Why The World Was Formed

I’ve just started reading The Rough Guide To The Universe and yesterday I got a notification of a new post on one of the blogs to which I subscribe. The post was about prayer and meditation and the poster mentioned that she did not believe in God but that she meditated.

I commented that I had stood once and imagined ‘everything’ as one thing – that is, I put everything in the universe from the smallest thing to the largest I could imagine in one bundle and then I thought of it all as one thing.

And I asked myself whether on a balance of probabilities it was more likely that this ‘everything’ simply existed – just of itself – or that God existed.

And I said that when I thought of the stars and the galaxies and the stones in front of me all as one thing together, I thought it more likely that there is a God, because it didn’t seem very likely that everything simply ‘was’.

In fact it seemed a bit of a nonsense to say that everything just ‘was’.

Noah After The Flood
I went on to explain that I like the story in the Old Testament of what happens after the flood, because the story seemed to reveal something about the nature of reality.

The story goes that Noah is berating himself for having not really believed there would be a flood – arguing to himself that if he had truly believed, then he would have been more powerful in convincing people, and he would have saved more people.

And full of guilt and self-pity, he becomes a drunkard – a shell of a man. There is a part in the story where one of his sons ridicules him for what he has become.

Then his sons are debating what the future will hold, and God talks to them and tells them that if they set up the institutions of social justice and social care he will come down and erect a tent around them and come and dwell in the tent.

I like the idea of God coming down into the world. The world is all we know – the rest we have to imagine or intuit.

But in the story of God talking to Noah’s sons, it seems that God can come into the world or remain out of it, which is an interesting concept.

It is an interesting concept bearing in mind that if God is everything and made everything, then it is a neat trick for him to be able to ‘not be’ in part of that which he is.

And this is not a hard reality to live with. We know from quantum mechanics that things can both be and not be.

When I imagine the world, I see a world without God in it as a cold place, whereas I see a world with God in it is a warm place. I am not talking about a psychological state but a reality.

Well that’s the story and it could be poppycock – but it holds together as a thought. Or rather it raises a question – which is why does the world exist at all?

Why The World Was Formed
The story goes like this. God is the ultimate good. More than this – he is the very definition of good.

That being so, he wants to do the ultimate good. And the ultimate good is to give his creative power to someone else.

But there is only God. So he withdraws and makes space – a place where he was not.

He makes the world in that space – a world made expressly so he could create man and put him in it. In a word, the world exists for man.

He creates man and gives him independent free will so he can co-create and perfect the world with God.

The story goes that what was supposed to happen in the Garden of Eden was that events would play themself out in 24 hours. Then the world would cease to be, being redundant, and man would dance in a timeless dance with God.

Adam saw how the story was supposed to go, but he wanted to live it all to the full. So he ate the apple from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil so that he could crawl out from the bottom of the muck-heap of life and join God in the dance.

What self-centered pride. What did he think he was doing? (Still, better not complain because I’m only here because of what he did..)

What Adam actually did was to put himself on top. He went against the express commandment of God who had created him and decided to do it his way. (Strike up Sid Vicious singing ‘My Way’)

And so the world goes on. And no-one wants it to end. Or as Hilly Blue, the character played by Divine in Trouble in Mind says,

Everyone wants to get to heaven, but not yet.

Back to the story of why the world was formed – the fact is that God will have his way and the world will end and the dance will start on time – and we will get there either kicking and screaming and with a lot of heartache – or more easily with a lot of cooperation.

Well that’s the story. I like it because it holds together. It may not be true but it has logic and it is complete. More than can be said for some explanations of what everything is all about.

What I know it that some people accept the story as being true. They accept is as much as they believe that the number 39 bus stops outside their house.

One of the things that I learned from this is to appreciate that there are people walking around who have a sense of what the world is, what time is, where things are going, and why they are going there, in fact that there is a ‘why’ at all.

And it has given me an inkling of the huge gulf that can exist between people who simply do not live in the same mental universe as one another.

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