Ah, the dilemnas of a scientist/poet with a religious impulse. I believe in science, want to believe in some sort of connection with the divine, and luckily can accept just about anything as a metaphor for anything else. To me, listening to the deeply religious is about listening to poetry. You can always just accept their words at face value or you can listen to what is going on underneath.

Anyway, as I was walking across campus yesterday, I was pondering the ultimate science/religion dilemna: the scientific impossibility of an interventionist god. Everyday, millions, or possibly billions of people pray for some sort of intervention in their lives. "God, make Timmy well." "God, could you send me a million dollars?" "God, could you please make this car run, just today?" All of these prayers require some sort of physical intervention in in the corporeal world by a God most conceive of as spiritual and immaterial. Quite simply, such an intervention would violate all known laws of physics. So in my world view, such interventions are not possible.

There is an alternative explanation, that is such prayers are answered by God through other people. That the spiritual and immaterial God, rather than acting on the universe directly, in some way interacts with people's "souls," causing them to make certain decisions and take actions that answer prayers. God sends a doctor, or a mechanic, or causes someone to change their will, and voila! prayer answered without physical intervention. Of course, this theory requires a soul that can interact with God's plane and with the body it inhabits, but then, superstring theory says we have eleven dimensions, so I'm not ruling that possibility out.

But anyway, here's my main argument. I don't think that God violates the rules of physics because I think that God is physics. I think that God is what exploded to create the big bang. I think that God inhabits all matter and embodies all forces. God is the gravity that keeps us each from spinning off of the Earth. God is the nuclear fusion that in the sun creates the light and heat to provide life to this planet and which, in other stars, created carbon, oxygen, iron. God is in the cold interstellar dust clouds where organic molecules are mysteriously created, possibly how this planet was originally seeded with the possibility of life. I don't think that evolution contradicts God's creation, I think that creation is evolution.

These are the things I've been given: gravity, the sun, all life on this planet. What more could I possibly ask for? It's up to me to find something worthy to do with these gifts.

These are my metaphors for God. What are yours?

It appears that we have fallen into the habit of compromising on issues that should not, and in fact cannot, be compromised. I have an idea that a large number of us, including even a large number of politicians, believe that it is wrong to destroy the earth. But we have powerful political opponents who insist that an earth-destroying economy is justified by freedom and profit. And so we compromise by agreeing to permit the destruction only of parts of the earth, or to permit the earth to be destroyed a little at a time -- like the famous three-legged pig that was too well-loved to be slaughtered all at once.

The logic of this sort of compromising is clear, and it is clearly fatal. If we continue to be economically dependent on destroying parts of the earth, then eventually we will destroy it all.

Compromise, Hell!
Environmentalists have given up too much by not being radical enough
By Wendell Berry
20 Oct 2004