A Profane Belief - Kevin Jackson

A Profane Belief

'Creationism.' I only have to hear it and I'm off: 'imbecility' has sprung, escaped from my lips (or rattling off the keyboard) before the 'b' of bang, and instantly I wish to retract for I've made a false start and jumped the gun. I want to apologise for my knee-jerk reaction to 'create' which is: create, plus suffix, equals imbecile.
It isn't the word 'create' I dread, but the dangler suffixes.
'Fundamental', with 'ist', and 'ism' added has the same effect: I boil, and 'creative' gets me going as well and that's a different story; but, I've spluttered 'imbecility' or 'imbecile s' and I want a re-start, please, for I don't think creationists are imbeciles or stupid people. Of course some may be, but not all of them, and I don't think that fundamentalism is imbecilic either for there is common need to make sense of the world around us. Whenever the world makes no sense at all it becomes imperative to allay chaos and tame our fears by making sense of our surroundings and place in them.
Here, I own up to 'me' and hope not to be condescending: do not 'we' pray most when we are most afraid? I do, and I must nail my colours up. I believe in God.
I know it to be a soft option in a secular society where atheism is a viable alternative, but as I mix blind faith with suspicious doubt in the Churches of Christ, as I am ignorant of the mores of all other religions . . . I believe in God.
A profane belief perhaps, nevertheless I believe that God created everything. Not bits and pieces of it, nor just the bits I choose, or the bits I like, or the bits I understand. No, EVERYTHING without limit and this may make no sense as I know there are limits. This may seem to be nonsense for we have frontiers and love our boundaries, but it makes perfect sense to me because I'm lazy; and believing that there can be nowhere, ever, past, present and future, ever for infinities that God has not created, where God has not been; makes everything easier.
What spews the word 'imbecile' from me in outrage, is any presumption of 'knowing God's purpose'. Second guessing God is a wanting in humility and a derogation of faith; and it's so devilishly cheeky.
God lets us meet our fate. Pray as we like, lament, complain, repent, but don't you explain and don't, please, do not presume to understand.
What sort of God believing numbskull could imagine a place or time without God? Hell on Earth? No. Heaven on Earth? No! 'On Earth' isn't the deal with God.
Having everything, what sort of God has a house, a website or a telephone number?
What sort of God would reveal the date of our creation?
And, as it so happens, God may.
And isn't this the rub?
My sort of God just might for the basis of having a Beginning, a 'week of godly creation' or 'big bang' to bounce off is so beguilling, and I shouldn't mind if there were a few more half decent creation myths to get our teeth into.
That, somewhere between the odd several thousand and 13.7 billion years ago there wasn't exactly 'nothing' for there was God, that there was God and unknowable Void does make perfect, if incomprehensible sense to me.
Presuming to date our beginning, as both the creationists and scientists do - that eon or day, that time, maybe a Wednesday at 2 in the afternoon that long ago, and now that long ago plus the time it has taken to write this, for it to be read, seems on the one hand endearingly sweet and very comforting, and on the other hand to be inept, but at neither hand do I think it imbecilic.
Had God created us, say . . . 'yesterday morning'; complete as we know ourselves to be with our collective memories, size, sight, planet, cosmos and all the familiar sense-making surroundings; how would we know otherwise? How could we know?
Scientists shouldn't stop looking and stating the latest earlier date for their Big Bang, and I don't want the words of our Ancients to be traduced.
The Ancients knew what they knew and were presumably no closer to God than we are. Of course some may be closer now sitting at the Right Hand and all that, some further away, while we still have our chance to impress: but when those who cared knew the world to be flat and at the centre of everything, the knowing made perfect sense to them if now nonsense to us. Certainly, we know more about much than our forebears did. Equally certainly, at any point we know no more than we know and isn't this all about certainty?
Certainly knowing? The very thought of knowing certainly, sets my teeth on edge.
How long can any certainty be sustained as certain? Just how much has to be certain?
Air and water? Yes. Food, banks, commerce, electricity, telly, the internet, taxes, wars . . . all yes: sex, birth, death - certain sure, but I cannot see that certainty is possible and even less, necessary, with the questions 'Where will it end?' and 'When did it all begin?'
Let us have a little humility before each other, if not before God. We just don't know and it doesn't make any difference to us whether we know or not. It hasn't made a jot of difference so far.
We have frontiers in our knowing and the Beginning is the easiest boundary of the unknown to challenge. The Future happens too quickly, too immediately to even envision knowing of or having control over. Now; the present, is hard enough to encompass. The Past by comparison, is a breeze.
We can never know exactly what happened in the past, and reassuringly the past keeps on getting further and further away. So the past makes an easy target and while we don't know anything about the Beginning, we sure (as hell) know the result.
The Beginning + The Past = Now; it's like the simple equation: x + 1 = 2.
What is the value of 'x'? Surely 1, and The Beginning is equally sure if ever further away and sliding beyond our grasp.
Annoyingly, it's a simple equation that we can't quite solve, damn it even while we have the certain answer.
Does The Past = The Beginning = Now?
It may as well do: not as 1 + 1 = 2, but as 1 = 1 = 2 whereby separating our Creation from our Past becomes a great conceit.
There's before what we know where we know we know nothing, and in the great ocean wash of 'what we don't know', here there is certainty.
How much more certainty do we need?
I believe in God.
But, I'm a lazy so and so.