The caring God ...

A common religious refrain is God cares about all of us. Does He? Let's assume God exists and for want of a better pronoun, let me assume that He is appropriate. Would He really care about us?

Let me first of all acknowledge that this is one of those metaphysical questions that is not really easy to answer. However, that has not deterred religions from trying, with disparate results. The God described by Christ is loving and caring. The God of the Old Testament is more wrathful and vengeful. The Greek and Roman Gods seemed completely callous about the affairs of humans. Indian mythology is replete with paradoxes, where God seems endowed with human emotions and the Gods are often playful, vengeful, prone to anger and fear, and at the same time benevolent and sometimes even dispassionate.

So, is there an objective way of assessing this?

One way of assessing this question might be to look at how consequential we are. The Universe's size is unknown. However, the visible Universe has a span of about 26 BN light years. The speed of light is about 300,000 Km/s. Over a year, light travels about 9,500,000,000,000 Km - that's 9500 BN km. So, over 26 BN light years, light travels, about 2.5 * 10^23 Km or, 250,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Km, which is the approximate width of the visible Universe. The average human is about 2.5M. So, the Universe is 10^26 times the size of a human, or 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, i.e. 100 trillion trillion times the size of a human.

The good news is that its larger than a single atom would be to say the circumference of Jupiter. The bad news is that it means we are many many times smaller relative to the Universe than the individual atoms in our body are to us. In fact, the most amazing part about it all is that I can write the number at all. The time it would take a person to count to this number counting a number a second is many many times the known age of the Universe.

Does that mean God doesn't care? Perhaps. There is of course no correlation between size and whether humans care. However, it would be fair to say that there is a threshold. For instance, we don't care about a single cell in our body, and each human is much smaller relative to the Universe than each cell in our body is relative to us.

Another interesting question is what we mean by 'us'? All of us are composed of matter. That matter existed in other forms before and will exist in other forms after. Does God care about the specific form? If so, why?

There is also the problem of clustering with the definition of 'us'. Humans don't agree with one another. They fight, they maim, and do generally hateful things. Which humans do God care about? Why not the others? If we are all covered, how can God stand by and allow the mass slaughter of so many? Why do people who commit crimes, kill and maim so often appear to go unpunished?

There is of course an even bigger problem with the word 'care'. While care has multiple meanings, the sense in which it is probably used in the aforesaid sentence is: 'a person or thing that is an object of attention, anxiety, or solicitude'(1) Care suggests anxiety, i.e. 'painful or apprehensive uneasiness of mind usually over an impending or anticipated ill'(2) The implicit requisite for anxiety, therefore is an uneasiness about the future stemming from a lack of foreknowledge. So, to care in the sense the word is used about God's love, God would need to worry about the future. But, don't we believe that God knows everything - past, present and future? So, if God has foreknowledge, He has no reason to be anxious, and so His caring cannot be motivated by the same feelings that we experience. In fact, foreknowledge implies that either He is knowingly permitting every unfortunate event that befalls us to continue, i.e. uncaring about the suffering from our perspective, or that He is using a different benchmark of care, i.e. uncaring from our perspective.

One possible explanation is that Life is a test for souls. He doesn't care about matter and energy, but about the souls. Here, any empiricism fails. It isn't quite clear that souls exist, and if they do, what form they take. However, what we can say is that the matter and energy Universe presents problems for the view that God cares about humans.

The conundrum of a Creator God

One of the most common explanations of what God is, is that God is the Creator, and responsible for creating everything. That means everything that exists was created by God.

So, we have two propositions:

• God exists.
• God created everything that exists.

It follows that God created God. Does that sound right?

One of the most common refrains of people who subscribe to intelligent design is that the very complexity and regularity of life suggests that it needed an intelligent hand to be created. After all, entropy would suggest that you cannot get order from disorder, or so they claim. Here's the problem though. According to them, anything of complexity can only arise from something even more complex. God, therefore, must be significantly more complex than us. But, then the question is where did God come from?

If we argue that God always existed, why couldn't everything else have always existed? Why do we need a Creator?

Ultimately, if there is a Creator God, i.e. a separate entity that created us, the biggest conundrum is where that entity come from?

Does God exist?

With the release of the movie "Religulous", Bill Maher and Larry David have waded into the debate about whether God exists. Bill Maher claims that his movie is really about challenging the certitude of religion. However, it is clear that he doesn't believe in religion or God. The question is, should we?

The question "Does God exist?" is suprisingly difficult to interpret.

To begin with, what do we mean by "does"? Does has a temporal connotation. But, what time is relevant? For instance, starlight reaching earth often comes from stars billions of light years away. These stars may have burnt away or exploded many millions of years ago. Yet, their light has only just reached us, and to us, they exist. But do they? Is it sufficent that they did exist? What time is relevant?

What do we mean by God? Are we interpreting God to literally be the God of a particular religion? Or do we mean the general concept of God. And if its the general concept of God, what is that concept?

Also, what do we mean by exist? What exists? Do thoughts exist? Does the Wonderland described by Lewis Carrlo exist? How do we know?

These are tough questions. There are no specific answers. But over the posts here, I'll explore what issues the answers would need to address.