TL:DR: The Genesis Question part eighteen

Hi, Everybody!

Sunday: Genesis Question Commentary by Mr. Dave Sim:

Courtesy the CerebusDownloads.com, thanks George!

25 May 14

Hi Troy and Mia!

I find it very difficult, in many ways,  to comment intelligently on Mr. Ross' book because he's so DEFINITIVE in his statements.  I'm more inclined to go through the book with a red pen, like a teacher, writing "Prove?" next to pretty much every sentence.  And, of course, I just spent the last several weeks going through what he considers to be a list of Biblical proofs and indicating that in most cases, I don't think they're especially relevant to the assertion they are being cited as supporting. 

It's a very tiring process, involving a lot of typing of exact quotes and then explaining what I see in the exact quote and then explaining why I don't see it as applying to Mr. Ross' theses. 

A good example occurs in one of Mr. Ross' bullet points near the end of chapter three:

Genesis 1-3 makes no indication of any change in the physical laws.  Thermodynamics, electromagnetism and gravity, for example, are implied throughout. 

Well, no, I don't believe so.  Any more than Subduction Theory, The VanAllen Belt, and astrophysics are implied throughout.  You can infer them -- and clearly Mr. Ross does -- but you're going to need a very friendly audience/jury to let you get away with it.  If you are not a monotheist by inclination and temperament, your inclination in reading Genesis 1-3 is going to be to see them as fables and/or myths and -- without any direct reference to thermodynamics, electromagnetism and gravity in the text -- you're going to have your red pen out frequently and often.  "Prove?"

Even a relatively sympathetic reader -- by inclination and temperament -- like myself has a lot of trouble with this, as I say.  It's certainly interesting to speculate.  A great deal of my own "faith time" is taken up with those kinds of questions.  But I incline far more in the direction of the question "why?" than the "what?" questions that appear to preoccupy Mr. Ross. 

Taking it as a given (for the sake of argument if nothing else), I accept that planetary systems are not unique in the universe, a view that I held even prior to 1994 when science had proven the existence of "proto-planets"  circling distant stars.  I never really thought that there was a great deal of validity to Our Unique Earth.  The universe is too big and there are too many stars for that to seem rational even -- or, thinking about it, especially -- on an "odds are" basis.

I'm not sure if there's any great validity to a Twin Earth theory, either -- that, given the same conditions and the same-sized yellow star and the presence of oxygen and hydrogen in their exact proportions, somewhere there is a planet exactly like ours which is, chapter and verse, following the exact same historical path that we are following and producing -- both roughly and specifically -- the exact same people all making the exact same choices that we've made. 

But, then, I'm not sure that there isn't. 

And, to me, the unknowable answers centre on "why?" -- the Why of Creation.  What is/was God's purpose in creating the universe? 

And, in that, I work backward from Effect: the LITERALLY unimaginable -- by anyone but God --  number of stars and planetary systems and planets and their populations that exist and continue to come into being on a minute-by-minute basis as they've been doing for billions of years.  Hurled outward at an accelerating pace by centrifugal and centripetal force. 

Why?  What is accomplished by that?  Confining my speculations to the purely scientific, the answer that I come up with is:  experiments.  If you create a nearly unimaginable number of planet earths and earth-like planets, similar or identical and/or differently nuanced, you create a "control group" where both variations and reiterations are accounted for (and I think this applies to the gas-giant planets like Jupiter just as much, but for the sake of simplicity, let's just discuss theoretical earth-like planets for the moment).

If -- out of six billion earths and earth-like planets, all being given free will and all having the enactment of free will on the part of their populations as a foundation for the experiment -- 5.999999 billion earths and earth-like planets, behave in a prescribed manner and, over the course of 15 billion years from birth to death, follow the same free will trajectory to the same conclusion, then, it seems to me, whatever God's point was has been made relative to earth and earth-like planets.

And you -- or, rather, You, because it seems to me only God is Vast Enough to know -- would have the .00000001 billion earths that didn't behave in that way from which to observe and then calculate variances.  How many of those non-reiterative earths became better earths and how many became worse earths?  It seems possible, if not likely, to me that for an omniscient being that offers the only possibility of Deistic Learning.  It takes just that many far-ranging experiments, just that many exactly reiterative enactments AND just that few variable results to discover something that You didn't already Know and to be able, potentially, to apply that to future experiments.

