Thursday, November 6, 2008

Flowcharting the religious stream of consciousness, part II

So you rounded the rapids and bounced off the rocks. Now we can take another couple of bends in the theological stream.

We left off with the question of whether most supernatural power is good or bad, tending to help or harm life.
We exist. Many living things exist. If beings who wished to wipe out life (or even just didn't care to let it thrive so much) wielded the majority power or had an even match with those who want life to prosper, we would be dead by now. Life has blossomed a long, long time now. Nothing has ever wiped it out.
So, the natural, the supernatural and life exist, the supernatural is conscious and the dominant supernatural power loves life, including us.
Was the supernatural involved in any way in our coming to existence?
If not, we must explain abiogenesis, the appearance of time, space, energy and matter from a pure singularity -- wait! Come back. It's exciting.
Before the universe began, the state of things (rather, of nothing) was what we call a singularity. This is a condition that cannot be truly remade without ending the universe. But we have made almost-singularities, and true to theory, change doesn't happen in them without outside intervention.
It doesn't help to run away to another universe, either. The question of what changed the singularity just follows us from level to level like an opponent in a video game, popping out of the light fixture and facing us. Quantum theory has no escape either. Nor relativity, which is what tells us the singularity was absolute and therefore totally unable to change without intervention.
The change had to come from somewhere when there was nowhere, something when there was nothing, somehow. What if there was Someone? Our chance to come to be depended on Someone who wasn't subject to the laws of nature, but sovereign over them -- Someone supernatural, above the natural.

Once in a while you may still hear the terms "evolutionist" and "creationist". These are outdated ideas, because it's a very rare creationist who doubts that species change, and a rare evolutionist who really totally accepts the random-accident theory of everything. What most of us are is eveationists, or crutionists or whatever the term ought to be. We live on a long continuum of choices in how much supernatural intervention we understand to be needed to bring us where we are. The key facts now stand: The greatest supernatural Power, Who loves us and loves life, invaded an absence of energy, matter, time or space to bring into being a universe that can support life, and then kept that universe from destroying itself. A Creator, Sustainer, supernatural ally of life and of humanity -- God.
Let us devote the next post to reasoning about how many gods may exist.

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