Theological Thoughts for the Day

What would an effective signal [of God's existence] be like? . . . To cope with the fact that anything can be interpreted in various ways, the signal would have to show its meaning naturally and powerfully, without depending on the conventions or artificialities of any language . . . A perfect signal should be spectacularly present, impossible to miss. It should capture the attention and be available by various sense modalities; no one should have to take another's word for it. It should endure permanently or at least as long as people do, yet not constantly be before them, so they they will notice it freshly. The signal should be a powerful object, playing a central role in people's lives. To match God's being the source of creation or standing in some crucially important relation to it, all life on earth should depend (mediately) on the signal and center about it . If there were some object which was the energy source of all life on earth, one which dominated the sky with its brilliance, whose existence people could not doubt, which couldn't be poked at or treated condescendingly, an object about which people's existence revolved, which poured out a tremendous amount of energy, only a small fraction of which reach people, an object which people constantly walked under and whose enormous power they sensed . . .

Of course, I am being somewhat playful here. The Sun does exist, it is about as good a permanent announcement as one could imagine or devise, yet it has not served to prove God's existence, even though viewing it as a signal does provide a unified explanation of why all those properties listed happen to be conjoined on one object. Since we do not find it easy to imagine how God could provide anything that would be a permanently convincing proof of his existence, why should we expect to be able to do it ourselves?  -- Robert Nozick, The Examined Life

Our religious understanding of evolution means that the divine energy is ever reaching forward and upward, in whatever halting, multiple, and spiraling ways, toward more sophisticated and complex levels of development. From where we stand in the evolutionary process, and given our ignorance of extraterrestrial conscious life forms, it seems right to say that human consciousness is a significant and qualitative leap in this process.    -- Arthur Green, Seek My Face, Speak My Name: A Contemporary Jewish Theology

                                                                        

Comments

[karen]

I have a close friend that seems to believe i should read ~The New Earth~& ~The Secret~. I tend to be pretty insecure, i worry- i don't like doing new things- or being w/ a lot fo people... these books are supposed to help my headaches(stress, i guess) and give me the positive i need(i must be on a +/- plane today).

I simply cannot read these books. I can't explain why- i think maybe it would be to place my trust in something other than the power of G*d, maybe.

What do you think of these books? Of the ego- of the physics of positive energy? Prayer and leaving myself in the hands of our Lord seems about as positive as i can get. The other ~secrets~ i don't trust. I just would like to know why.