Your argument, if I’m understanding correctly, is that a creator, who we’ll call God for the purposes of this conversation but who could just as easily be called any number of names, triggered the Big Bang as a means to create a suitable universe for us to live in. Am I following you correctly? Okay, now I have a few thoughts.

We know that the universe has certain laws that are true everywhere. Some of these we know already, others presumably are bigger or smaller than we can currently see. Nothing strays from these laws. Everything can be traced back to that Big Bang, but if that is the case then what is the point of faith? If God put every single ounce of truth that defines the universe into that initial explosion, somehow able to imagine how he could get from a big sack of nothing all the way to an entire universe full of things, allowing for all the amazing things that need to be in place in order for the earth to exist in a way that would sustain life, allowing for all the things on earth that need to be in place for humanity to appear, and allowing for all the things that took place in human history to lead to you and I having this conversation, then why do we assume that he has any capacity to change anything?

And what would be the point of creating a universe if you already knew what was going to happen within it? If he built the universe based entirely on the absolute certainty of his plan, and nothing can deviate from that plan (or he wouldn’t be omnipotent), why bother? The logic of doing that escapes me entirely. Does God have free will? If he doesn’t, then what drives him? And if he does, then why did he bother?

Once upon a time, they believed that the world was 6000 years old. Now we know the world is billions of years old. Once upon a time we thought that the sky was a firmament, and now we know that it is an atmosphere, and beyond that the nearly infinite unknown of the universe. Once upon a time we believed that God spoke directly to people, but now we know that this doesn’t happen. Once upon a time we believed that God directly created every single species of living thing, but now we know that the process of evolution took us from single-celled organisms to the complicated creatures we are today. Why is it that every time we learn something, God seems to receed further and further away from us, always hiding just outside our reach? He used to live just above the earth, and now he lives somewhere we cannot fathom outside our universe. Doesn’t that seem strange to you? Every new insight moves God farther and farther away, and takes more and more of his power away from him, yet you continue to think of him as an all-powerful creator who is active in your life?

You say that he has always been there, driving forward with his plans. Was that necessary? More and more, we are learning that our decisions are are the result not of free will, but of the way we have evolved and the impacts that the world around us causes us to become exposed to. All of these things operate given the constraints set out at the moment of creation, so why would he need to direct anything? If evolution is a natural process controlled by the laws he instantiated at the origin of everything, then nothing could stray from those rules. And nothing does. At no point do we see crockaducks or life forming out of peanut butter. Evolution follows strict guidelines with absolute adherance. So where is God in that?

If he created everything in that instant, all the rules that would lead to you and I having this conversation, then he would have had to have specifically designed all of the pain, suffering, misery, starvation, pestilence, death, and depravity that ever was. Forget a loving God, he would have had to have purposely thought up the genocide of the Jews. Does that seem sensible to you?

If it is as you say, God has a plan, that plan was realized the instant he started the ball rolling, or else we would see evidence of his direct impact intervening and counteracting the rules he set out. If nothing fails to live up to those rules, and everything has a plan, and the plan has to go off perfectly because God is without flaw, then why can he judge us? According to your logic, we are the products of his rules, so if anyone needs to be punished for our actions, it would be him for setting out rules that would require us to behave badly.

I guess what I’m trying to ask you is how any of this makes a lick of sense, and if you answer with him working in mysterious ways, I’m going to punch you in the cock.

Jim