God's Google

God's Google



What if the theories of evolution and intelligent design were both true? Why not? That would satisfy everyone but the lunatic fringe. Those freaks find it equally, if not more important for the other guy to be wrong. But let’s leave them alone for now. They don’t deserve the attention.



Suppose God just decided one day to create Man in his image and did all the things the Bible said He did. He’s God after all. He could do it. He looks at His Adam and His Eve and He is pleased. But they can’t just float there in the void so He builds a garden around them. Fine. Now, the garden has to be somewhere. He creates the Earth and puts the garden there. Cool.



Maybe he did take His first stab at it some six thousand odd years ago as the Bible says. He could have popped them into existence and decided: “This is nice. This is what I want and now I will fill in the blanks. So I will reverse engineer the shit out this project so that it can all exist in reality.”

“What do mean, Lord? What is reality?” an angel may have asked him. Michael, the arch one perhaps.

“Well, I’m thinking of trying a new approach this time and I’m going with Free Will. It will require a solid foundation so that I won’t have to watch them constantly. They can go about their business and I can go about mine.”

“Free Will? Well, that’s just great!” Gabriel may have said. “We don’t even have that, and we’re supposed to be your favorite.”

“You have other things that they won’t. Leave me alone now, I’m busy.”



Remember now, God is omnipotent so he is not locked into linear time as we know it. He’s free to bounce around from today all the way back to the Big Bang and anywhere in between. Oh, and the future too. Don’t forget the future.



So starting with Adam and Eve in the garden he reverse-engineers life back to the primordial ooze, and the rest of the universe all the way back to the Big Bang. It turns out to be a huge project, what with having to figure out atoms and elements and natural causes for all of it. You can’t just get all the elements from heat and gasses, so stars have to explode and their detritus must recombine to make even more elements that weren’t there before and then combine those into compounds or what have you. Sounds simple enough.

One day, down here on Earth, Hydrogen, Methane, and Ammonia get involved in a three-way. It starts to rain and they are all struck by lightning. The rest is history. Elements and compounds get together and say “Hey let’s be life, okay?” This is what evolutionists believe happened. All by itself, with no one directing it. They call it “Spontaneous Generation”. This process has been performed in laboratories by men. It makes for a good argument. Whether or not this is what happened in some steamy puddle, 3.8 billion years ago is something the evolutionists take on faith. Ironic, huh?



We end up here, today, with thirteen billion years of science (reality) to figure out and several thousand years of conflicting dogma that we use to rationalize killing each other. Maybe this is just the breather God needs while he continues his work on whatever the hell there was before the Big Bang. We already want to know, maybe sooner than He expected.



So, if the Earth was the first place to be created, it implied that God and his angels would be somewhere else. Heaven was it, and what separated them was the first instance of a thing called space. Space between places. Before there was stuff there was no need for space to separate it. It worked out so well that God used it for the rest of the universe in matters of matter.



Maybe Heaven was part of the material universe at one time, and when Galileo found a way to look further, God decided to move it.



Now, He and his angels are not made of matter and He decided that when interaction was necessary there would have to be some sort of process. He gave his angels wings to travel to Earth and transform into corporeal form.



The angels were thrilled with their new wings and having some place to go and stopped grumbling about free will for a short while. Or thousands of years depending on who you are and where you’re standing when you look at it. What they weren’t thrilled about was their obvious loss of standing and many of them resented being displaced by humans.



Is anybody getting this? God created the Heavens and the Earth and man in his image. He worked backward to give it all a scientific foundation so that Man would not be just a work of magic that might wink out of existence when He got distracted.



And why couldn’t He be distracted? If He’s capable of everything, He’s capable of that.



What if he did start at the beginning, four billion years ago, one hand stirring the primordial goo, while the other is shaping events like tectonic shifts and ice ages, all the time watching the end result? All the before stuff evolving into humans right there on the hi-res flat screen He uses to watch them. Changing to adapt to climate or changing because God didn’t like the way we looked with our noses on the back of our heads. Maybe He sprinkles a little something into the mix at the fifty-million-year-ago mark that fixes it, and up on the screen he checks us out. Ah, yes, nose in the front. Neat.



What if God was looking away when those giant rocks slammed into the Earth that caused the mass extinctions? The last one was sixty-five million years ago and the one prior was one-hundred-thirty-five million years before that.



Maybe that was all according to plan or maybe God had appointments elsewhere on those occasions. He didn’t erase the effects when He got back. Perhaps He liked the results. Then again, maybe they were His way of wiping the slate clean and starting over. Mysterious ways, right?



It seems to me that this whimsical premise should satisfy both sides of the debate. One side gets its evolution and it won’t kill them to allow for some form of intercession. The other side can embrace creation and still abide the idea of natural selection. It’s hard to say who has the stronger argument. At first glance it would seem that science is onto something, considering all the evidence at hand. But as I mentioned earlier no one was there to witness the first spark of life so all this science is based on a belief in the absence of proof.



Does that mean the creationists have the edge in this scenario? I sure as hell don’t know, but they don’t help their case, in my eyes, when they tell me Satan created dinosaur bones. Or is that just the lunatic fringe saying that? See how they ruin things for everybody? I find this funny. I imagine that God does too.



