So What Does It Matter and Why Do We Want to Know?

Perhaps we are the curious half of intelligent existence, along with any other sentient species the Creator may have created. Since any God of that stature must be all knowing, God would not be curious, at least not Creator God. I have to try to think about what I would do if I were God Creator, but, of course, I am not likely to get even close, because I have no point of reference. There is absolutely nothing about which I know everything, not even myself. So is God creator only one of many, and perhaps, the only one with full knowledge, in order to keep the rest of God involved and interested in existence? Are we, and all the other sentient species in existence another state of God?

Well, that is entirely possible. So what are the implications? Well, one implication is that existence, in itself, has no meaning, no reason. It just is. Yet we seem to need a reason for everything. After a lifetime of trying to puzzle out the answers, of being either comforted when I thought I had or totally distressed when I could not understand what had happened to me, I have finally almost reached a state of peace. I am a terribly curious creature by nature, so part of me will want to know as long as I can think. However, the other part of me has managed a "cease-fire" so to speak. After waffling back and forth all my life, I have figured out that it really does not matter. (Oh yes, I can hear all the religious zealots screeching now!) However, I will explain.

First, it does not matter what I know or believe, only reality will or ever has existed. My believing or not changes nothing except me. Why do I need to know? What would I do differently? The truth is that I would make no changes at all either way. If what I have decided I believe is right, well halleluljia and let's celebrate! I choose to believe in a benevolent set of deities of whom we, human beings, are a part. I choose to believe that we have an immortal soul and shall go on forever discovering what God (or Gods) has made and continues to make. We will explore an endless universe of existence with little rests in between. If I am wrong and we simply stop existing when we die, then I will never know the difference.

But what about how you live your life? I hear people shouting! Well, I don't think I would change it much in light of either revelation. The way I live now would not be terribly unpleasing to the popular notion of God, and it tends to please me. Well I could be happy with a bit more money, but I would still care about other people and not want to hurt them. If I found out suddenly that nothing more exists after death, I would probably not believe it, because the idea is so uncomfortable. I certainly would not put a gun to my head and end it all. Why bother? I will just continue to enjoy living.

Will I really stop trying to puzzle it all out. Hardly! What am I doing here? I will keep on trying to understand as much as my puny brain can fathom, but I will not stress about it. I will not worry. What is, is.

Our religious Crazy Quilt

So why do we have such a hodge-podge of belief systems today? Are any of them right? Well that is something to think about. I have been to many different Christian churches and even to a synagogue and I have yet to find one that I think has it all right. But then, who am I to judge? If I knew it all then perhaps I would be obligated to start my own religion as a service to my fellow man. There seem to be more different belief systems than there are countries even.

I think we have this huge variety because nobody can really prove who is right and who is wrong, and maybe that is a good thing too. After all, isn't being human about the freedom to choose? Lower animals cannot choose, because they do not have the capacity for reason. Higher beings may also not be able to choose, because there is no choice when you know absolutely what is right. So would there be any free will if everything were revealed to everyone? Perhaps being human is a vacation from being God? Or is being part of the divinity a vacation from being human. Are the two simply different states of the same spirituality, just as energy and matter are two states of the same physicality?

I look at how we play games. Nobody wants to lose all the time, but neither do they want to win all the time. If either of these happens we often stop playing after a while. So maybe it is an essential part of the human spirit not to know and to be always striving to learn. So each patch in the quilt has its own pattern and texture and each is beautiful in some ways and maybe not so beautiful in others. Until and unless we have many many patches, the quilt appears unbalanced, because no two are alike, but with the huge variety a balance is achieved in the overall mosaic. I wonder how a lawn would appear to us if every single blade of grass were exactly like every other one. Would it appear perfect or maybe only artificial and boring?

Of course the next question is which one has it mostly right? And the answer is.....Maybe all of them. What, after all, do most modern belief systems have in common? Well, for one, they all share a belief in good and evil. They all believe that certain things are good and others are bad, virtuous versus sinful, positive and negative. Duality seems to be inherent in every belief system, except, perhaps, the atheist belief system that discounts the existence of a creator or controller and attributes everything to some kind of "lucky accident" theory. Of course, if you try to pin down an atheist as to how that accident occurred or why, and back them up to each level until they are left with an inert singularity that could never be anything else without the existence of a creator, then they retreat to pointing out the flaws in creation, ie. Disease, pain and crime.

But are these flaws? If there was no disease, what would health be? Without the capacity for pain can we ever know ecstasy or joy? Since crime is deviance, without it, could there be a "normal". It seems that all of these depend for existence upon the existence of an opposite. Everything seems to have two sides, just as God said, as portrayed by George Burns: I never really learned how to make something with only one side.

So Why Does Anything Exist?

Wow, duh because if it didn't we could not ask this question? I think this is a really important and basic question, but essentially it is unanswerable. This and the question of God's existence go hand in hand, but this is actually the more difficult to answer, because one could easily say that the creator exists because it is necessary to make all the rest. Isn't that a nice little piece of circular logic?

