It's been a hard month, or two. The morning of September 27th was marked by the arrival of Hurricane Helene. Followed by a surreal 10 days, already receding from my memory. Now, over a month later, I'm still reading about the people who drowned in the Swannanoa River Valley, the mudslides of Fairview, and the hard-hit towns of Bat Cave, Chimney Rock, and Lake Lure(1).
Today, it's raining, a gentle reminder of the 20" we got, as are the hundreds of cut-up trees beside the roads everywhere I go...
Brings to mind the days when I'd ride the Berkeley-Stanford bus from Oakland to Palo Alto. I was 22, married, living in Oakland, and finishing my bachelor's in economics and master's in statistics at Stanford. The ride was during commute hours, and took an hour on a good day, hour and a half on Fridays. We'd cross the old Dumbarton Bridge, past the wetlands and the salt fields...
The ride was an opportunity to work on homework each day. It was a big, comfortable, "Greyhound"-type bus, which meant I got more sleeping than studying done. But I remember pondering the question as I dozed, "Does God exist?"
Okay, maybe this isn't the question you ponder when dozing on the bus(2). But this wasn't an unusual question for me. I'd been thinking about and discussing God's existence since I was in 8th grade. To me, it was part of a natural progression as I got older. I expanded my awareness, from infancy ("I am the center of the universe"), to preschool ("my family is the center of the universe"), to childhood ("my neighborhood is the center of the universe"), etc. And my "awareness" had been "expanded" with a crowbar! I'd lived in seven different neighborhoods by the time I had moved to Oakland(3)!
I can see myself, looking out the window of the bus, past Ardenwood Farms, the Coyote Hills becoming the salt marshes of Fremont. It's early morning (the bus would drop me at Encina Hall on Stanford Campus at just before 8am). I'm dozing...
"If God exists, why would he/she allow a child to die of cancer?"
The question floats from my subconscious, no doubt buried there since learning that my wife's older sister had died of cancer at an early age.
"What is the purpose of life, if one's life can end before it has begun?"
I thought of this question in the context of all the TV shows I'd seen, where good old '50's family values were put on display, like "Father Knows Best", "Leave it to Beaver", or "My Three Sons".
"If God can do anything, why does he let children die?" I wondered.
I felt the weight of the question eat away at any remnants of belief I might have had...
Today, I might ask the same question: "How can God allow children to die in a flood or landslide?"
But today, my answer would be different. I don't think of God as a benevolent, all-powerful, judgemental know-it-all. Perhaps my best description of my belief in "god" can be described as an acceptance of my humility as a human, and need for a the humbleness in the entire human species. I prefer to think of "god" as "everything I don't know or understand". Science becomes a search for "god", a responsibility of humanity.
Now, that's not to say that it's a simple path. God is hard to come by. And every time I think I'm getting closer, I have to remind myself that there are things I still don't understand.
In fact, there are things I will NEVER understand. And even worse, what I think I understand is just my latest hypothesis. History shows that those that understood the world in the past were wrong. Even on my best days, I'm more likely to be wrong than right!
Oh, how strong my ego reacts to being wrong! How strong my need to be right!
It's better that I remember, being wrong is not a bad thing. Being wrong is how I learn. And using what I've learned is the best I can do, today.
So, does God exist? Yes, as everything I do not understand. And since I will never be able to understand everything (see Gödel :-), "god" will always exist.
__________
(1) All these locations are within a
20-mile radius from where I live.
(2) And thanks to genetically low levels of testosterone, and being married, my mind wasn't prone to other daydreams. I have always been grateful that I didn't suffer the same preoccupation with sex that my peers seemed to struggle with.
(3) I was born on moving day! I don't count this move, since I was born after the move. At least that's the story my mother always told me, about climbing into the moving truck, pregnant, after packing up. At age 4(?) we moved to a new house. Summer of 1964, at age 9, we moved to southern California. June of 1970, I moved with my parents and my brother to Bergen, Norway. For the school year (September 1970 to June 1971), I moved to Belgium, living with a French-speaking family, going to a French-speaking public school. Summer of 1971 we moved back to California, but Stanford in northern California. The summer of 1973 I moved to Portland (Reed College). Got married the summer of 1975 and moved to Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. One more move, the summer of 1976, and my wife and I were in a small apartment in east Oakland. She went to Mills College, while I finished up at Stanford.
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