1/24/23
Newsletter #229
The Crack of Dawn
Like a revelation, perhaps the 10th time I saw Casablanca as a kid, it hit me that all of supporting characters were named after cars: Claude Raines plays Louis Renault, Sydney Greenstreet is Ferrari, and another character is Ugatti, which is obviously Bugatti without the B.
And touching on theology for a brief moment, I just watched a discussion between two experts in the field: Stephen Colbert and Ricky Gervais. Gervais is a devout Atheist (which to me is like a jumbo shrimp); Colbert is a Catholic who’s willing to defend his indefensible position. I’ve heard this defense before so I was a little surprised that Colbert would fall back on such a silly argument. He put forth that there has to be a God, otherwise how did the universe go from nothing to something? I don’t remember what Ricky Gervais said, but my response is: who said the universe ever went from nothing to something? Certainly no responsible scientist. Oh, right, one might interpret that from opening salvo of the Old Testament Bible: 1. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2. And the earth was without form, and void.
Well, there’s already the earth – which certainly counts as something – it’s just empty. Vacant. If an apartment is vacant, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Furthermore, what is nothing? In all of human experience we’ve never encountered this nothing. That which to the human eye may look like “nothing,” is in fact loaded with all kinds of things: molecules, atoms, quarks, solar rays, radiation waves, wavelets, for goodness sake. This is not an argument for or against God; it’s an argument against nothing. If your theological foundation is: there must be a God, otherwise how did we go from nothing to something; half your equation is illogical from the start, and it’s not the God half. Why does there have to be nothing that becomes something? Particularly when we’re pretty damn sure there’s no such thing as nothing.
I think humans have trouble with really big numbers, I know that I do. A million is a thousand thousand. OK, I get that. A billion is a thousand million. All right. But a trillion is a thousand billion? You’re losing me. So, when scientists say that the dinosaurs ruled the earth 300 billion years ago, it kind of doesn’t mean anything, at least to me. Human civilization has only been around for 10,000 years. I have to jump from 10,000 to 300 billion? That’s like a lot, right?
And when I read that the new James Webb telescope confirms, and expands, the findings of the Hubble telescope: that there are at least two trillion galaxies in the universe – galaxies, mind you, like our own Milky Way, which has always seemed pretty big to me – it's really just gobbledygook. Two trillion galaxies? At least? Is that possibly true? It’s all so enormous, and with each new telescope even more enormous, where in this ever-expanding universe can there possibly be nothing?
So, the position of the learned theologian, Stephen Colbert, is that the “proof” that God exists is because he made something out of nothing, which is a thing we’ve never yet encountered.
And that’s not even what the Bible says anyway. It doesn’t say nothing, it says void. Actually, void where prohibited.
All of this begs the question, why would I listen to Stephen Colbert and Ricky Gervais discuss theology in the first place? Why? Because it could be funny.
Don’t take life too serious, it’s too mysterious, just live it, and laugh at it all.