Hard to Believe
I just returned from a memorial service for a friend who died last week.
I expected the now-normal "celebration" of the dead person's life,
with pictures of her at every age and hair style, favorite songs playing in the
background, and images of loving grandchildren with their gramma all pinned
artistically on the walls. It's usually an unbearable display of
unredeemed sentimentality, but it's the sort of thing one has to put up with
these days without even looking sour and disapproving. I can do that.
Today, instead of the expected celebration, the churchful of friends and relatives got an old-fashioned mass for the dead, that plus a special speaker, whose name and relationship to the dead woman I couldn't quite catch, and who took too long to say nice things that dissolved into mumbles by the time they reached those of us in the back rows. If anything, it was more unbearable even than the dreaded celebration.
My own relationship with God has flourished and floundered intermittently through most of my life, but in recent years it has deteriorated badly—and now has disappeared completely. Earlier this century, when I was writing an autobiography, Random Miracles (2011), I thought perhaps God might exist as the match that set the Big Bang in motion. And once one admits to the possibility of a God, it becomes possible to think of Him as an entity one ought to thank for whatever good has crept into his life. Wishful thinking, I think now. These days about the best I can hope for is the possibility of a Creator who may have had a hand in the origins of the universe but who lost interest almost immediately, dropped out, and is currently unavailable. We’re totally on our own.
Everyone more or less knows this. Where exactly is God in the large universe we live in or in the small genetic one that lives within us? As questions about the formation of the universe, the creation of matter, evolutionary biology, and the operation of quantum mechanics have all been partly answered by scientists who are pursuing the remaining questions with single-minded devotion, there is no further need for supernaturalism and superstition, no need for God as an explanation for what we couldn't previously understand.
Religious folks, however, can't or won't give up the other-worldly superstructure they've become accustomed to--God, heaven, hell, the Bible, Adam and Eve, the whole thing. They say they still believe in all that, although it is probably just that they can't face death without the promise of life after death. Jesus and the Resurrection. Religious folks think of themselves as rational beings in everything else, of course, but in this one case they are completely blind to science and proudly proclaim their "blind faith." And then to draw further attention to their abandonment of rationality, the proudly pious assume an air of sanctimonious superiority. It's an unattractive defensive posture--but it's totally understandable. I wish I could be one of them.
Today, instead of the expected celebration, the churchful of friends and relatives got an old-fashioned mass for the dead, that plus a special speaker, whose name and relationship to the dead woman I couldn't quite catch, and who took too long to say nice things that dissolved into mumbles by the time they reached those of us in the back rows. If anything, it was more unbearable even than the dreaded celebration.
My own relationship with God has flourished and floundered intermittently through most of my life, but in recent years it has deteriorated badly—and now has disappeared completely. Earlier this century, when I was writing an autobiography, Random Miracles (2011), I thought perhaps God might exist as the match that set the Big Bang in motion. And once one admits to the possibility of a God, it becomes possible to think of Him as an entity one ought to thank for whatever good has crept into his life. Wishful thinking, I think now. These days about the best I can hope for is the possibility of a Creator who may have had a hand in the origins of the universe but who lost interest almost immediately, dropped out, and is currently unavailable. We’re totally on our own.
Everyone more or less knows this. Where exactly is God in the large universe we live in or in the small genetic one that lives within us? As questions about the formation of the universe, the creation of matter, evolutionary biology, and the operation of quantum mechanics have all been partly answered by scientists who are pursuing the remaining questions with single-minded devotion, there is no further need for supernaturalism and superstition, no need for God as an explanation for what we couldn't previously understand.
Religious folks, however, can't or won't give up the other-worldly superstructure they've become accustomed to--God, heaven, hell, the Bible, Adam and Eve, the whole thing. They say they still believe in all that, although it is probably just that they can't face death without the promise of life after death. Jesus and the Resurrection. Religious folks think of themselves as rational beings in everything else, of course, but in this one case they are completely blind to science and proudly proclaim their "blind faith." And then to draw further attention to their abandonment of rationality, the proudly pious assume an air of sanctimonious superiority. It's an unattractive defensive posture--but it's totally understandable. I wish I could be one of them.
