There Must Be Something?

The following is probably the closest I am going to come to a Christmas message.

As a Christian agnostic, I remain uncertain about the existence of God, primarily because God cannot be defined. If you think that God is a universal ruler who is in control of everything, then the senseless evil of the world disproves your image of God.

The argument is often made that if there is no God, then there is no universal good or evil. Morality is then defined by the species. There is no basis for saying that the fictitious Klingons, who glorify violence, are bad, and humans are good. One cannot say that spiders are evil simply because the only way they can survive is by sucking the life out of other creatures.

While I grant that this may be true of spiders, I do not believe it is true of intelligent creatures. If spiders evolved intelligence, then at some point they should realize the truth that they should love their fellow creatures. I cannot prove this, but that is how I feel. This may seem to be a wholly imaginary topic—after all, humans evolved as altruistic animals, so for us, love is good and hatred is evil. Why wonder about other potential intelligent beings in the universe?

I confess that I believe there is some universal goodness. Not necessarily a person to be called God, but a pervasive Goodness against which evil can be measured. Even if there is no God who does anything, says anything, or thinks anything, goodness is not merely an adaptation that some species have and others do not. If love is God, then I believe in a universal God.

This is not so different from something that is actually in the Bible. The first epistle of John says that God is love. It does not say that love is God, but for me to say it is not such a stretch from what the Bible actually does say.