AW! Epistles
From Russell Odell 2
Abstract
Wednesday, September 06, 2000
A God for Everyone
© 1986 Russell Odell
The universe functions with too many precise universal laws of nature to be accidental. There has to be a super intelligence (not supernatural) in the background of creation for which man has, through the years, mentally created many gods, spirits and other myths, to explain to himself what he cannot understand. It is the ego of man to try to fathom the unknown as well as strive for the unattainable. When answers cannot be verified, man finds solutions with a mixture of mythology and faith. The greater the faith the more acceptable the answer.
Imagine the fear of the early caveman when he saw his first bolt of lightning during the middle of the night and felt the ground shake beneath his feet, while torrents of water fell from the sky. Such a sky was frightening and mysterious. Fear gave way to superstition of what was in the sky.
When man questions something, because he is curious, imagination takes over. By blending in a little superstition and a dash of fear, he can concoct weird fantasies.
As civilization developed through the years that man has walked on earth, each group developed their own special god, and there were many of them.
Coyote is the god of the Crow Indians of North America. According to the Crows, Coyote built a boat and, taking two ducks with him, set out upon the waters of creation. He ordered the ducks to dive into the waters and bring back some mud. From this mud he created the earth and all its creatures. However, if creation took place after Coyote got the mud, where did the two ducks come from? Never mind. You don’t question the gods!
We have the Chinese to thank that we have only one sun. They believed when the earth was created, there were ten suns. This generated so much heat the earth began to burn up. Their god Yi, an expert archer, with his magic bow, saved the earth by shooting down nine suns.
Immortal life came from the Celtic’s god Goibniv (aka Govannon), who was a supreme brewmaster. Anyone drinking his beer gained immortality.
Ometecutli was the Aztecs’ god of fire. Misor was the Semite god who created salt. There was a god for just about anything and every thing.
Polytheism is a belief in the plurality of gods, not necessarily equal in importance, each of which is distinguished by a special function. The Indian Veda, for example, features Agni the fire god, Vayu the wind god, and Indra the storm god.
Dynastic Egypt had hundreds of deities, but worship (as in Greek Olympianism) was city-centered.
The gods of polytheistic systems are organized into a cosmic family, featured in legend and myth and expressing belief about the individual’s relationship with the universe. The lesser deities of polytheism tend to diminish with time until the religion exhibits monotheistic tendencies. Thus the Olympian sky god Zeus became the head of all Olympian deities; the Egyptian god Ra became the supreme god of Egypt; and the several thousand Vedic gods of the Hindus, were gradually displaced by the trinity of Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma.
The Christian’s religion is monotheistic, a faith believing in one God and one God only. God is the divinity of the three great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In the Old Testament, various names for God are used, Elohim most commonly. The four-letter word YHWH is the most celebrated and considered by the Hebrews too sacred to pronounce. They also consider it ineffable and, in reading their scriptures, substitute the name Adonai, so they don’t have to pronounce that sacred word.
Christians tell me they believe only in one God. However, it appears that they too have a hidden plurality camouflaged by their interpretation of what their God is: The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. They are not individual entities. They are all combined within the body of one God, not three.
A Catholic priest, a good friend of mine, told me this is too complicated to understand. You have to accept the churches’ doctrine on faith. ( Perhaps it is something like saying, "Me, Myself and I".) What makes this hard to understand is that the Jews look at Jehovah as one God. Christians look at the same God and see it as, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. How one religion can see Jehovah as ONE and another religion can see Jehovah as THREE is puzzling. Individual faith always answers individual questions with individual correct answers. No problem.
The Greek god Zeus was a supreme god, the son of Oronus whom he succeeded, and Rhea, his brother, the husband of Hera, whose son Hephaestus was the god of Volcanoes. Zeus was also an amorous god who loved many goddesses, nymphs and, also mortals. It is said he had 115 mistresses and 140 children. I regard him as a pre-King Solomon.
