What’s your God theory?

No-one can prove their theory – that’s what’s so cool about having one. What’s yours? What do you tell your kids? And then there are incredible scientific findings to expand your thinking….

The story about our universe’s conception is inconceivable!  Our universe, starting from nothing, started upsizing 13.7 billion years ago. This is possibly after expanding and collapsing infinity-times before this; or perhaps tangibility did start with this rapid expansion of stuff and energy. The Big Bang was big, but it wasn’t really a bang, more like an incredibly rapid blowing-out. And perhaps these massive expansions and collapses happen all over the show all the time. Then our sun formed around 4.6 billion years ago, claiming over 99.9% of the mass of our solar system, with a baby Earth formed fairly soon after that (4.4billions years ago).  And the planets and stars are still moving further and further away from each other.

We are not the only civilized ones around, but they won’t bother finding us. Carl Sagan calculated the number of probable planets in the universe at ten billion trillion, while Frank Drake’s equation says that the number of extraterrestrial civilizations, just in the Milky Way, could be around 10,000. And the Milky Way is one of about four hundred billion galaxies. And my biggest laugh out loud moment from Bill Bryson: ‘Of course, it is possible that alien beings travel billions of miles to amuse themselves by planting crop circles in Wiltshire or frightening the daylights out of some poor guy in a pickup truck on a lonely road in Arizona, but it does seem unlikely.’ Our solar system’s closest neighbour is a three-star cluster called Alpha Centauri, which to reach in a spaceship would take around 25,000 years, and double that to get to the next lonely landmark, Sirius.  We are far from anywhere and most of space is space:  matter makes up less than 1% of whats out there.

My theory? She is impartial to the outcome but intimately involved in the story. Everything has always existed, much of which is unfathomable to us, and your highness wants to just let rip and share. And I suppose, if I were her, I would too. Imagine just being, everything, polar opposites of all things conceivable, all at once, with so much power, so much potential and the ability to create anything – I would just explode. So your highness dreamt up the concept of time, and apartness, which allows a story to play out. Throw in elements of matter and space and it is inevitable that a myriad of species who become self-conscious routinely develop and die out. I sense she wants a story, with a beginning, a middle and an end and she is neutral to the outcome. It’s the experiencing that matters. This is my religion.

Your highness picked us to create the story of her only son? It does seem like a lot of effort to send one’s son to try to speak in Plain English – or Aramaic as it was – to explain what he knew (everything) in stories and responses, in three years, to a tiny but rigid community, grudgingly part of the consolidating Roman Empire. In one of more than a billion possible thinking worlds in the universe, in one of possibly an infinite amount of universes. A spec of history in the brief timeframe of human existence. But religions help us make sense of the unknowable and statistically make us happier. 80% of the world follow one religion or another, and I have grown up with bible stories at bed time.

It was in the asking that I felt her hand.   But I will tell you what finally did it for me. The magnificence and misery of the spot in the universe I find myself in now. Yes, I think my existence is a god-damn miracle, best presented by the boys who sleep on either side of me, right up close, in my king-sized extra length bed. Their little bodies so incredible, their minds active behind their breaths and their switching eye-lids. I have felt them solidify in my hold and know that if they die before I do, my grief will an ultimate grief.  And the fact that when I am so depressed I want to disappear my whole body pleas to something that I sense towards my back right: “Can I go now?”. Or when I am so desperately depressed, ‘out’ is not even an out: “I don’t want to exist before and after. You had no right to put me here. You had no right to create my soul.” And finally, I gave up and gave in, asked for help, and got it. Yes, yes, mind over matter, yada yada. I’m just telling you.

I don’t get the Jesus thing, but it doesn’t matter.  I am now trying to understand the life and personality of Jesus – using a dumbed down version of the bible so I can get through more than one sentence at a time – and he does have some things of consequence to say. Whoever he was. I can report back that I owe nothing, I am privileged to be me and my sense of gratitude has expanded exponentially. Jesus himself, when I am able to isolate him, has strength that takes a while to uncover. I’m intrigued.

Now for some mind-blowers for you

• Space, the universe, keeps expanding into nothing – there was nothing there before space took up space.
• The universe is curved, boundless but finite. If you travelled to the end of the universe, you would end up where you started from. This is the same as not being able to understand that the world is not flat.
• Dark Energy takes up one third of the universe – and we don’t know what it is.
• The Jedi Religion, based on Star Wars, became a recognised religion in 2001 and has over 400,000 followers in the UK alone.

And the answer to my seven-year old when he asked me for the MOST IMPORTANT reason why I love him? It was easy. ‘You’re my gift from God’.

So whats your God theory?

My best source of easy reading is:

Daniel Tatarsky, Everything you need to know about everything you need to know about’, 2011

Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, 2003