If You can discover the Better Earth Factor by examining how that Better Earth or Those Better Earths behaved -- what choices Better Earth made and at what junctures and can figure out how to bake that INTO Your next generalized earth cake mix, that, in turn (it seems to me) could present You with an even better and more prolific .00000001 billion earths next time around…

("next time around" in my own speculations being the next Big Bang after Our Current Bang has exhausted its outward momentum, heat and light and ended up as dust and dark matter and spirit)

…with yet another set of unanticipated variables which can be used in the next cake mix and so on. 

But Why Do That?  This, it seems to me, is why science abandoned the "why?" question so early in the history of science, favouring instead an ever-lengthening list of "what's".  "Why?", actively pursued, takes you very quickly into realms seriously beyond human ken (I think). 

Is God just entertaining Himself? 

Given that God is omniscient and omnipresent, by definition, the idea that He experiences everything -- just on our own planet, He experiences life, death, marriage, torture, childbirth, terror, procreation, violent death, joy, violent dismemberment, rage, ecstasy, revelation, insight, shame, disappointment, success, achievement, failure, futility, defeat, billions of times every second, simultaneously -- COULD suggest that that's all this is.  Who could question the motivations behind Deistic Entertainment? 

And is Deistic Entertainment the same as Deistic Experience?  Is God rewarding AND punishing Himself for what He knows He has done to us by giving us life?  God, knowing that life is as much pleasure as it is pain or more pain than it is pleasure (depending on how you choose to live it), knew that He needed to subject Himself to all of those extremes if He was going to subject his creations to it.  In a sense, this answers the question, "Why does God allow bad things to happen to good people?":  Because bad things are a part of life, and, however many bad things happen to you or to someone you know, they are significantly dwarfed by the bad things experienced by God, by definition.  Our sufferings are minuscule when compared to the sufferings of God, again, by definition. 

My own assumption -- in answering "why?" is that (bottom line) creation was a lot of work.

Even at the point of greatest reduction, imagine having to create an entire earth where atheists got full value for their price of admission. 

They choose NOT to believe in God, but they are also making good and bad choices throughout the course of their lives.  0's and 1's. 

Assuming they make more good choices than bad choices (while having made a fundamentally Bad Choice in not believing in God, they are still God's creations and ergo fundamentally good), it would be necessary to create all of the miracles of nature that God created which would allow atheists to experience awe and reverence and "inward soaring" even though they end up in a cul de sac of their own choosing ultimately.  Their Bad Choice, ultimately, remains so and will be so even in their own eyes when they come to recognize it.

The Koran makes a greater point of this than does The Torah and the Gospels.  You will have no cause for complaint on The Last Day. You will make out your own account against yourself, seeing your own choices, seeing where you made them, why you made them and where they led.  AND seeing all the pleasures and joys and "inward soaring" moments you experienced along the way.  I mean, MY assumption is that you will, in that case, have seen that you traded "too much for too little".  You could have been "returning to God" from Whom you "came out" and instead you REALLY "got off" at an AC/DC concert (where God was the furthest thing from your mind).  But there will be no doubt that that was your choice and that you experienced what you experienced even as you re-experience it as part of "your life flashing before your eyes" and on Judgement Day, as misapprehended as that choice was.

Viewed from the other side of things, God certainly has provided us with a wide panoply of monotheistic choices:  ways and means of believing in God and serving Him.  Many of them contradictory as (it seems to me) suits our inclined-toward-contradictory natures.  We are inclined to choose philosophies as much for the extent to which they are oppositional as for the extent to which they are supportive.  How many Muslims are fundamentally anti-Christians by choice and primary motivation?  How many Christians are anti-Muslims by choice and primary motivation?

It seems to me that this is, again, God's "undeserved kindness" (grace) at work.

For all we know, (and I, for one, would suggest that the evidence points strongly in that direction) many of us chose to be oppositional by our natures back before the Big Bang. 

Like Groucho's song in DUCK SOUP "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It". 

God, knowing this to be a foundational element of the spirit of so many of His creations, made sure that there was no shortage of things that you could be fundamentally opposed to while professing sincere faith in Him.  It seems to me an experiment in "innermost motivation" and an access point to our "innermost natures" if we're willing to look at it.  Do you oppose out of malice or out of love?  Do you primarily hate falsehood or love truth?  Do you secretly delight in the fact that All Muslims Are Going To Hell if that is your innermost motivation in being a Christian?