The Romans equated Zeus with their own supreme god Jupiter ( aka Jove). He was the son of Saturn, the agriculture god.
Alignak was the Eskimo’s god of the fallen snow. He could also cure sterility in women. These various gods had the power to do many things.
I could tell you about many other gods because, there is no end to them. As some of the ancient religions became extinct, strangely, so did their gods.
Even in this day and age, there are those who believe in gods that seem strange to me. And they look at my God and your God and think we too, have strange gods, and they have a right to think so. I never criticize anther’s faith; I would consider that to be sacrilegious.
The general conception of God is that of an infinite being who is supremely good, who created the world, who knows all and can do all.
I have a Buddhist friend who tells me his religion does not have a God. His Amida Buddha did not create the universe. Does not judge or punish man. Does not perform miracles. Is not transcendent. Amida Buddha does not shed his blood in a crucifixion to save man. However, like all religions it has its dogma and it gets complicated.
Buddhism was started by a man known as Shakyamuni who lived in India more than 3,000 years ago. I think all religious philosophy began with man wondering how his world began and why he is here.
I believe in one uncomplicated Creator. A good question to ask is, "Why do you find it necessary to believe in a Creator?" I answer that by saying I don’t find it necessary at all, I find it practical. I believe as Einstein did when he described God as a Creator. The difference between a God and a Creator is, you worship a God via a lot of unrealistic dogma, whereas, a Creator you try to understand and work with. It helps me to understand many of the unanswerable questions that pop up ever so often. Science tries to answer these unanswerable questions by saying, "It just happens!" I don’t buy that answer. That is only a conjecture calling on the spontaneous magic of mythology. I do not know of anything in this universe that "just happens," whether it be an exploding star or the hatching of mosquito larvae.
Behind everything there is a definite plan, based on definite laws of nature, and these laws of nature are too complex and, systematically arranged by one sequence following another in precise sequences to be accidental. These laws of nature strongly indicate that they required thinking and planning and careful executions.
Another good question for you to ask is, "How do you justify your belief in God?" I will give you a practical example, one you will find difficult to overlook.
In 1956 I had to take a chemistry examination. Chemistry wasn’t my best subject, but I had to pass that exam. In a book store, I saw a book, Chemistry Made Simple, by Fred C. Hess. The price was one dollar. I bought the book, studied it and, passed the exam. The same book sells today for $12. and it is worth every penny. If you want a quick review in chemistry, get this book!
A year or so later, while thumbing through this book, I became fascinated with "Table V111, Distribution of Electrons" on page 26. (In the newer $12. edition, the Table is on page 18.) Anyone having only a couple of years of High School is acquainted with the simple basic construction of the atom. It has a tiny nucleus of protons and neutrons that are orbited by electrons.
The electrons orbit this nucleus in various shells. One orbiting shell may have only three electrons. For instance , the element of Sodium has three shells. The first shell has two electrons; the next shell has eight electrons; its third shell has one. The element of Gold has six shells. The first shell has 2 electrons; the second shell has 8; the third shell has 18; the fourth shell has 32; the fifth shell has 18, and the sixth shell has only 1. The lightest element, hydrogen, has only one electron shell. A heavier element such as Potassium, Calcium, Iron and Nickel have four shells. What makes the difference is, their last two shells never have more than eight electrons.
No atom has more than seven shells. These shells are not numbered with numbers 1, 2, 3, up to 7. Instead they are given small case letters, beginning with the letter k, followed by l, m, n, o, p, and q. Why letters instead of numbers? I don’t know.
The thing that grabbed my attention was:
- Shell (k), can never have more than 2 electrons.
- Shell (l), can never have more than 8 electrons.
- Shell (m), can never have more than 18 electrons.
- Shell (n), can never have more than 32 electrons.
- Shell (o), can never have more than 32 electrons.
- Shell (p), can never have more than 15 electrons.
