My Disinterested God

Friday 21st October

I was bought up in the Christian religion; Church of England, though my Uncle Pow (real name Albert) was a Congregationalist and we went to services there sometimes.  I attended Sunday School and Bible classes and was confirmed – and then…nothing. I was expecting some revelation, some Divine wisdom to descend and wrap its cloak around me.  But nothing, in fact a quite dim at first lightbulb started glowing in the dark recesses of my brain….”What if there were no God?”.  So I gradually became an Atheist, or maybe rather an Agnostic.  But there was always a doubt lurking in the back of my mind….”What if there was a God after all?”  But over-riding this was the conviction that people, here in the now, had to do something to make the World a better place, we couldn’t expect God to do it for us, and if it was all part of God’s Great plan, what the hell was he thinking about when he allowed the Holocaust to occur; and Cancer and other diseases. Some plan… even I could have planned things better.

I watched Life on Earth and all those Attenburgh Nature series, and read up on Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.  And still those doubts lurk.  Can all this beauty and splendour, the amazing creatures we see everywhere we look, flowers of incredible delicacy, even insects with their tiny limbs, could all of this be down to just Natural Selection, the best genes working their way through the generations and refining everything towards some sort of perfection.  And anyway?  Why Life?  Why Genes?  Why DNA?  Why did the first molecules develop into life itself?

And here on Earth I became more and more dissatisfied with all the Gods on offer; I didn’t recognise any kind of God I could accept, let alone worship.  And why Worship anyway?  And why expect any of these Gods to give a flying f… about humans, the cruellest and most destructive of creatures on the planet – surely an aberration in the natural order of things if ever there was one?  And still these lingering doubts.  I could never accept the idea that everything, Earth, Life, The Sun, Stars, The Universe itself and all Matter could simply be an accident.  Maybe we will find out one day.  But for now all we have are theories and doubts.

So, in absence of any sort of conclusion, I am prepared to believe that there may have been some sort of Creative Force behind the Universe, the Laws of Physics and Life itself, or the propensity for Atoms to combine to form, where possible, Life.  But maybe that God (for want of a better term) is actually quite disinterested in us; one tiny species on a minor planet in some far-flung region of everything.  So, maybe a creative force made the Universe possible and drives the attraction of Atoms which may form Life, but that is as far as it goes.  It is now up to us to make things work for the benefit of all living creatures on this, (so far) our only Planet.