Friday, April 25, 2008

Expressing my perception of God

God never stopped making sense to me. God actually just made more and more sense the more I lived and saw and learned and read. I'd say that part of that contentment with the idea of God comes from the fact that I also think quite a bit about the nature of God and how he exists. Biblical texts provide many hints as to the nature of man and the consequences of men interacting with one another, but very little about God and His nature is expressly stated.

I am rather partial to filling in the blanks with theological theories of monism. The idea of God as the universe and the simultaneous existence of varied manifestations of him (including anthromorphic manifestations!) seems to be almost universal.

I like a lot of the biblical allusions to such a state of being:
-the idea of "the Creation" being a presentation by God of himself
-the trilogy as the "persons" of God
-man as the "image" or "son" of God (and, on the flip side of that, God's choice to be the "son" of man)
-hell/evil as the mere absence of/separation from God.

These references probably first occurred to me as allusions to that state of monistic being after I read some about the M-theory and different physics-related theories of everything.

Honestly, I always thought the biblical description of the Creation was odd. How does one bring something altogether new into being as it appeared God had when he called light into existance? I never quite QUESTIONED it, but I always analyzed its feasibility.

When I was younger, after reading about the law of conservation of energy, I decided that God was energy. However, after I read about the string theories, I decided THAT was a more appropriate concept of God/the universe--that God IS these strings or branes or whatever and that the things we have no physical conception of--the soul, the spirit, etc. are unapparent because they are manifestations of string behavior which is of no relevance to our temporal selves.

Energy, the various manifestations of God that we are capable as temporal beings of perceiving, is only a part of that theory.

To me, that made sense. It also made me smile to think that, at some point, the most advanced scientific thinkers postulate that the universe springs forth from something that just IS. As the Bible puts it, God = I am that I am.