Jul 01, 2018

12 Steps to Joy (11)

The Word of Life (4)

            In the beginning the Word already existed.

                        The Word was with God,

                        And the Word was God.

            The Word existed in the beginning with God.

            God created everything through the Word,

                        And nothing was created except through the Word.

            The Word gave life to everything that was created,

                        And the life of the Word brought light to everyone.

            The light shines in the darkness,

                        And the darkness can never extinguish it.”

                                                                        John 1:1-5.

 

            The Word gave life to everything that was created,

                        And the life of the Word brought light to everyone.

Scientists grew desperate to find a way to answer the question of how our universe came to be. I will quote from Amir D. Aczel and the book “Why Science Does Not Disprove God”:

Roger Penrose (Steven Hawkins mentor) has spent a lifetime trying to understand the workings of the universe. And he came to a stunning conclusion: if the entropy (a measure of disorder commonly used in physics) of space had been off by even a tiny fraction, the universe would not exist. Thus the universe has to have been “fine-tuned” to a degree that we can hardly comprehend. Penrose writes in The Road to Reality: The argument would run roughly: “For sentient life to exist, we need a large universe with timescales long enough for evolution to take place, in conducive conditions, etc.; this requires some inflation, originating from our tiny smooth initial region, and once it starts, the inflation goes on to provide us with the wonderfully enormous observable universe that we know. ……….. The required precision in phase-space-volume terms is one part in 10 raised to the 10^thpower raised to the 123^rdpower at least. The exponent 10 raised to the 123^rdcomes from the entropy of a black hole to that of the observable universe.”

The anthropic response is trite: “Well, we are here to ask the question, so therefore it occurred!” The problem is that when we start talking about such huge odds of probability it is literally impossible to come to any real conclusion. Even Roger Penrose admitted that it is possible that the only answer that makes sense is one of a greater force setting up the parameters so that we could exist as we know ourselves to exist. I don’t know why so many have such difficulty in thinking that there just might be a greater intelligence somewhere, at least as great a difference us between humanity and the ape. Another name for this force is God.

Much of the anger at what we know as God is a misunderstanding of God by so much of humanity. Many believe that what we call “God” is an old man with a white beard sitting on a throne somewhere just waiting to roast us – and I mean that literally. It seems puzzling to me that intelligent humans have such a weird idea about this being that we call God, but it seems to be a product of our religions. Too Many religions talk of the vengeful God, the angry God, the murdering God (over 2 million deaths are put in the hands of God in the old testament) and other traits that are meant to generate fear instead of the one thing that we know God is: Love(1 John 4:8). I am especially puzzled by intelligent humans who understand the wonders and delicate balancing act of the universe fail to see that this is the act of a loving God creating paradise in the wonder of the universe. We are the only creatures we know of that can look with wondering eyes and other senses at the beauty of the universe; we can see the stars and galaxies and the heart-stopping beauty of nature, and be moved to tears by beauty.