Does God Believe in Us?(a sermon delivered at the Hamburg Unitarian Universalist Church on December 28, 2003) Do I believe in God? My children have not asked me that very tough question yet, but I have often thought about what my answer will be. If I was forced to characterize myself at all, I would have to say that I am an agnostic humanist, but that will mean very little to a ten-year-old. For now, I am happy to say that I am a Unitarian Universalist and just side-step the tougher question. Although I am always open to a lively discussion about divinity. While preparing for this sermon, I received a UU joke over the Internet that really spoke to me. It seems that a Unitarian Universalist died, and on his way to the afterlife he encountered a fork in the road with two signs. The sign pointing to the left path said: “To Heaven,” while the sign pointing to the right path stated: “To a Discussion of Heaven.” Of course, the UU turned right toward the discussion of heaven. Now, while I think that a liberal religious person would normally move to the left given a choice, this joke does illustrate a fundamental mind-set of most Unitarian Universalists I have met—the desire to discuss religion more than practice it. I don’t mean this as a slight on our religion. I actually see it as one of our strengths. You see, we’re not content to merely rely on faith for our beliefs and principles; instead we seek out answers. We study and discuss religion, history, mythology, science, philosophy, and even books and the media, looking for tidbits of truth. We then fit those bits and pieces together like pieces of a puzzle to help us answer the big questions: How was the Universe Created? Will there be a life after this one? Is there a God? And if so, what does this supreme-being want from us, if anything. The latest pieces of my personal worldview puzzle came from one of my favorite sources of truth—science fiction. I recently read the Nebula Award winning novel, Calculating God by Toronto-based author Robert J. Sawyer. The novel begins when a spider-like alien lands at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and asks to be taken to their paleontologist. You see, this technologically-advanced alien race, called the Forhilnor, has a theory about the creation of the universe. They believe God created it, and they want to find out why. The Forhilnor have found evidence of direct intervention in the evolution of two separate races and they have come to Earth to research our fossil records. It seems on both the Forhilnor home world and that of a race called the Wreeds, massive extinctions helped pave the way for intelligent races to arise and gain dominance, and these mass extinctions happened at the same time on both worlds. Perhaps this is a coincidence, but when the aliens find out that earth suffered the same mass extinctions—at roughly 440 million, 365 million, 225 million, 210 million, and 65 million years ago—they are even more convinced that some intelligent entity must have directed these evolutionary events on each world in order for the three current races to achieve sentience at the same time. But why? That is what they want to find out. In the words of Hollus, the alien visitor, “The Primary goal of modern science is to discover why God has behaved as he has and determine his methods. We do not believe that he simply waves his hands and wishes things into existence. We live in a universe of physics, and he must have used quantifiable physical processes to accomplish his ends.” It sounds to me like Hollus would have made an excellent Unitarian Universalist. What I like about this book is that Rob Sawyer starts with a very simple concept—so simple that it’s been part of my own personal worldview puzzle since adolescence—that the seven days of creation weren’t necessarily a literal seven days—but then he builds on that concept and supports it with hard, scientific data. It took the creator of the universe in Calculating God millions of years to produce physical conditions that would bear the fruit of life. According to Hollus, if the basic forces of the universe—gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak forces—had even slightly different values, the universe as we know it wouldn’t exist and life could never have formed. Take the formation of stars for example. Stars must strike a balance between gravity, their own mass, and the electromagnetic force of their energy output. If the strength of gravity were different by one part in 1040, every star in the universe would either be a red dwarf or a blue giant. There would be no life-giving yellow stars like our own sun. There is much more data in the book that supports Hollus’s claim that. “The universe was clearly designed; If it has a design, it must therefore have a designer.” But I will only bore you with one more that I found astounding. Water. Water is perhaps the most amazing substance in the universe. And it happens to be absolutely essential for life. Life on Earth evolved in water and all living things require water for their biological processes. But water’s amazing properties are also required for some important, life-giving processes in nature as well. Unlike most substances, water expands right before it becomes a solid, so solid water—ice—floats on top of liquid water. Try that with lead and see what happens. But this is very important to our lakes and rivers—our water supply—and for our soil as well, wherein we grow most of our food. You see, if ice didn’t float, lakes would freeze from the bottom up, killing organisms that survive the winter on the lake bed. These completely frozen waterways would then never thaw because currents beneath the ice promote melting in the spring. Water also seeps deep into rocks due to its high surface tension, which is second only to selenium. And because water expands when frozen, it breaks these rocks up, helping to create soil. According to Hollus, water has seven distinct thermal properties that are unique or nearly unique in the chemical world. He says, “The likelihood of water having these unique thermal properties by chance is almost nil.” Now, I’m no scientist, so I have no way to check the validity of all of Hollus’s claims (but as a good UU, I would be more than happy to discuss these claims with any scientists we have in the congregation. Like Hollus, I am searching for answers to life’s great questions through research into the physical world). But, for now, I am willing to accept that Rob Sawyer is speaking the truth through Hollus. It is the job of a good science fiction writer to get his facts straight about the state of current scientific thought so that he may then extrapolate that science into the future or use it for philosophical games. And Rob Sawyer is an exceptional science fiction writer. However, if I am to take Hollus at his word that there would be no life in the universe if any of these “carefully adjusted parameters [of nature] that make life possible…any in this long chain—were different.” Then I as a good UU have no choice but to accept the rest of Hollus’s argument: “We are either the most incredible fluke imaginable—something far far more unlikely than…winning [the state] lottery every single week for a century—or the universe and its components were designed, purposefully and with great care, to give rise to life.” Now, let me tell you, this is a tough piece of information for a devout agnostic such as myself