A Little Bit of Physics

One of the things we physics students are told to do when coming up with an equation to describe a certain physical situation is to test the equation and see how it behaves at the limits, as the independent variable goes to infinity or to zero. Some things blow up- they get infinitely big at infinity or at zero and that's apparently unacceptable in most cases. Some don't behave the way you want them to- if the strength of an electric field goes to infinity at an infinite distance away, there's a small problem.



Now I'm not saying you should, I'm saying you could apply the same kind of idea to theories about God (sometimes called theology). Say that God is constant, good, over all ranges of human suffering. It works pretty well for everyday life, given certain constraints like suffering is here to help form us and we can't know the will of God and His plans are better than our plans. At zero, though, it doesn't make any sense, given the constraints just mentioned. If we are formed by suffering, and being formed into a stronger human being is good, how can God be good if good isn't happening? Maybe that's why there's never a lack of pain in the world. But then we head over towards infinity and though I don't pretend to know what infinite suffering is like, I can see large amounts of suffering and I can't say that God is good there. And if He is just a constant good, then that constant has to be large (infinitely large, in fact) for it to overcome infinite suffering.

Maybe it's the observational data that's wrong. I mean, the theory tells us that God is good, infinitely good, over the entire domain, zero to infinity. Perhaps the instruments are limited in their measurements. Maybe they break when pain gets too large. But then we just have to trust the theory.

And you know physicists. They're never happy unless they get to test (read: blow up)something. So that could be why I want so badly to see God, regardless of that pesky Old Testament consequence of death. Of course, we're completely forgetting the necessity of bravery on the part of the experimenter, a quality which the experimenter seems to lack. So we'll work on building better instruments and hope that one day the experimenter will have the courage to press the big red button and live. For once.