker Eddy’s “Science and Health”? Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer”?

But … personal experience? Certainly God is capable of speaking for Godself, and does so all the time. But who the bleep are YOU, to be making faith claims about what God told you? Who do you think you are, anyway? And how do you know it’s God who is communicating to you, and not your oldest friend, Wishful Thinking?

We can’t know MUCH about God, but there are a few logical deductions and inferences we can make:

•  We know that God is more than 13.73 billion years old, since that is the approximate age of the Universe. We know that God created the Universe, because if someone else created the Universe, that other being created God too; and if some One exists who is older and smarter than God and who created God, wouldn’t that make the older entity a Supergod? Why not call the created deity something else, and call the Superbeing “God”?

•  We know that God created “all that there is, both seen and unseen.” We know that God created the laws of physics and mathematics; we know that God created suns and planets and all forms of life. We know that God created music and beauty and goodness. If there are other dimensions, God created them, just as God created our own dimension. If there is an afterlife, God created that too. If there is a dimension for angels and devils

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>