God is Great!

Does looking up at the stars at night make you wonder about God?

There are approximately 100 billion stars in our Galaxy. The Hubble telescope revealed that in the small section we can observe - there are around 200 billion galaxies. As for distances they are almost incomprehensible (especially to someone who thinks it’s a long way to Perth).

Down here on Earth watching little fairy wrens raise their chicks fills one with delight and awe at such complexity and beauty. We are just beginning to understand the physical, chemical and biological patterns and processes involved in our world.  What we are discovering leaves us with a feeling of wonder, it makes us feel there must be a creative, spiritual force, a mind, God somehow intimately connected to it all.

I wonder, is there sentient life on other planets contemplating the greatness of God?

God is incomprehensibly great!

In his book Sapiens, Yuval Harari makes the case that our human laws and social rules are just that. We’ve made laws and rules to enable us to function as a society. We’ve used God to justify them or claimed God gave them to us, (but that doesn’t mean s/he did). The Ten Commandments or the Divine Right of Kings are just two examples. We don’t follow the Ten literally anymore. A wife is no longer considered ‘property’ for example. As for the Divine Right of Kings, English speakers ended that idea with the beheading of Charles I, and are not too keen on “Presidents for Life”.  However, the Chinese think the latter is okay. Every society has different structures and rights and responsibilities, and they change and evolve. These are human institutions. We kid ourselves thinking God follows our rules or notions of fairness or is US written large - unless we believe that in the beginning humans created God.

Life in God’s Universe is like the parable of the labourers. Our ideas of what is fair and what’s not don’t apply. Sometimes “Good people” have terrible lives and “Bad people” have terrific lives and visa versa. We get different abilities or lack of them, and life offers us different opportunities. Our planet could be wiped out by an asteroid tomorrow.

Our Universe does follow God’s rules, it follows these patterns rigidly it seems, in as far as we understand them, and based on those rules - our actions have real outcomes. Our universe’s rules govern how nature and the universe works which we haven’t always understood but are slowly beginning to. Knowledge of these rules means we can begin to control the outcome of what happens to our little planet and beyond. Human ingenuity and the possibilities for the future of life are both exciting and frightening.

What do we want that outcome to be? The possibilities of both Utopian and Dystopian outcomes are in our grasp, now. God is great!