God of small things

When in college, God popped up somehow in a conversation that I wasn’t paying much attention to and a friend of mine said to me, “It’s the kind of thing you like, the question of whether God exists”. She probably knew of the seemingly weird articles that I wrote for an email group then where asking the most important questions was the surest way to becoming uncool. But far from being the kind of thing that I was interested in, I hadn’t once considered spending time on God because my worldview (which I now know is called “naturalistic”) was nice and clean without one.

Lately though, I’ve been watching videos by freethinkers and have begun to notice how many believers I’m surrounded by. They come in all shapes, sizes and colours. I’ve talked with some of them. Some quite moderate. Others not quite so. And I noticed something remarkable. They strive to find a place for their God. They just need some place to put him. If you tell them about evolution, they will tell you that God set it all up. If you tell them about the Big Bang, they will tell you that God sparked it. Some put him in the skies, others in other dimensions beyond our reach, yet others in sub atomic particles which haven’t yet been probed, sometimes they make him the source of strange cosmic waves which are for some reason interested in your life, sometimes they put him in you, sometimes he’s out of space and time completely and sometimes (beat this) above all reason.

Ask me and I’d say this is quite an interesting phenomenon. Why would an otherwise-sane person of normal intelligence (in some cases, super normal) go to such lengths to protect her God? Why would an otherwise intellectually-honest person pretend to not see the unreasonableness? What is in it for them? Why screw their own brain? Why throw away one’s common sense? I think I know the answer.

In Richard Bach’s Illusion, when the Messiah is asked “Do you live in this world at all?” He says something that amounts to “No. Do you? All of us live in different worlds. You think you live in the same world as your tennis crazy neighbour? The Wimbledon started this week and you didn’t even hear about it. You think you live in his world? You think you live in my world?” You could say that Bach was playing with different connotations of the word world. The truth however, is that we don’t live in this Universe. Don’t get me wrong. We don’t live on a rock that revolves around a ball of burning gas. We live in cities or towns or villages where the sun rises in the morning and sets at night. We are not made up of atoms and molecules. We are made of skin and bone and muscles and sometimes you break a bone or tear a ligament. The laws of physics don’t determine anything. The professors at college decide the questions for the test. Your dad decides if your pocket money needs a raise and your boss decides what you work on. The laws of physics are not even important. Rarely do you throw a ball up. If you throw it harder it reaches higher. And whether you like it or not it falls back and not always as expected. We live in, what some people like to call, the Middle World. Neither the big world with balls of burning gas we call stars, nor the small world where electrons flirt with nuclei. We live, in the Middle World.

So much for the middle-ness in size. There’s a middle-ness in time too. You do not live in a world that’s been around for 4.5 billion years. You don’t live in a Universe that might collapse in or burst out. Your Universe started when you were born. And will end the day you die. If when you die, man has unanswered questions, they will remain unanswered for ever in your world. If you die in a battle, the battle never ended for you. There never was peace re-established. If you died before Christ, he was never in your world. If you died without hearing about a beautiful beach on the west coast of Africa, there was never such a thing.

Inasmuch as they would like to pretend otherwise, the God that the believers strive to find a place for is not a God of the gaps, it is not a God of ignorance, it is not a God who created the universe, it is not a God who planted life on earth, it is not even the God in the scriptures. It is the God who runs the Middle World.

Probably we will one day find out how energy can pop out of nowhere and create a universe. Probably we will shatter electrons till they give up. Probably String theory would be falsified. Probably not. Probably we will figure out a way to duplicate the brain. Probably the materialists were right all along. Probably not.

But matters in the Middle World are quite different. Not everything in the Middle World makes sense. And there is little reason to be optimistic about what we would do here. You run into old friends on the streets. Some meetings change your life. Some blunders shatter it. Little decisions estrange your loved ones. A bad job sometimes is the best thing that happens to you. You break your leg on the way to an interview. Your archrival gets the job. You end up in a better job and she goes bankrupt. Chaos rules. Things make sense in hindsight but while looking into the future, there’s just one thing you are sure of – that it is going to be nothing like you imagined – almost certainly.

It is an extremely attractive proposition to have someone run the Middle World. Especially if this person who runs it loves you no matter what. Sometimes the course of your life seems to depend on what you do. But largely, he makes sure it goes like it ought to. Things might not look very promising at times but of course, he runs the place. You’ve got the boss on your side. So chill.

Discussions about God generally involve things like the beginning of the Earth and the beginning of life. The truth however, is that I’m yet to meet a believer who can honestly say “I thought and thought about the beginning of the universe and I found God to be a satisfactory explanation.” Or “I didn’t believe the scriptures first but after lot of reasoning, I concluded they were right”. What is more likely is that you would hear something like “You know I wasn’t sure at first, but then last summer I really really wished that this would happen and it DID” or “Praying gives me peace of mind”. It is not the beginning of the world or the evolution of the eye that makes people believe in God. It is the chaos of the Middle World.

Whoever thinks that science will one day get rid of God simply doesn’t know his utility. We might figure it all out but we would still need someone to run our Middle world. Someone to salute before you start your car because you don’t know what could be around the corner. Science might bring the big God down. The one who sparked the big bang and planted life of earth. But the God of small things, the master of the Middle World will remain invincible.