The Source of Life

David Scott 06/12/12

I had a rousing debate the other night over a delicious dinner as to the state of the world. It was posed to me by two therapists that the world was in a constant worsening state of turmoil and insanity and emotional distress, and in such a debate, there is no hard evidence one way or the other, but their anecdotal evidence of their personal workload was very compelling. Certainly, if you look around the globe there is no shortage of horror stories, this year. It's as though everyone has fallen into a bit of a dark place. Race and immigration riots in Israel, killers in Canada, violent assaults across the United States. The massacres in Syria. There are economic issues in Greece, and drug wars boiling under the surface everywhere you go. And certainly any sort of feeling soul, and loving human being might ask what sort of God would allow such a world to continue to bring about such endless pain and misery.



Would it be entirely unfair to suggest a monstrous one? Would it even be possible to find evidence to refute that claim? For the sake of simplicity, assume the Judeo-Christian God of the Bible, and then ask yourself if you might compare a God who describes himself as jealous and vengeful to an abusive parent.

Now, certainly an Atheist would use this ammunition as evidence against the existence of a deity. I've heard it argued more than once that the monstrous nature of our supposed creator is evidence of non existence. That argument doesn't make any sense to me, though. It's certainly a good argument for why you would not want to believe in something, though. God is a beast of nightmares, certainly, who has visited plagues in the night on entire peoples, and delivered countless into their violent ends, and often with no warning.



Now, I don't know if I've ever shared this before, but from what I have seen and experienced in my speck of existence, what would be generous to even call a dot in all of space an time, I have seen that monsters create. Good souls empty out their hearts trying to bandage the dying, but death is everywhere, and everything is falling apart. You're born falling apart, and so is everything else.

Our sun is dying.



It always has been. Someday it will be broken and scattered and it will tear apart whatever is left behind orbiting it. What we are even at this very moment is a compilation of the remains of stars whose light will never touch us. We are the center of a universe that is expanding so fast that as long as we are limited by what we see.. we will never, ever, ever know what is beyond our event horizon. It is expanding so fast, that from far enough out, light simply cannot travel fast enough to reach us here on our isolated little spot. That there is no telling what lies beyond that horizon. Or even what stars we see now that have passed beyond it. As they hit that point, they released light that will slowly reach us for infinity, the light right at the event horizon is infinite and red.

But I digress. While people with good hearts strive endlessly to patch up the ripping apart and dying world, new things are constantly being born in the remains of the old.



I argued that the world is continually improving. That things are better today than they ever have before. But I'm not going to recount my argument here. If you're interested, try to imagine what I argued. I'm interested in hearing posters thoughts about why I might think that the world today is an ever improving place.