I’ve heard some people frequently confuse God with nature. There is a difference between nature and God. Many people I talk to consider nature and God as synonymous, at least here in south Asia, but for the life of me, I can’t see how. Nature is just a collection of laws of physics, chemistry and mathematics. The main difference here is intent. Whereas nature is resolute in its actions and reactions, God wills things into being or out of being according to his wishes. A loving God would intentionally bend or break the rules of nature to further his will or to promote his creation. We as people would be hard pressed not to believe it. There is a pretty big portion of belief involved in this, both God’s belief towards his worshippers and the belief of the worshippers in their God. It’s a two way street. Though its true that there is no such physical force known to science called belief and even though belief by itself cannot move a mountain, it can sufficiently inspire someone who can.
Do we want to live in a world where man and man alone makes all the rules? Where corruption, selfishness and cruelty are just the opposite sides of valor, dignity and compassion? It takes more than just neurons and electro-chemistry for a bullet ridden soldier to hoist the flag of his nation in the hope of a victory he will not live to see for a people almost none of who he will ever know. Its all around us, a mother fighting for her child against all odds. A father working deep in the mines, risking his life to bring home another month’s income for his family. While it would be neat and clean to attribute these to conditioned responses or the general influence of society while growing up, they don’t really explain the disregard for self-preservation as a means of joy. Its not a death-wish since that implies a mind working below par and its much too prevalent for that. While endorphins may explain the process inside the brain, they do not explain the why of the mind. Why does it feel good? The apple falls to the ground, we’ve even got a name for it but why does gravity exist. For all our sciences and technology, for all our reasoning about the universe, all we have managed to do is give a name to things or ideas, not the reasons for their existence. We have made the computer and airplane. We certainly didn’t invent them or their components. We merely managed to rearrange the matter and energy that already existed. We basically dug the airplane out of the ground and rearranged the materials to suit our purposes. We didn’t create it from scratch. Why does germanium act as a semiconductor at room temperature? We can talk about valence electrons and saturations but who decided that it would act like that. It is certainly convenient and we just happened to find it laying around in abundance for us to use. It didn’t have to be this way.
To some a divine power seems too simplistic. Is there anything wrong with that? Some need scientific proof. The universe exists before our eyes in all its glory and some people want more proof. Ignorance can be a bliss but it should not be an excuse for incompetence. Our eyes see a microscopic fraction of the wavelengths in existence, the same for the sounds our ears can hear. There is a very small range of temperatures our skin can feel without freezing or burning and certainly our tongue cannot taste even a fraction of all the tastes out there. Despite this we trust these limited senses more than what our hearts are willing to experience if we let them. Does sound have a smell, and what does light taste like? If the universe exists only by chance, these questions would have mathematically precise solutions because to mathematics, intensity is just a larger number.
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