Hi Daniel:

Your last sentence illustrates a point I’ve heard many times. “What kind of God would do that…” What kind of God would play tricks on us, allow the existence of cruelty and war and famine, etc. Why would God do that to his creatures.

This is also a thread that many of my atheists friends pick up on and run with as proof that God does NOT exist.

My own thoughts on this topic are that God created us to grow within the bounds of His laws. He put things in motion, provided guidance, and pretty much said go for it.

The cause of the problems we face is not God, it is us. We are struggling to reach our station, and that struggle is painful. We have to reach it as individuals and we have to reach it as a civilization. Two completely different sets of rules, two different tracks, both destined to reach great heights.

Consequently, when we turn the blame on God, it is really just a misunderstanding on our part. He had given us the tools, the teachings, the path…it is up to us as individuals and as a civilization, to decide if we will stay or stray from that path.

But even with that, there is a greater set of rules in play. Cause and Effect. Something causes us to generate an effect. Without that cause, there would not be an effect. My own thoughts on this are that the evils we see building in the world around us, are CAUSING us to respond. The EFFECT will eventual force us onto the right path as a whole, and as individuals.

Another factor is that we have to seek out and go to God. God’s love cannot reach us unless we love him. Not sure why this law of the universe has been put in place, but it does seem a good way of sorting people out. To say God does not exist because something bad happened to you, or because war exists, is to deny this law. And if you feel that you did go to Him, and you still got hurt (as I have thought on many occasions), then perhaps you sought him with the wrong attitude or from the wrong direction.

Or maybe it was through God’s grace that you did suffer. Perhaps it is the principle of growth by trial that he allowed you to go through so that you can become stronger and closer to him.

And finally, being finite beings, we often forget to weigh eternity into the equation. It is too easy to forget that that which we suffer here, is but a blink in time compared to eternity. Suffering here can have a positive impact on the individual in the next world. If we forget this, then our suffering seems injurious and unjust…and in fact, on this world, may very well be…but in the next world, it may very well become the currency in which we thrive.

These are just my own thoughts…I don’t presume that they are divinely inspired, or come from God…just a human being who realizes his own fallibility and there for posts such things as nothing more than a line of thought among many lines of thought.

To me, this sounds like the question that theologians and scientists should be focused on is the origin and the end of the earth, rather than the origin and the end of the universe.

But this does leave me with another thought. Could this same macro and micro exist on a universe scale? Is it possible, with the revelation of the theory of the multiverse that our specific universe came into existence with the utterance of the word “BE” by our Creator, while other universes already existed. Can individual universes come and go while still adhering to the rule that says creation has always existed and always will exist?

Science cannot disprove creationism. Suppose the universe was created 6000 years ago, complete with all the fossils in the ground and all the photons coming our way, which we might interpret as telling us about a much older, larger universe. There is no experiment which could disprove that. Science could reject it on the basis of parsimony, but the most powerful arguments against it are theological. What kind of a God would play tricks like that on us?