- Shell (q), can never have more than 2 electrons.
NOTE: ( There are now 108 known elements. The chemical atomic table is a bit confusing because, we have elements 106, 107 and 109. Element number 108 has not been found as yet, therefore the element 108 is missing from the tables list. This missing element will be found ,however, according to the Mendeleev’s Periodic Element Law he established in 1869.
Element 106 was discovered at Berkeley University, in California and, at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna, in the U.S.S.R. in 1974.
Elements 107 and 109 were discovered in 1981 and 1982 respectively at the Institute for Heavy Ion Research, in Darmstadt, Germany. The elements 106, 107 and 109 have yet to be given names.)
Who, or what, set this mathematical law? Or do you think it "just happened"?
Another set rule I think did not "just happen" is, any atom having eight electrons in its outer shell, has no chemistry; can form no compounds.
A couple of other set rules I think did not "just happen" are, there are never more than eight electrons in the outer shell of any atom; only the outer two electron shells are involved in a chemical change and most are involved in the outermost shell. The question is, "Why must this be so?"
I would have to be very naive to believe that this mathematical electron shell formula "just happened" purely by chance. Anything so rigid in its sequential format is the result of intelligent planning somewhere. It all began billions of years ago and, that is why the Universe is as it is.
Let’s carry it a step further into another practical concept of why there is a Creator. The hydrogen atom, consisting of one electron and one proton, was the first atom. It is the grand-daddy, the ancestor, the absolute beginning, of all atoms. However, it is the only atom that does not have a neutron. All other atoms must have neutrons or they couldn’t exist. Where did the neutron come from? A Programmer (Creator) programmed the hydrogen atom, that doesn’t have a neutron, to produce the neutron! It was created by an undefined intelligence, superior to any found on earth. It didn’t "just happen". During the Big Bang of creation, the positive electrical charge knocked off some of the protons, made them electrically neutral, and that was the birth of the neutron. Even though the neutron has been around for billions of years, man didn’t discover it until 1935. Its discoverer was Sir James Chadwick (1874-1891) for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Let’s take another step to another practical area of thought and consider the electrical charges on the electrons and protons. The electron has a negative electrical charge; the proton has a positive electrical charge. These two charges must be critically balanced. This must be difficult to do because the proton has about 1840 times the mass of the electron. This is a technical balancing act that couldn’t "just happen" by any stretch of the imagination. To make this more wondrous, no one knows how these critically balanced electrical charges got on these particles of the atom. How important are these infinitesimal electrical charges?
Carl Sagan writes in his book, Cosmos, page 219, "Turn off the electrical charges and everything crumbles to an invisible dust. Without electrical forces, there would no longer be things in the universe… " Not only would the Earth disintegrate, so would the entire universe of billions of galaxies. (This includes you and I akso!) I can’t believe that our universe is held together purely through chance. Can you?
Of course, there are those who will say, "If God created the universe, who created God?" But that is not too difficult a question to answer. If we could go back to the beginning of infinity, we would know.
We will have to wait until we can so, what’s the problem?
Those who doubt that a Creator had anything to do with the things I have discussed, will say that I am taking this on faith. Faith is believing in things that cannot be verified and, I will agree with that. I will also agree that when I am told, "It just happens," one would also have to have faith to believe that, because, that too, is impossible to verify.
Too many specific conditions are happening in precise sequences for life on earth and the functioning of the universe, to be accidental. As a closing thought, the earth weighs 6,600 billion, billion tons; it rotates on its axis 1,000 miles per hour at its equator while orbiting the sun at 18.5 miles per second. Where does the energy come from, to keep this tonnage spinning and orbiting the sun at 66,600 miles per hour?
I have given you a few of my reasons for not accepting the, "It Just Happened" repartee. Regardless of what you think, there is something in the cosmos a lot smarter than we are. If you want to, you can call it God. I am not trying to change your mind. I am only trying to stimulate your thinking.
