And when I asked one night, while watching Star Trek stoned senseless, “What would you do if you were Captain of the Enterprise and suddenly saw the face of God on the viewscreen?”

He didn’t miss a beat. “I’d send the crew to General Quarters”.

I have been pondering this and I have come to the conclusion that we might be a science project.

If I were a “supreme” being and I wished to play with creation, under the physical laws that were here when I got here, I might set up a solar system as my lab. Not from scratch but using one already well into the accretion process.

Being aware of the Goldilocks principle, I would set up maybe three planets as the objects of my interest.

My favorite, I would place in the warm sector. The building blocks of life that I will place on each world will thrive in this warm planet, where water will always flow and the primordial soup will always be warm.

The second would be the largest, further from the star and subject to more fluctuation in climate, but still a good candidate.

The last would be smaller, in a colder environment, The challenges would be greater but the harsher climate might create stronger more resilient life.

Then I sit back and watch. By my own rules I am not allowed to intervene in the process.

The warm planet is soon eliminated by unanticipated consequences and chance occurrence.

The second collides with a rogue planet and winds up with a large satellite.

The third progresses nicely and looks promising.

Finally, the second overtakes and passes the small cold planet which has blossomed and faded quickly in cosmic terms.

Voila we have Earth. Our supreme being writes a paper and moves on to more challenging things.

“No matter how horrible or terrifying a ghost story is, it is still essentially optimistic because it recognizes the possibility of life after death.”

Once you grok that, everything we believe or think about religion falls neatly into place.

Without ever agreeing on what we are talking about.

It’s a bit like discussing “freedom”. We all know what it is, and by God we in the US are “free”. But what is it? We own property, don’t we? Try not paying the property tax. We are free to travel, aren’t we? Try not paying the sales tax on the car, the registration fees, the fuel taxes or the tolls. We are free to vote for the candidate of our choice after intelligently weighing the issues, which are presented to us through lies presented over and over and over until we believe they must be true.

So, before we get off on all manner of discussion of the attributes of “God”, let’s agree on what “God” is in a way that a nun, an imam, an atheist (just what is it you don’t believe in), a Fiji Islander, a Hindu, and a Buddhist can understand.

Or if you are going to talk about a limited God, one with an interest in only a few of His Beings, say so and discuss God as conceived by Christians. But at least admit that. Realize that a politician invoking God in “God bless you” is talking about the same being as is the priest who says “God damns you” to the atheist and the Protestant minister says “God loves you and condemns the sin” to the homosexual who has no choice in their sexual orientation (presumably because of some quality in God’s plan).

Clearly most folks are talking about a First Creator when discussing God, for the same reason they invented God in the first place. They can’t stand the anxiety of not knowing, they try to reduce matters to something they can understand and ascribe cause and effect in order to bring order to their rather random lives. At least agree upon that, when discussing God.

And in the end you’ll get nowhere. You’ll be trying to discuss that which is beyond words with words, trying to create an unknown, unseen being by sculpting a statue. Doomed to failure, relying upon the agreement of others equally as ignorant for validity. If we all believe, it must be true. And it is for them, within their own brains, their own universes, if not for anything outside that bound.

Hurricanes look just like spiral galaxies, although the arms in each are formed by entirely different physical process.

Lots of patterns like that seem to repeat, although it is easy to understand when their causes are similar, it is fascinating when similar shapes arise for totally different reasons.

In mathematics, you keep seeing the same patterns over and over again, like sine waves, and they also pop up all over nature.

This is why Chritianity and Islam caught on. The Roman and Greek Gods were thugs, bullies and blackmailers, they had to be paid off or it was curtains for you. And they didn’t care how you lived your life, as long as they got their sacrifices and temples.

The idea that god enforced universal rules of decency, morality and fair play was not a Western idea at all. We learned that from the Jews.

As for the dietary rules and other purely ceremonial and ritual postures, that was just to keep the faithful in line, and make sure they were signed on to the program. Anybody who wasn’t enthusiastic about that was immediately suspect, a potential troublemaker. Kind of like the Pledge of Allegiance.

Of course, God never “said” this, and to the best of my knowledge there’s nothing in the Bible about it.

It was a man-made tradition to remember Good Friday, and no longer a hard-line rule of the Catholic Church.

Jeans (or was it Eddington?) believed it was a lot more like a thought.

I’ve always thought it most resembled a simulation, a computer model. But I must admit I never would have thought of that if I weren’t already familiar with the concept of computer models and simulations. There are probably an infinity of other alternatives, none having to do with anything we think of as the Divine.

In modeling, the math is easy, but there are so many combinations and permutations that you quickly lose track of what you’re doing. The only thing you can do is tweak a few parameters and run it again until the results are more acceptable. “Hmmm…lets alter the charge/mass ratio of the electron” and see if I can resolve that Weak Force problem…”

God either alters the rules as he goes along, or he has finally got it right and doesn’t fiddle with them any more. And are we the final, desired product, or an unanticipated minor development of no particular significance? Perhaps we are an accidental side-result not worth going to the trouble of rerunning the job to correct.

Then again, maybe whether or not we eat meat on Fridays really matters to this mad scientist.