Meditation 639
Maybe A God Beyond Our Understanding
by: Dan Shanefield
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Not that I'm beginning to believe in a traditional God, but I am beginning to think about the possibility of some kind of "intelligent designer" entity that we will never be able to understand. (I guess we could call this entity "nature," but I'm giving it a special name, because of its connection with life.)
There's nothing new about this, and many philosophers have written about it, including religious people. However, it's quite new for me to think this way. I still don't "know," so I'm still an agnostic, but recent books published this year, such as "Hitting The Cosmic Jackpot" by Paul Davies, (see my Meditation 631 have made me realize the fantastic level of improbability for life based on DNA, if life only arose from random events.
This "intelligent designer" thing wouldn't be something you could pray to, so belief and worship wouldn't do us any good. It's strictly a philosophical matter of exploring the truth about our universe, and it's not going to get me into heaven.
Ordinarily I wouldn't believe in the "truth" of this either, if it's something we can never understand. I do understand Galileo's experiment with falling weights, and Newton's ideas about gravity and inertia (I can verify them with little stones), but I'm saying maybe the "intelligent designer" thing can never be understood. However, just because we can't understand it doesn't mean it's not true. Modern physics, verifiable by experiment (and that's the key thing with me) shows that many things beyond our understanding are quite true. An example is Einstein's explanation of gravity as a warp in space, where space involves four dimensions (including time!). That is not easily understood by us humans, although many experiments have verified it. Even worse is the stuff you can read about in wikipedia by searching for "Quantum Entanglement" and "Wheeler's Delayed Choice." They are experimentally verified but defy understanding. So why not some kind of "intelligent designer" thing in the universe?
Maybe there are other explanations for the origins of life, not requiring anything so close to conventional religion. For example, see the recent Meditation 637. However, those are almost as hard for me to believe. Not quite as hard, but almost.