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D.R.: Please, no lawyer’s spin

Don Rogers

Re: D.R.: Scared into line?

by Anonymous on Saturday, May 13:

“Cut it with the whole ‘something from nothing’ scenario. That was shredded by science decades ago. The ‘nothing’ that theists want to cling to was actually ‘something,’ only in such a compressed and compact form that most cannot begin to understand, including me. Yet science can tell us how the ‘something’ was ‘something else’ before, and probably will be again in a few more billion years. In other words, the universe itself is part of an ever-existing cycle, and as to how it began in the first place, well, we’ll probably never really know, except that it wasn’t from something referred to as a god. Don, you’re simply struggling with the possibilities like most normal people. Quit thinking there MUST be some formal answer for it all, and just go with the flow that it is what it is, nothing more.”



There’s circular logic, and then there are cycles. Either way, my friend who commented to this blog entry in early May spun around so heavily that he (or she) utterly failed to address the question.

The question does not go back to the start of a “cycle,” the “something” that was “something else.” That’s just atoms rearranging. Maybe the universe has big banged and big collapsed a gazillion times. That’s not the question.

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Science can, in theory and given enough time, provide answers for the mechanics of existence. There’s your apple.

I’m asking for these very clever thinkers who, foolishly I think, confuse science as All There Is for a second to not be lawyers trying to confuse the question, which is as simple as it gets: How did something come from nothing?

Here’s another, for their faith-foolish polar opposites: Who is God’s god? Beyond science, but beyond our churches, too, lies the question of how God came into being.

Perhaps “God” by name is too loaded, harkening too vivid a religious image.

I believe in what we call God, though I don’t believe it’s a “He” in our image. I believe in a Creator that is both too abstract and removed for humans to grasp, and so basic and personal as to be a paradox that blows our minds at either end of this spectrum.

I don’t believe that from reading books, though that helps. Let’s call it intuition, well knowing that I probably am completely wrong. Still, I’ll live with that. No one else offers anything more believable.

Logic does tell me the churches don’t get it, with so many having so many different views on this subject. The churches do serve overwhelmingly positive aims for this life, and in bringing overwhelmingly peaceful communities together. Even with the relatively few infected by hubris, and the rarer zealotary that has lost all touch with what it’s all about.

But the faithful don’t have the core answers any more than my “logical” atheist friends have. This thing is far bigger than can be contained in any book or even a-priori speculations.

Maybe we do simply wink out for eternity when our bodies break in this one burst of life. But it’s just as possible that there are innumerable planes of existence, universes, and other possibilities well beyond our rather puny imagination.

My point, I guess, is that we simply don’t know. To act as if we did is awfully presumptuous.

So, sorry, the answer to my simple question ” “How did something come from nothing” ” is most definitely not “something else.” That’s just a lawyer’s dodge, and a clumsy one at that.

A shrug is at least honest.


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