she· verb

What sheverb is

What sheverb is not

Select photos

Archives

E-mail

Get Notified

Home

Guess what happens to boiling eggs on the stove when you forget about them. For an hour. Go on, guess. I'll clue you in at the end of the entry.

So, I've been wrestling with theological questions that have my head spinning with Einstein, quantum mechanics, St. Augustine, the discussion boards at infidels.org, C.S. Lewis, Kant, the Gospel of Thomas, Sartre, Adler, Luther and others. 

Because I'm pretty much a dork, I'll trust that you'll not mock me too harshly when I reveal where all this came from. Really. I'll trust you. To not harshly mock me. Promise? Okay, then. Here it is. It all started with a comment made by a kid on Joan of Arcadia. (STOP MOCKING ME!) Because he's nerdy, and into chemistry and the chess club, I attribute to him a quality of authority beyond what I already know. Because I know nothing of chemistry and chess clubs, of course. Not to mention I'm a huge dork, but I believe we've established that already. 

When the nerdy kid is asked if he believes in God, he responds, "Sure. It's logical. If you accept the special theory of relativity, which I do, and the laws of thermodynamics, which I do, and then you throw in the fact that light is conscious, which it appears to be, you know, how can you argue?"

While I'm not entirely certain how evidence of God is proven by this statement, my imagination is captured by the phrase, "the fact that light is conscious." The hell? I fly to my trusty web browser at the commercial break and immediately line up 12 websites to investigate.

Thus began a two week odyssey that ended up with me in a priest's office this past Wednesday asking him such questions as:

• If God is omniscient, how can there be such a thing as free will?
• And for that matter, if God knows everything, why did he create the world and put us in it?
• How are we to trust modern science if the hand of God can come down and work a miracle every now and then, mucking everything up?

The priest seemed a little unprepared for these questions. He stumbled over the answers and didn't offer much beyond what I'd managed to decipher from the books I'd culled from the internet. It's clear his parishioners don't ask these sorts of questions very often and that surprises me. How does one live their life believing in a fairy tale without examining it? Without questioning it even a little? 

Those of you reading along at home know that I gave up the notion of a magical creature who guides our lives and answers our prayers when I was in my early teens. But there's always been a part of me that wants to believe. Especially since my dad died. The desire for there to be a purpose to all this, the desire to see our loved ones again when it's all over is powerful. So powerful, in fact, it makes fools of us while we watch television programs all alone on a Friday night.

The research and reading I've done in the last two weeks, however, has made me realize that my initial rejection of God was based on religious inconsistencies and biblical errors rather than on an exhaustive study of the arguments for and against theism, Christianity, atheism or agnosticism. I have no idea where this will take me and I imagine I will wind up an atheist or a theist rather than an agnostic. 

But the most important question still remains, doesn't it? What happens to boiling eggs on the stove when you forget about them? For an hour?

 
This. This is what happens when you put eggs on to boil and forget them. 
God's hand did not reach down and cause a miracle here. No. There is 
empirical evidence proving I exploded these eggs all by myself. Now whether
I exploded these eggs of my own free will is another matter entirely.