A drawing I don't like

Someone emailed me a sketch the other day, entitled "What Really Happened on the Hudson."

It appears beautiful, at first glance, showing divine hands holding up that plane that crashed into the Hudson River recently, protecting the occupants from a watery death.

But something in me does not like that mode of thinking at all.

Those divine hands could just as easily have brushed away that flock of geese a few minutes before, preventing the whole terrifying ordeal.

Those divine hands have apparently been withheld when scores of other planes have gone down.

Why would an impartial God save one plane and allow another to crash, each containing a relative random grouping of people, some probably good, some probably evil? I mean, I could understand if some Mafia dons or a gang of Neo-nazis or Bin Laden and his buddies had chartered a flight and God stood by and calmly let it slam into a mountainside ...

I'm not one of those people who finds the existence of evil to be the disproving of God's reality ... although I question the wisdom in creation of such fiendish horrors as candiru, guinea worms and cystic fibrosis. I can grant that sickness and pain can teach important life lessons and shape our character -- but worms that gnaw their way through your feet -- what do those poor African villagers learn from that?

I have chosen to believe this year and I will believe. But I still don't like the picture of those hands. What if you were a relative of someone who was incinerated in a plane on Sept. 11, 2001? How would you react to the implicit message that God directly intervened to save these folks but let your loved ones die?

The Big Bang

I picked up a book today humbly titled "Rock and Gem" and it's worth every penny of the six dollars that it cost me. Fittingly, it opens with a description of the formation of the universe:

"It is hard for us to imagine a time ... even before there were chemical elements, the building blocks from which rocks and minerals [and us, too, I might add!] are made. Yet between 13 billion and 15 billion years ago, the entire universe consisted of one tiny dot of primordial energy. Then, in an instant, the Big Bang set in motion a chain of events that resulted in the creation of atoms and, over millions of years, the formation of galaxies and stars."

It is in these metaphysical scientific theories that science and religion seem to share a certain common ground, I think. The same skepticism that torments me when I try to make my head believe what my heart wants to believe, about a loving God somewhere out there and a life beyond -- this skepticism crops up when someone tells me that our vast universe was once a tiny speck of energy, etc., etc. It is so utterly fantastic.

The scientist will note, however, that E. Hubble famously first observed the expansion of galaxies -- proved that the universe is expanding, something that any human being can now see for themselves with the proper telescope or other equipment.

And the nature of expansion is that the matter in question had to change from an initial, unexpanded state.

The path towards a rekindled faith, continued

Is philosophy just math in words?

I get words. I love words. But philosophy trips me up almost as badly as math once did, back in the days when I was forced to take it in school.

I try to understand it, in blogs and in books, but my eyes glaze over and it goes right over my head.

That being said, I wish it were different. Philosophy is the study of wisdom, and the study and comprehension of wisdom compliments science as the crowning achievement and glory of the human species.

Having survived his boyhood, CS Lewis (see earlier posts) now takes me into the deep waters of philosophy. I must swim with him if I am to understand how he reclaimed his faith after years of intense atheism.

The first step, and he didn't consider it even a step at the time, appears to have been his realization of the following:

"The whole universe is mental. Our logic is participation in a cosmic logos or Absolute."

Any thoughts from smart people? Interpretations for the layman? Suggestions of refutation?