In fact, creator and our "God" may not even be the same, though they must have the same origin, which is the Ultimate Creator. So was she suspended alone in the void for unknown ages until she woke up and laid an egg? The egg exploded and the universe was born, That's as good as any other explanation I have heard, but I do not think it is right. I think that the process of creation has always been ongoing and will always be so, because the universe and, indeed, all creation, all existence on all planes, is both fluid and intimately inter-connected so that everything that happens affects everything else that happens everywhere at once, just a the movement of one molecule of water in the ocean displaces all the millions of others all at once which displaces all the millions of air molecules etc ad infinitum. For every action there is always a reaction on an infinite scale. That is why this, or anywhere else where we are, is the center of the universe and the rest is all rushing away.

Even the simple act of my writing this is reverberating off to infinity. I write and molecules move, electronic pulses create digital signals which travel to many destinations until they land here and change this space, which infinitesmally nudges everything else that exists or ever will exist. And even these have been nudged maybe billions of times before these words actually appeared on my screen or were posted to this server.

Either everything exists, including God and Satan or nothing exists, which we know is not true. Even if all this is simply a figment of my imaginination all inside my head, I EXIST. And what is reality after all? Is a thought any less real then a rock or an ocean? Perhaps all that is necessary is that someone believes for anything to exist: good or evil, black or white, universe or void. When I consider this I wonder if any single mind can possibly comprehend even the tip of this iceburg. Maybe that is why God is so difficult to locate, because She is many minds or even all minds everywhere at once, and no small segment, such as a single human mind on this planet, can even begin to understand the whole of reality.

I seem to be talking in circles, but then they are, at least, infinite. So the sphere of existence is expanding and contracting and vibrating in all directions all at once on all possible frequencies and we can only see the reflection of a sunbeam.

So we are at the point of accepting, however blindly, that EVERYTHING exists, except "Nothing" because it is impossible for nothing to coexist with anything else, even God. That is a scary thought. Everything that can be conceived by even our small minds exists somewhere at some time in the vibrating sphere of all that is. Monsters, vampires and bogeyment exist as easily as angels, faries and elves and even as easily as people. Some things we dream up are only as real as we make them at any particular moment, and some are not physically possible on this particular plane, but it makes sense that is we can imagine it then somewhere the creator has created it.

I remember once when I was teaching my daughter's kindergarten class to use our Atari computer and program in Logo that the teacher was having the rest of the class make paper turtles while I taught one group of five. I happened to hear her tell little Esther that there was no such thing as a pink turtle with purple polka dots. I casually wandered over to Esther's desk and whispered, "Yes, there is. You just made one." How much more powerful must be the mind that created my mind or her imagination.

So something exists we label as God, but what is it?

So by looking at what I think the world would be like without the existence of God, I think the fact that the world is NOT like this is enough proof that there is certainly a much higher power and a creator. However, we did not cover creation, so let's look at that first, and then see if it is possible to describe God.

Creation is one of the things for which we may not be developed enough as a species to really understand. It seems to me to be an ultimate paradox. There must have been a creation, since things don't order themselves. Science has presented plenty of believable evidence that this universe, indeed, had a beginning. However, did all of existence have a beginning? Well, the current shape of existence certainly must have, but if you consider the scientific axiom that both matter and energy are conserved within existence, all that does exist always did exist. It just changed form. I won't even try to answer the further question that always comes up about the nature of "nothing". "Nothing" just simply never existed and never will.

So where is God in all of this? He is in all of it. In fact, perhaps, He Is All of it. Maybe that very first point of existence was God, and maybe He existed always. Time began when He became whatever He is now, maybe sentient and Self aware. Time is another of the physics paradoxes that we may never really understand. Does it exist outside of our ability to measure it? The whole concept of time is linear, and so cannot be infinite. God invented time. From what did He fashion it? How did He measure it? Why did He need it? I cannot answer any of these, though I will make a stab at them later. Meanwhile, let us just agree that God invented time and that it only exists as long as some intelligence perceives it.

So God woke up from an eternal sleep or internal monologue or maybe even an internal dialogue with separate persons created within Himself, and found Himself alone in the void. It was dark, cold and empty until He expanded it and created whatever started the current universe in which we live. We have no way of knowing the physics of existence at that time, though some of the brave scientific minds are attempting to find answers. Maybe existence was all matter and God was all energy. Perhaps all that matter was then contained within an infinitely dense singularity within the antimatter void and God might have been an extremely concentrated energy or one the was spread out and permeated everything. And then He thought, and what He thought became reality, and the universe began to expand from its point of origin.

