PERCEIVING GOD

Perceiving God

I see a young man standing in the sun at a bus stop. He stands with a backpack slung over one shoulder. He has a pleasant face and he looks purposeful. He is of university age. He is travelling locally so he may attend a technical college. He is living in the moment. His mind may be on what lies ahead in his day, an assignment, a project, a person with whom he will spend some time. I surmise that he is not thinking, "How did I get into this world?" "Why am I here?" Big picture thinking for this fellow as the bus moves toward him, is probably concerned with nothing more extensive than what he will do after graduation? 

Yet, seated in my car, I pass him and my eyes are multi-tasking, observing the road ahead, vehicles attempting to merge, the speed I am travelling, the time on my car clock, and the blue sky that expands forever. I am projecting my thoughts into the frontiers of space and to the metaphysical reaches of origins. I am a man with a faith but fleetingly I seek to consider how a person without faith can imagine the genesis of all things.

I think of the other 7.125 billion humans on this planet, 2.1 billion of whom are overweight like me. Still we expect to live 70 years on average, and that's that. We will be gone. Others will take our place just as they presently are doing at a rate of 1.2% annually, which is why only twenty years ago we were 6.5 billion people. Forty years ago there were only 3.999 billion people on earth, and while we have almost doubled the world population, we still depend completely and solely upon this biosphere and minerals of this sphere. I marvel at my earth home being one of the four terrestrial planets in our Solar System, yet it is the densest planet and the third from the Sun, and earth is the only planet that is known to accommodate life. Mercury, Venus and Mars have not supported life. But why here on this earth and since when were we here, and who or what started this?

This is what my mind is doing as I drive to my gym to keep this body healthy for a few more years.

I know that everyone is agreed that the universe did have a start. Enthusiasts of faith and scholars of science concur that the earth within its solar system, did have a beginning sometime, somehow. Of course the proponent of faith has traditionally been content with an unpretentious explanation that in the beginning it was God who spoke his creation into existence. Unconvinced scientists basing their views on radiometric dating and other sources, think, rather than believe, that earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago, and life began to appear in oceans, then affected its atmosphere and surface, promoting the production of aerobic and anaerobic organisms and causing the formation of the atmosphere's ozone layer.  This ozone layer and Earth's magnetic field obstruct the Sun's life-threatening radiation so life has prospered here.

I've been around the block a few times, well not literally this time on my way to the Rec Centre, but I am familiar with both faith claims and scientific assertions and the credo that the two, faith and science can never interconnect. Proponents of both faith and science declare that you must have one without the other. Of course I have read about people from either party who have converted and happily harmonized to their own satisfaction, divine creation and a lengthy evolutionary timeline. So here I am this morning wondering whether I could be satisfied with a universe that seems to have created itself, spontaneously, inexplicably really. I am quickly coming to the conclusion that as much faith is required to accept that theory than is required to believe there is a supreme being who has always existed and who at one moment began a universe and a planet with forms of life upon it, one form being human.

Would there be any advantage to deliberately abandoning the notion of a divine creation? If God and creation are a crock, then naturally, the benefit is freedom from fairytale. We can disregard the constraints and restrictions of religions, which seem to control the human faith experience. We can be madly uninhibited, and live life to what we each regards as the fullest, expecting nothing more, but seizing everything that we can squeeze out and enjoy. On the other hand, if God is true, and if both the young man at the bus stop and I in my car are here because of some "vast eternal plan" as Tevye the milkman called it in the musical play, "Fiddler on the Roof, " then the benefit of acknowledging the deity becomes something paranormal. It follows that a believer will want to understand as much as can be known about the plan, and how it affects the individual now and hereafter. Given the two options, both of which require faith, I find myself opting as I have in the past, for the one that affords a relationship with the originator rather than being left with nonalignment.

I have only touched the surface of these contemplations as I arrive for my workout. I am fully grounded. I step out of my car. Terra firma. Now for ninety minutes my mind and body will be dedicated to the stationary rowing machine, the elliptical machine with the chance to watch 'Love it or List It,' on the overhead monitor, then the stationary bike and the treadmill, and maybe some weights to finish.