76/227. My Book pp. 119-120. Post No. 1352.
MY COMMENT :
I am constantly surprised when I look back at all the events in my life which I could never have foreseen. The future – short as it will be for me – will no doubt contain more surprises. But it is certain that one day the Sun will disintegrate, along with every form of life on our beautiful blue planet. Hard to see this as Intelligent Design. A simple explanation : furnaces run out of fuel.
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Now in my seventies (at time of writing), I can ask what I have ended up with ? From unlikely beginnings in Kogarah, a run-of-the-mill suburb of Sydney, I find it difficult, or at least surprising, to have to recognize that where I am today, what I have done, what I have, what I think and believe, what I have become, are light-years from what I could have expected – had I ever tried the equivalent of the Beatles’ projection made in their early twenties : “When I’m Sixty-Four” – back at the end of my education at Marist Brothers Kogarah.
The future, fortunately, is the Great Unknown (you wouldn’t want to know, as they say at Randwick Racecourse). The trouble is that certain things are foreseeable, even certain to happen, others at least more than improbable (like my becoming, had I remained a priest, Pope Frank the First). But we do have certain certitudes about the future. Notably, the disappearance of, as we say, life as we know it. None of us will be around to witness the event, but the Sun will one day disintegrate, along with its planets and the inhabitants on ours and perhaps on others in the Universe, dying along with what had so long seemed to be our permanent source of survival.
One cannot forget human belief in God in view of all this. Are we supposed to believe that God set a time-limit to our collective human existence, that He timed, willed, predestined the ultimate explosion, implosion, destruction of our solar system, if not the whole Cosmos ?
People who buy “I.D.”, “Intelligent Design”, apparently find little difficulty with all this. I just wonder, however, whether they would really want to spend eternity in the presence of such a divine despot, not to say mythical maniac, who, from the beginning, supposedly planned such an Armageddon, such an Apocalypse. They waste their time believing and promulgating such nonsense. It is a pity I have to waste mine in exposing their credulity.
RIDENDA RELIGIO