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!
