In our age of knowledge, nobody likes to say, "God made it so." I like to think I am well read on the subject of science. And I like to think that my faith hasn't blinded me, or prevented me from acknowledging the many delightful discoveries that have been made about the universe, but I still like a little mystery to my existence. The words "God did it" acknowledge that mystery in a singularly childlike way. Although we can know much more than we now know, we will never know everything.
So am I a fool if I say, "God did it?"
Perhaps, but I don't care. There must be a way to ensure some mystery and humility remains in our thinking.
It is one thing to know that somehow the first primitive sponges managed to turn into worms, jellyfish, shelled arthropods, and squid-like creatures. And it is one thing to know that the Big Bang filled the universe so energetically with subatomic wavelike particles that eventually came out of their uncertain quantum mechanical shells and formed atoms and molecules. It is one thing to know we know many things now.
But it remains another thing to ask that delightfully mysterious question, "Why?" We know these things are, we know much about how they work. But we want to, as Stephen Hawking put it so eloquently, "know the mind of God." Some, like Hawking, search the fabric of the universe for that answer. Others study anthropology. And others yet wonder if we cannot ask that question in the complete abstract, in that science known as the queen of the sciences, theology.
Why are we here? Why is there anything? What am I here to do?
Our knowledge comes, and it goes. Newton's universe is swept away by Einstein's. But these critical questions stay with us always. And who can condemn those who wonder if those questions aren't perhaps as spiritual as they seem to be?
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