So now there was God, and some very interesting "things" happening. He probably took eons to watch it and it is possibly His energy that keeps order within it. That energy may actually be one kind of energy which we have yet to discover. Some people have discovered it, but no scientists have been able to prove its existence, any more than they have been able to prove the existence of God. Astrologers may be closer than most, measuring the Energy we cannot see by means of measuring its waves. It would follow then that it is not the stars and other heavenly bodies that influence us, but rather it is the same energy that governs them which does. It is like measuring the physical characteristics of a pond and a stone by measuring the rings of waves made by dropping the stone into the pond from a measured distance.

So how is it that all God had to do was to think to make things happen. Ah, maybe that is His nature. I have often seen the dice on a lively craps table behave erratically when there was a lively crowd. They will roll and look like they will fall on seven and then suddenly tip again and land on another number. Is this because all those people were "thinking" about the same thing? I cannot prove telekinesis to anyone else, but I have seen enough "unexplainable" things to believe it works, though no human has much control over it. It could be that we occasionally tap into that source of power and strange things happen.

So what if God did not exist?

I have tried the question of the existence of God from the angle of positive proof and negative disproof of His non-existence, and come to the conclusion that no matter which way I go, I cannot sufficiently prove His existence to anyone who does not want to believe. Perhaps that is by design, and I will consider that possibility later. Right now I want to look at how existence would work if there were no God.

First let us define God as both creator and controller of existence. The question of to what extent begs answering eventually, but, for now, let us just define Him/Her/Them as the Creator(s) and Maintainer(s) of existence, and consider the possibility that They ultimately comprise all of existence as a viable theory. We shall also here-after refer to God as "He" for convenience, though we will also tackle the truth of that pronoun eventually. First, let us consider what this existence would be like without God? Then we can look at the reality and see if that description fits.

First of all, if existence were simply a random accident, would not that very existence be also random and with random and changing rules? Random means without design, motive or purpose. Can anything be without design, motive or purpose? I look now at what I like to call the "Butterfly Principal" (I stole that term from some other writer). The essence of this principal is that everything we do has effects so far reaching as to be quite unimaginable, using our current brains, down generations and possibly some day across galaxies, and that any act, no matter how small, has the possibility within it to change the universe or even all of existence. I have tried to follow the possible progression of one smile or one sharp word with "if-then" reasoning, and concluded that I will always run up against the infinity of time and space. I cannot begin to even imagine how much future there is, let alone what it will be. Our brains are finite, and can only really understand, or perhaps only express the understanding, of that which is also finite.

However, even though I cannot predict or even dream of the actual ramifications of the butterfly principal, I try to live by it, because it seems a consistent way for judging my own actions. So why do I care? Without the existence of God, would any sentient being care about the future? Without God, self interest would surely be the driving force in this world. However, if that were so, perhaps self interest would drive us to invent God in order to prevent utter chaos, or either mass murder or mass suicide. But, is self interest enough?

To be sure, self interest is a powerful force, but once intellect comes into play it is not enough for most people, not even those who are the top dogs at the time. Witness the French Revolution or World War II Germany. There were countless people who sacrificed even their own lives to protect the oppressed. Some of these people were even rich and powerful. Why did they do that? Does that not totally refute self interest? Even if you consider that "better world" that they wanted for their progeny, there is no evidence that any of these people ever tried to guarantee the survival of their own any more than that of total strangers whom they knew to be oppressed.

It seems that we humans need structure and purpose. We need rules. If we cannot find them, then we invent them. Chaos is frightening and we constantly strive to order everything. In fact, without this ordering we cannot even think. Is thinking possible without order? Not with our brains. We currently do not control enough brain power to maintain order in the face of chaos, let alone impose it. Now if you look at existence, it is apparrent that everything tends to chaos, but when that happens, it destroys. Most of what we know to exist demands order. Even the power to "know" demands order. Since the universe tends to chaos, we can assume it does not order itself. Yet, order does exist. There are those who would claim that we invented God, but nobody can even begin to postulate that we, poor creatures that we are, created order.

In the Beginning there was.....

Ok, so what was there, what is there now and what does it all mean?

I think better when I write, so this is the answer to answering the questions I have or deciding that I cannot do so. Of course, I expect I will probably come up with more questions than answers, but maybe doing this will clear some of the cobwebs. Anyway I will use this lovely space to amuse myself and, perhaps, bore everyone else, or not. I like to think that those things which interest me are interesting also to others.

There are so many questions we, as a civilization or many civilizations struggling to coexist, are trying to answer. The more important the question the more different answers you will hear about and the less likely it is that even two or three people randomly selected from a crowd will agree on the answer, unless, of course, they choose, "I don't know."

What are the IMPORTANT questions?

1. Why does anything exist?
2. Why do we exist?
3. Does God exist?
4. How large is the universe?
5. Can we ever see it all?
6. What happens after death?
7. Why were we born on this planet at this time?
8. Is there a plan for anything?
9. If there is a plan, can we change it?
10. If there is a plan and we change it, what are the consequences?
11. Why do things work the way they do, especially as concerns the apparrent unfairness of the universe, or at least of life on this planet?
12. What is the best way to live our lives?
13. Does any of this matter?