to add to my world puzzle, and its ramifications are enormous. If there is a super-powerful being that has created the universe over a period of seven God-sized days, what does this being want from life? What does He…or She…or maybe we should just say It…What does It want from us, the end product of Its great experiment? That is just the question that Rob Sawyer answers in Calculating God. I’m not going to tell you the ending because some of you might want to read it. I also felt a little let down at the end of the book. What Rob’s God wanted wasn’t what I would think that God wants. I didn’t add that bit of his book into my world puzzle because it just didn’t ring true for me. I guess I want a God who wants something more from his creation. And no, I’m not talking about blind adoration and devotion (and neither was Rob). I think you all know how I feel about that. I think most of us would hope that if there is a God, It is above such petty human needs. Too much suffering on this world has been caused by religions that believe their God must be praised above all others. The Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Muslim Jihad raging today are all just variations of terrorism done in the name of God. No, not in the name of God. I would say that we are to blame for these Holy wars. Not God. Religion is a man-made structure—created like the myths of ages past and today’s science fiction—to make sense out of the senseless, to bring order to chaos, to put a face on an unknowable and un-seeable God. And it is in the name of religion—not in the name of God—that these atrocities are performed. The Crusades and the Inquisition took a devotion to their religion to an extreme end. The Crusades were ostensibly designed to free the holy land from heathens (read: muslims). These heathens did not believe in the word of the Christian God and therefore were not worthy to dwell in His holiest of places. But, the crusades quickly devolved into nothing more than church-sanctioned rape, plunder, and pillaging. And, the Inquisition was nothing more than a witch hunt. Again, anyone who believed in something other than the accepted religious doctrine of the time was hunted down, jailed, and, often, tortured—all in the name of God, but carried out by the church. The moral was clear in the early days of the Christian church: Believe or else! Often, though, it is the search for immortality—for the right to sit at the left hand of God—that drives religious people to do the things they do. Christians believe that you must accept Jesus Christ as your savior or suffer an eternity in Hell. Those who are saved go to Heaven to live with God for eternity. Truly devout Catholics go so far as to pray for the souls of those of us who do not accept the divinity of Jesus because they fear we will be damned. Muslim fanatics who die committing heinous terrorist acts believe they are martyring themselves in the name of Allah, and that this will cement their position in the hereafter. They kill—and die—in the name of their God. But it’s okay because the people they murder are non-believers and thus of no consequence, and their own death is a glorious one-way ticket to immortality. It is this kind of devotion to religion that drove me away from the church in my youth. Of course, the Christian church doesn’t condone this kind of brutality any more (and neither does the muslim religion). Most of these atrocities are undertaken at the hands of extremists like the Taliban, Al Queda, Nazis, and the Ku Klux Klan. But even the most benign of Christian churches still require you to believe in Jesus or suffer the pits of Hell, and all go well out of their way to try to bring you into the fold, whether you want to be there or not. Is this what the being who fiddled with the forces of nature to create us wanted? I don’t think so. If we were given intelligence for a reason, that reason cannot be to try to kill each other over who believes in the true God. If we were given intelligence for a reason, that reason must be to strive for a better world; to reach for the stars; to find a way to come together in our quest for the divine—as the fictional Forhilnor and Wreeds have done. While the Forhilnor arrived at their belief in God and their quest for the divine through science, the other alien race in Calculating God has far different approach. The Wreeds are an odd race that developed philosophy as we and the Forhilnor developed science. Rob Sawyer goes into great detail about how the evolution of the Wreeds brought them to where they are today, but for the sake of this sermon, let’s just say they are wired differently than you or me or even Hollus. The Wreeds believe in the existence of God, but arrived at that certainty through philosophy, not science. When asked whether he believes in God, T’Kna, a Wreed ambassador says, “Do you believe in sand?...Do you believe in electromagnetism?” It simply is not a question worth asking, for the answer is obvious to the Wreeds. T’kna goes on to say, “More significant is whether God believes in me?” The Wreeds, it turns out have a quantum physics-like belief in their own existence. As T’Kna says, “God’s chosen people are those whose existence he/she/it validates by observing.” And thus they devote half of their waking life trying to communicate with God. This is not prayer, according to T’Kna, for they desire nothing material from God. They merely wish to speak to it. However, I would argue that the Wreeds do want something from God. They wish to be the chosen race that God validates through Its attention. Their devotion to daily communication attempts borders on the fanatical, and I personally believe that if our very existence does depend on an outside observer, then the fact that we are alive must already prove that this observer is…well…observing us. But their goal is the same as everyone else’s—they seek the divine; they are on a quest for immortality…for their entire race. Even the Forhilnor are on this quest. As I mentioned earlier, all Forhilnor science—in fact much of the time and resources of their entire race—is devoted to understanding how God created the universe and why. But I think this is just a façade. I believe the true intention of this alien race—whether it is a conscious effort or not—is to completely understand the science of God so that they may achieve immortality and take their place beside God, not as believers—not as followers—but as equals. And that, to me, has to be the purpose of creating life—or at least creating the conditions that will lead to intelligent life. God wants companionship, not devotion. God wants to populate the universe with intelligent races that may someday join with it in a brotherhood; a family. Think about it. This desire is built into our very psyche. We mate and produce offspring not to create devoted children who will praise us and pay tribute to us (although a little respect from time to time would be nice). We hope our children will grow up to become like us, to live with us in a world that we create together. We want them to reach for the stars, just as I believe God wants us to reach and strive for the heavens. We believe in their ability to go beyond our own abilities, just as I think God hopes we will one day ascend beyond this mortal coil and join It as masters of the universe. So, do I believe in God? Yes. Yes I do. Does God Believe in me? I certainly hope so. |
Contact Will Copyright Notice |