And, unknown to us, of course, is what God's assessment of that is -- although I assume that God's assessment is always the (infinitely!) more accurate one.  "Hatred of Muslims is stronger in this person than love of God."  And what's God's best assessment of that?  Does that even qualify as "innermost motivation"?  Does this person hate Muslims because he sees Muslims as a threat to God, so his innermost motivation in hating Muslims is a defence of God and a threat to what he sees as God's Truth?  How harmful and detrimental does God see that as being?  No way of knowing.  But if the person lives in a context so remote from even a possibility of having any kind of personal contact with a Muslim anywhere and at any time, isn't the net effect a positive one?  And comparably with the hate-filled Muslim living in Medina, say.  He's probably hundreds if not thousands of miles from the nearest (in his own ideological frames of reference) infidel, so how dangerous is his level of hatred for Christians and Jews?  What is his innermost motivation but, also, defence of God and defence against what he sees as a threat to God's Truth? But in terms of life application, his experience as a Muslim in a strictly Muslim population will make his view of infidels secondary at best.

Feminism having opted for immigration as a means of sustaining population (as opposed to natural rates of childbirth) inadvertently seems to me to have breached that particular construct to its own detriment, introducing "infidel-hating" Muslims into infidel societies. 

A large part of any immigrant population having a normal rate of childbirth is going to be Muslim and fundamentally opposed to feminism.  You can -- and, as a society, we do -- then work to convert Muslims into secular humanists with near-zero birth rates (which is amusing in its own way: opening up immigration to solve the problem you've created in your society through feminism and then actively converting your immigrants into feminists), but that still leaves you with an expanding population of devout monotheists, Muslims, and a collapsing population of secular humanists, feminists both infidel and formerly Muslim. 

"Thermodynamics, electromagnetism and gravity" …"implied" or not…in Genesis 1-3 seem to me to be somewhat if not completely beside the point when compared with these structures: scientific properties and principles and how they applied to creation having more in common with set design and theatre construction than with the actual Play, as I see it.

If you look at the French experience, I think that better demonstrates the answers implicit to the "why?" question and the REAL intricacy of God's creation as it enacts itself (or, at least, as I see it). 

The French, it seems to me, tend to, generally,  have an innermost motivation of hatred for things which are non-French and an innermost motivation that French things are superior to non-French things (literally Chauvinism, after Chauvin).  So the French enactment of the "immigration solution to the population disaster caused by feminism"  hatches out differently.  They tend to accept French immigrants over all other immigrants on the assumption that all French people share the belief that French things -- and people -- are superior to non-French things -- and people. 

The result has been Parisian suburbs that are primarily Muslim -- most of the French immigration coming from former French colonies in Muslim North Africa -- suburbs that have become literal no-go areas for non-Muslims.  "Innermost motivation" of hatred for the non-French meets head-on with "innermost motivation" of hatred for the non-Muslim. 

Compare that with our experience in North America where I think the results of our enactments -- to this point -- illustrate that our innermost motivations tend not to be hatred of other cultures but rather the love of our own culture. 

Even with the 9/11 attacks providing more than sufficient cover for "Muslim bashing" -- had that been our choice: hatred of a culture not our own -- there is virtually no evidence that that exists.  There is, I think, an unspoken antagonism  towards Islam and Muslims but I think that's more a recognition that you can't be a good feminist and a good Muslim.  Or a good Muslim and a good feminist.  It's either-or and it's natural on the part of feminists and their ideology (which has become our default secular state religion here in the West) to just wish that Islam would "go away" conceptually and literally -- and to hope that sufficient exposure to and participation in secular materialism and dishonourable female behaviours (lewd conduct and dress, adultery, fornication) will convince Muslims to abandon their faith for feminism.

But, in the larger "why?" sense, I can't help but admire God's even-handedness both in creating Islam and allowing feminism to exist and then letting the chips fall where they may over the course of the late 20th century and -- however long feminism continues to exist in its collapsing secular context.

And I wonder if the juxtaposition of feminism and Islam at this point in our planet's history makes us a cliche earth?

Or an exceptional one?

Best,

Dave

Next Time: answers and comments on comments. Plus pictures of a dead aardvark! Bring the kids!