Why Does God Seem So Shy?

by Charles Pinwill

I once long ago asked myself the above question. If God is an all-powerful existent, and His wish is that we come to know and love Him, why doesn’t He make Himself obvious? Many other existents seem to us completely obvious.

A case in point is the camel. He is neither particularly bright nor able, yet none would seem to doubt him. There is not to my knowledge a Camel-Atheistic Society bent upon denying his existence. Every person on earth, apparently, is convinced that the camel exists. Yet the camel shows no discernible interest in whether we believe in him or not, and indeed the millions of wild camels in Central Australia prefer that they not be noticed. Still, we believe. Even camel-agnostics are not in evidence.

In time I came to the view that God is perhaps both very thoughtful and wise. If God, all powerful as He is, were obvious, then our relationship with Him would be severely restricted. Most of us, being conscious that we are completely within His power, would immediately go into submission. For these of us, the only personal relationship possible would be one of the slave to the master.

Defiance would be an option of course, but only for the determinedly suicidal.

Obsequious ingratiation of the “yes Sir, no Sir, three bags full Sir” variety, would be every person’s invariable and unalterable lot. It would seem therefore that God, if He be there as the all-powerful One which He must be, as this is in the very nature of God being God, may wish a different relationship from this one. What we schoolboys called “crawlers” for their embarrassing deference to authority are not, it seems, what are sought. The only alternative I have been able to conceive, is that God would prefer to have us as His friends.

At the end of Christ’s stay with us, St John recounts His speaking of His disciples as His friends.

Would God create the universe, life, and humans, ultimately just to end up with some friends? Would He artfully never do anything in such a way as to make His authorship indisputable, always allowing doubt so as to enshrine the freedom of our will, lest we ascribe an arbitrary nature to God and rush to acclaim our slavery? From the “big bang” forward, for something like 14 billion years, he has always allowed us some doubt, and this in consideration of us, so that we would be able to volunteer Him our affections - for love can never be compelled. 

This long and persistent insistence upon defending a measure of His anonymity as the author of all things would allow atheists to brand God as a reclusive fanatic, were it not for the restraining difficulty that they don’t believe Him to be there at all.

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He probably found it rather easy to ’leave us in the dark’, as the expression goes, in the matter of the big bang; our utter inadequacies ensuring our stupefaction. Still, alternate speculations are to be had: a warp in time, the contrivance of a multi-universe making physics, and a riotous orgy of the strings of theory getting out of hand, among them. 

We only very narrowly escape the tragedy of knowing with certainty of the existence of God when the likelihood of life occurring randomly is considered. Original life requires pre-existent proteins. These strings of amino acids average more than 150 long. With 20 different amino acids needed and available to choose from, their assemblage must then be uncompromisingly precise. The chances of getting the first 3 wrong are 20 x 20 x 20 to 1, or if you prefer it, random chance will get the first three wrong 7,999 times out of 8,000. Getting all 150 in the right order when there are 20 amino acids to choose from makes the chance of it being wrong 10 to the 70th power. As there are fewer than half that number of atoms in our galaxy, to give comparative chances, we would need to pick the only precisely correct one atom in two galaxies to mimic the chances of getting our one protein correctly assembled.

Though of course it is much more difficult than this. All amino acids come in right- and left-handed versions. Life only uses the left-handed ones, so even when the correct acids happen along, half of those too will also be wrong. Further, if the prevalence of amino acids allows another to be added in their making, on average, every X seconds, the desired protein will only last that long until another is added at one end, thus destroying it in its use to life.

Again, it is harder than this too. As the minimum number of different proteins is, as is thought, about thirty for the most primitive life to exist, then these thirty must randomly occur within touching distance at a particular transient moment. In the next moment, one may have added another amino acid, as they do, so the whole package is now faulted.

Even all this would be useless to life of course, unless information in the form of DNA were also present here, along with RNA which can read and act upon this information. A highly discriminating cell wall with powers to regulate entries and exits would also be necessary to encompass the whole.

Professor James Tour points out that interactors (special relationships within cells) are so excruciatingly numerous and complex that their probability of being assembled randomly and correctly approximates 10 to the 78 billionth power.

Another risky time came in the Cambrian period. While previously there were pretty much only single cell life forms, suddenly, in perhaps as little as ten million years, all animal body forms proliferated in the fossil records. This flummoxed poor Charles Darwin, who hoped that prior geological periods would eventually furnish evidence of these fossils’ ancestry. This has never happened.

This sudden appearance of new life forms contradicts the gradual accrual of the small genetic changes of evolutionary theory. Just one might have been a surprising fluke perhaps, but suddenly there were dozens of completely new and different life forms. New DNA information as complicated as the Encyclopedia Britannica just seemingly “popped” into existence for each of these novel life forms.

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The so-called “Goldilocks” universe where all the forces, energies and elements are precisely calibrated to allow life, and differing them by a billionth part would end life on earth, is also seriously at risk of affirming intelligent design. The best rebuttal used here is that if there are a billion universes, then one will naturally be “just right”.

That an intelligence would happen into existence by chance to be able to observe the phenomenal good luck of ourselves in being that intelligence, is another long-odds outsider that has come home.

The comforting thing about all this is that although the improbability of God’s existence is again and again reduced to approximately infinity to one, in all instances the one persists. We can never be sure of God’s non-existence, nor His existence either, and are thus prevented from abject submission, or to use the Arabic word for submission, ‘islam’. Are we saved from this in order at least to allow us the prospect of becoming God’s friends?

As love is always voluntarily given and cannot be otherwise, our lack of surety preserves our hope of friendship with God and allows us to love him also.

I don’t doubt that surety is possible, but I do pray that it happens somewhere else under different conditions.

Whose were the words “My Lord and my God” but those of a doubter?

Fortunately, through all these near misses with certainty of God’s existence, He has tenaciously preserved a small measure of doubt for us. We are not inevitably driven to be His cowering abject and destitute slaves with nothing to offer that He doesn’t already have. Doubt preserves our right to offer the one thing that God doesn’t already have, and never can have; our love - other than it being freely consenting and voluntarily given.

OK, so that’s the meaning and purpose of the universe. What will we talk about tomorrow?

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