And the gods were formed
‘Does something like this cause you to question God?’ he asked me.
I was at work on a lunch and speaking to a work colleague a few weeks after my brother had died. I responded by saying my saying it didn’t and that was the truth. Back then my response to such tragedies was that God had a plan that was beyond my understanding. But this confidence in God and God’s plan didn’t last forever.
It wasn’t the death of my brother that made me question God, it was watching the Netflix documentary The Keepers. The documentary tells the story of a nun, Sister Caty who was a teacher at a school where students were being abused. One student says she told Sister Caty about the abuse she was going through and the nun told her she would do something about it. Sometime later the nun was found dead. It is believed the nun confronted the Priest who was alleged to have partaken in the abuse and he got some men to kill her for confronting him. Watching it got me wondering how a loving, all-knowing, all-powerful God could allow something like this to happen. Pretty sure any loving father would stop his daughter from being abused if he could. Yet it seemed like God did nothing to help the victims in this documentary. Thinking about what took place in the program I concluded that either God is powerful and just doesn’t care about those who suffer, God is loving and not powerful, God is powerful and loving and just doesn’t know what is going on, or God just doesn’t exist. But that was before I was aware of polytheism and polytheism gave me another answer.
Some Christians don’t like the idea of the big bang but maybe the writers of the scriptures would. From experience, the big bang can leave those with a certain kind of faith feeling insecure but it is something that explains the existence of the world we live in. Interestingly despite the opposition to from some religious people it was a priest who came up with the idea. The priest’s name was Georges Lemaître and his idea appeared in a scientific paper he wrote in 1931. The theory he presented was that the universe began with a primaeval atom and since then the universe has been growing in size. Lemaître didn’t refer to his theory as the big bang, it was the cosmologist and critic of the theory Fred Hoyle who coined the term. He rejected the priest’s idea up until he died in 2001. Someone who wasn’t so opposed to the idea was Edwin Hubble when he discovered that the universe was expanding. Since his discovery, other scientists have looked into the idea and by calculations, as well as observations and explorations of space they concluded that the big bang theory is the best explanation of how the universe began. So the theory simply is that about 13 billion years ago an explosion created the universe and the universe has been expanding and evolving since. Here I would like to add an idea: within that explosion, the gods were formed.
My theory is that if the big bang formed the gods then the gods are subject to the universe and are greatly limited in what they do. Maybe the gods would want to do something about the pain, suffering, and death that us humans have to deal with but just can’t due to the physical restraints. Someone might say that if gods have physical restraints then they cease to be gods but what if our understanding of the gods is wrong? While there is no explicit mention of God in the book, Song of Songs 8:6 can be viewed as referencing God with the words ‘raging flame’. In Deuteronomy, it says God is a consuming fire, God appears to Moses as a burning bush, and you have Nadab and Abihu being killed by consuming fire that came out from the presence of the Lord. These section of scriptures show a link between fire and God. So what if God or the gods are made of a material that produces fire? Hydrogen came about moments after the Big Bang and hydrogen is a flammable material. Maybe God is made of hydrogen and fire is what is produced when human beings come in contact with God? Maybe humans died when they encountered God in the Bible not because God hated them but because the human body is unable to cope with the matter that God consists of. Maybe God doesn’t intervene in the suffering of people because it would make things worse due to what God is made up of.
In the middle of writing this, I realised you don’t need other gods to explain suffering. If God is restricted by physical restraints then I wonder why have other gods? Now I know in some sections of scripture they talk as if there are other gods but I see no reason for other gods. Of course, I could just give the idea of any God at all, why does God need to be a product of the big bang? Why can’t there be a big bang without God? I guess I just like the idea of there being a God. I accept that a God who isn’t in control and one that consists of substances that are harmful to humans isn’t very comforting but it does explain the existence of a loving Gods existence in a world full of pain, suffering, and death. For there to be a God I think we need to view God differently. The Christian view of God just isn’t compatible with the world we live in.
