The God Issue

The God issue:

There's a lot of discussion out there in the media on whether or not there's a God. It's the usual sparring match between the high priests of religion and the high priests of science. Everybody has an opinion and nobody has a satisfactory answer.

Problem with this debate is that there are strong indications that many of the debaters still see God as an old guy with flowing white beard and a halo or nimbus surrounding the bald spot. It's an old picture, but it's one that will have to do until a better one is posted.

Long ago, when tribal elders first undertook to introduce a little predictability into the affairs of their communities, the old guy with flowing white hair and whiskers was a good image. He might have been one of the elders, a source of wisdom and full of experience, a benefit to the more chaotic end of the community spectrum, whose members were too busy with the pursuit of sex and success to take the time to think things through.

This is no longer the case today. Science has made great strides. Charles Darwin has re-defined the story of Creation, altering it from a week-long event to an ongoing process. We now see creation as the process of Natural Selection that keeps unfolding even as we speak. 

Isaac Newton gave us insights into gravity. Albert Einstein gave us insights into temporal relationships and Steven Hawking is exploring the cosmos for us. All of these are worthy undertakings.

Einstein thought he could gather the celestial clockwork into one simple mathematical equation. He was going to call it the Theory of Everything. Hawking, today's High Priest of Science, is trying to do the same with cosmology.

Another scientist, Polish-born Benoit Mandelbrot, comes closer to mathematically outlining an all-encompassing reality with his work with fractals. Other learned types talk about strings, a marginally-comprehensible theory about the nature of matter on a sub-atomic scale. It would appear that so far,  life's physical realities resist being gathered into a neat mathematical equation.

Nuclear physicists working on the Cern project in Switzerland are looking for the God particle by studying the debris from particle collisions in their giant accelerator.

Astronomers, working with incredibly refined optics, are looking deeper and deeper into space and farther and farther back in time. Each time they encounter another mystery, they postulate another hypothesis to try to explain what they are seeing. There's all kinds of speculation, but so far, they cannot explain effects they labelled dark matter and dark energy.

Isn't that what the biblical scribes were doing when they put together the scriptures? Encountering gaps in their knowledge, they used their imaginations every time they ran into another problem that defied explanation.

Neither the people looking for God nor the ones looking for the God particle have anything more than theories to offer us at the moment, but neither can define God because God is a concept. He's a concept we all need in order to make our everyday lives easier to navigate. 

Many people will keep God around because they need someone to thank when things go right, someone to blame when things go wrong and someone to appeal to for help when all other avenues of appeal have been exhausted.

It is also fair to expect that the more science delves into the mysteries of the universe, the closer we come to a better understanding of God. Like personal maturity, the search is open-ended. It can be compared, but it is never complete.