God has the best sense of humor of anyone. He likes practical jokes and word play. I like to think He does, if He’s there, I mean. And if He is, He’s funny. I’m not as funny as I think I am but I believe that humor is one of the eight senses. You all know the first five, and most believe the sixth is ESP. The seventh is sense of humor. If your lucky, you possess the eighth one: Sense of irony.



I would think that, ironically, God would be more favorably inclined toward the science guys than toward the worshippers. Simply because, although the nerds came up with all the cool weaponry that destroyed so much of his work, and spend their time trying to disprove Him, it was the holy rollers who did the inciting and, using Him as an excuse, did all that damage while insulting him in the process. I think He would appreciate the irony as well.



We were talking about His sense of humor. We’re getting there.



There are certain sounds that just work together better than others. That is all you need to know to get music and poetry and laughter. Throughout the heavens, there was one expletive that was more gratifying to the ear than any other. Not for any reason other than it felt good to say it in situations that required emphasis. That combination of syllables was arrived at through trial and error and just seemed to roll off the tongue. “Bollocks” and “Horseshit” have that same quality for us, or at the very least, me. We think they are vile words because of their definitions, but the truth is the sounds came first, we liked them, and then, through reverse engineering, the meanings were injected into them. How can you be sure it didn’t happen that way? Lighten up.



So, anyway, God decided to give his humans one last bit of help. He wasn’t very optimistic at this point though. He’d already tried confounding their language, as well as a flood, a pillar of salt, words etched in stone, parting a sea, plagues, a burning bush (they can’t all be tens) and He didn’t seem to be getting through to them. When they weren’t killing each other or fornicating, some of them were off mutilating their penises in His name. That really pissed Him off. The “Covenant with God”. That was the worst one, but other traditions were just plain silly. Don’t eat pork? If He’d had anything to say about pig meat, it would have been to cook it thoroughly. Instead, they made it a religious prohibition after watching many of their numbers succumb to trichinosis. They were clever in their way. Both were health/sanitation issues that need to be dealt with, and what better way to force compliance. By practicing their religion, they were able to ward off the demons that sometimes caused diarrhea, muscle weakness, edema, and fever. Not to mention the really nasty demons that were constantly putting sand under their foreskins.



Enough digression, already. We were talking about God’s sense of humor. He sends his son to Earth in one last ditch attempt to straighten us out. He already knows the outcome, however. Remember he is everywhere at every time. “I’m going to teach these dumb-asses a lesson.” He may have said.

“How will you do that, Lord?” Galadriel (why not?) may have asked.

“Those idiots are going to use my son’s name to justify everything from genocide to winning ball games. They are going to run around the globe like a bunch of jerks, doing awful things, all the while invoking his name. So, I’ve got just the name.”

“What name will you give, Lord?”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Are you kidding? That’s not a name. It’s a cuss word. It’s nonsense. And it’s our best one!”

“They’ll find that out when they get here. I can’t wait to see the looks on their faces.”

“Why don’t you just change them, make them nice, or wipe them out altogether?”

“I have my reasons. Maybe I’ll tell you sometime. But this free will thing is turning out to be a real bitch!”



Even though God knows everything from the beginning of time to the very end, he still tried to help us now and then, knowing full well we’d make a bog of the whole thing. But he gave us free will and so far he hasn’t ungiven it, so he must have his reasons.



Sending [expletive deleted] to Earth to die for our sins may have been his last big gesture. He could see what we were about, and while some good may have come out of it, that combination of sounds would be used for millennia to justify atrocities.



He may have had to endure some “I told you so’s” from his angels when we started using those syllables down here the same way they were being used in heaven.



Maybe He was surprised (for lack of a better word) at the astonishing burst of progress we made in the twentieth century, in our ability to look at things very far away and large, and very close to home and small, and take them apart, and look at the parts, and look at the parts that make up the parts.



“They know about Relativity, Lord!”

“Already?”

“They know about String Theory, Lord, and Quantum Mechanics and they are about to find all the other dimensions, Lord!”

“Alright Lucifer, shut it. Like you had nothing to do with that. They are moving a lot faster than I wanted them to, for whatever reason. They are going to figure out the Singularity in no time at all. It’s amazing how strong their need is to know why things are. Jesus Christ!”



I don’t think God is the type of guy who would hand out free will only to take it away when things looked hairy. I also don’t think He sits on a throne reading from a naughty/nice list, like Santa Claus, before deciding who comes through the gates. I think free will for us meant free time for Him, and after a few unsuccessful tries at helping us, He left us to our own devices and only checks in now and then.



I think He might be waiting for us to discover the meaning of life, or as I like to put it: Why is there stuff? Maybe after watching us struggle for answers, he came up with a question of his own. He’s knows why there is stuff. He makes all the stuff. Perhaps He wants to know who or what made the maker of all the stuff. Something that hadn’t occurred to Him (okay, or Her) until we started digging. Although our desperate need to know, might not have been written into our ROM, free will turned out to be full of surprises. If I were the Deity, I wouldn’t mind a few surprises now and then. And while He’s off doing other things (it’s a big universe), He’s waiting for us to find the answer for Him.



To put it another way, He uses us as a search engine. His Google, if you will.



Mysterious ways, right?