ideas on Creation

As I was reading the beginning of the week's material on the train (i.e. the excerpt from Davies' writings), I had a few ideas pop into my head:

God is a fantastical being; for all we know, He could be imaginary. After all, He doesn't really appear before us - I'm sure somebody could easily argue that He doesn't exist at all. Where's the solid proof?

(But then again, perhaps He does appear before us, just not in a form that I'd be expecting.)

In any case, what I'm trying to say is, that it's curious how God could well be a fantasy, and yet He is probably one of the most discussed and debated topics/characters in society.

Funny how we can spend so much time on a presence that is exactly that - merely a presence, an intangible being.

And perhaps the problem is that we have humanised the concept of God. God is "He, Him, His" - God is assumed (on my part at least) to have human attributes and emotions, a physical constitution akin to that of a human. Maybe that's the limit of my conceptuality of God.

Maybe that's why it's difficult to accept that He exists or has existed prior to Time or the Universe.

Makes a hell of a lot more sense that God is a concept outsde of Time, strangely enough!

I was having a brief discussion with Mum about this, and she mentioned an idea that Dad had, and I've elaborated on it a bit in the following paragraph.

If God is so almighty and powerful (and if He really does exist), there's no reason for him to have made such a tiny thing like Earth, with all its inhabitable features, and nothing else. There must be something else out there, a world like ours, one that's inhabited by living beings, perhaps totally different in constitution to ourselves, but communities of beings nonetheless. Perhaps the story is that there are a number of "Earths" out there - but God created these existences in such a way that we would never collide with another of the Earths - communities living in an isolated peace from stranger nations. Like island nations, but on a universal, planetary level.

So there's another thought to ponder. However, to continue onto other areas-

Reading through the week's materials, I now have an understanding of the different "isms" - deism, theism, pantheism, and panentheism (I didn't know that last one existed). I would have to say that the concept I like best is contained within pantheism - the belief that God is not a separate entity, but an intrinsic part of the all aspects of nature we see around us - the leaves, the clouds, the rivers, the cliffs, the fish, the birds, the canines and felines.. and so on and so forth. This then removes the idea that I don't seem to be comfortable with - the conceptualisation of God as being contained within a physical form such as a human's.

I went through a phase during high school where I was very much in love with nature. I still am, I suppose, but I spend so much time in the city, and commuting to and fro in a train surrounded by lots of people, I don't really get much opportunity to observe natural surroundings. The trees and their individual fronds, the morning frost in winter, and the balmy breeze in the summer; the intricacies and the simplicities of nature that I walked by on my way to school each morning, and on my way home each afternoon.

Nature makes me smile. It's the Romantic in me.