Gorillas in the Mix.

• Author: Puterbaugh, Dolores T.
• Position: Believe in God

PEOPLE WHO DO NOT BELIEVE in God, or are afraid to believe in God, often make predictable assertions to support their position. They often will start with a mocking supposition about an old wizard or some such image who sits on a throne in the sky. Well, duh. No mature believers take those images literally, any more than they still believe that their doll's hair will grow back overnight, or that wishing their stuffed bunny is real will make it so. No, we have outgrown childish things, thank you very much.

Another argument points to how badly people behave who claim to believe in God. Well, again, no surprise. Of course, humans behave badly; that is a big part of the whole story. Have you read our sacred books? Good grief, it is nothing but lying and murder, greed and adultery, and every sort of mischief, about from the beginning. Adam messes up and then blames both Eve and God.

Before long, our partner in conversation points to the sexual abuse horrors of the modern age. There are no excuses for this. Religion, of course, is not the only arena with a flawed priestly class. The fact that scientific experiments often lead to no useful knowledge does not keep people from vigorously asserting we must follow the science. Some scientists torture beagle puppies and other ones discover how to vaccinate against polio and rubella. We do not throw out the world of "science" because some of its clergy are pretty terrible.

Doesn't all of this magical God stuff just give us an excuse not to learn things? This intriguing question seems rooted in the confusion among parable, history, poetry, wisdom texts, and other types of books in the Bible. Nowhere in Scripture are people charged with staying as dumb as possible, and many scientists will admit that the more they learn, the more apparent it is that what comprises the material world does not seem to be mathematically possible as a random series of events. What is obvious, perhaps, to a physicist like the late Father Lemaitre, the Belgium priest who first came up with what is now known as the Big Bang Theory, is a bit harder sell to regular people.

This leads to a particularly interesting argument: if God really exists, it would be obvious, and not just to Jesuit scientists. How obvious?, you might ask, and so would I. As obvious as a Marvel Comics superhero? Would God look like an Albrecht Durer woodcut, wearing jc leather sandals, and making a peace sign? Would the bad people be punished, instantly and...