PART III
Why a “Hands-off” God Makes Sense
Just like a modern-day Bishop Athanasius, who resolved for Christians, albeit problematically, how 3 gods could be one, I finally figured out how God operates. It is time to envision a futuristic God minus the fanciful, speculative baggage dreamed up over thousands of years by humans. Almost all of it is pure fiction.
When God set up the universe many billions of years ago, he definitely intended it to operate more or less on automatic pilot. While he established sub-categories, such as geology, evolution, climate, and orderly planetary movement, he monitored them only every 10,000 years. Oh, and when planet Earth was born, he installed a special monitor just for it because that is where Earthlings believe intelligent life first originated.
Each time his alarm clock alerted him he unlocked his observatory on Galaxy MACS0647-JD, 13.3 billion light years away, and strolled in. Flicking a gigantic switch using a dazzling bolt of lightning, he lit up a bank of 3-D screens, each larger than a football field. An immaterial, ghostly being, he leisurely floated about on his custom-built ozone cloud as he scanned them for new developments in his universe. Not a single human soul could be detected anywhere near him. He could even hit the replay button if he so wished. But he never interfered with his masterpiece unfolding before his eyes. It was too perfect.
If baboons had transformed themselves into humans, so be it. When an ice age crept across planet Earth to a depth of several miles and froze in place for 10,000 years, it was like a mere second in time for him. When a giant meteorite roared into our solar system, plunged through the atmosphere, and blasted most life on Earth to smithereens, too bad. If a new sun were born, or an old one died somewhere billions of light years away, it made no difference to him in the grand scheme of things. As billions of galaxies recede faster than a speeding bullet into an ever expanding universe, that’s OK. When a tyrannical Hitler, Mao, or a Stalin caused hundreds of millions to die horrible deaths, he didn’t flick an eyelash. When a gigantic volcanic eruption buried vast areas of our planet in ash and blotted out the sun for scores of years, it was simply nature taking its course.
God will no doubt be in his observatory if planet Earth happens to wobble off its traditional course and plummets into total, eternal darkness. He will witness the estimated 200 billion or trillion galaxies in this ever-expanding universe stream away from earth at immense speed, leaving us again with empty space beyond our Milky Way. 2,000 years from now he will observe tourists visiting ancient ruined Christian cathedrals and shaking their heads in wonder at the gullibility of their ancestors believing such a fantasy. He will sit passively on his ozone cloud as our planet becomes an earthly paradise for a time, and then plunges into utter darkness for all eternity when the sun burns out 5 billion years from now. A trillion years into the future when the universe reverts to nothing, just as it began, he will be there.
No one has ever seen God, except for ancient believers who saw Jesus, God in the flesh, who, by the way, never claimed to be God. It was mankind who made him “one” with God, in the Trinity declaration. And so the question is, “Does he really exist”? Is there indeed a supreme being, even a Holy Trinity? Or is he, like the Egyptian sun god, Ra, the Greek god, Zeus, the Roman god, Jupiter, or the Aztec deity, Huitzilopochtli, a highly-imaginative figment of our imagination? If not, is he floating around in his observatory at Galaxy MACSO647-JD this very minute passively observing the universe, including our inconspicuous planet Earth, and allowing its intelligent inhabitants to live and die on their own terms, without the slightest intervention?
Perhaps humans should just chuck all past fanciful religious gibberish and go along with modern scientists who are avid proponents of the BIG BANG theory. Voila! The universe was born in the blink of an eye out of nothing, billions of years ago. In a trillion years, give or take a few billion, it will again revert to nothing! Now that IS really hard to swallow!
