Open your eyes people. The universe is so immense, there has to be more than just one God!

-- smitty (smitty@sandiego.com), February 01, 2000

Answers

How so?

-- Yolie Duarte (yondelac@nmda-bubba.nmsu.edu), February 02, 2000.

If there were more than one god, they'd all be fighting constantly. The universe would be a big mess.

I have doubts about my beliefs at times, but for me, polytheism is defintely OUT of the question.

-- nope (not@buying.it), February 02, 2000.

I give "smitty" credit for at least believing in God, overcoming the temptation to be an atheist.

But we should not base our belief in one and only one God on the idea that two would be in conflict with one another. No. If there were two immensely powerful beings, the question would arise, "Which one made the other and is therefore God?" ... or "Which OTHER (third) being pre-existed the two powerful beings, created them, and is therefore God."

You MUST reach a point at which there is one uncreated Creator, one uncaused Cause. He is the one and only God, Who existed from all eternity, is the Embodiment of all perfections, Who made everything out of nothing, and Who would laugh at the thought of an octillion galaxies -- all of which would fit in His back pocket, if he had one. God is infinite in every aspect of His Being. Just as time cannot encompass Him (for He is eternal), so space cannot encompass Him. That which He created cannot be greater than He is. He is a pure spirit, which has no pieces, no dimensions, etc., so the universe cannot be "bigger" than He is.

Yes, this is a very deep subject. We have to toss aside our every-day materialistic ways of thought when considering this.

May the Lord give you His peace. JFG

-- J. F. Gecik (jgecik@desc.dla.mil), February 02, 2000.

Please explain your rationale smitty. Is there some galaxy-to-god ratio that you are privy too? Please share it.

I have a suggestion for you. You may consider reading the excellent book "Show Me God" by Fred Heeren. Start by visiting his website at http://www.daystarcom.org. I believe you will find it fascinating and enlightening.

-- David Bowerman (dbowerman@blazenet.net), February 02, 2000.

We do believe that God (only one) created the human beings - we don't beleive that there must millions of Gods just because we consists of billions atoms. When God was able to create life, was able to create this little, tiny atoms, why should God not be able to create billions of galaxies? There is no difference for him from a 'technical' point of view.

-- Franz Waldhaeusl (waldhaeusl@euro-photo.net), February 03, 2000.

God has trained his only begotten son, Jesus Christ to Godhead. This tells me there are more than only one God. God is full of love and he is not egotistical. He shares with others, even to the point that they will become like him. There is plenty of room in the Universe for many Gods. Take off your blinders, you Catholics!

-- smitty (smitty@sandiego.com), February 07, 2000.

Thanks, Smitty. You are getting closer to the truth. I misunderstood you earlier, thinking that you were saying that there have always been, from all eternity, multiple gods.

Now to comment on some of your latest words:
"God has trained his only begotten son, Jesus Christ to Godhead."
--- No, this is not correct. God's revelation to us shows that Jesus Christ Himself has always been God, a Person sharing the godhead with His eternal Father. There has never been any "time" when they did not exist. Jesus the Divine Son is "eternally begotten of the Father." He did not need to be "trained." He has always had the fullness of divinity, including all knowledge. (Please do not mistake the learning He did as a child, through His adopted human nature, as a "training" in divinity.)

"God is full of love and he is not egotistical. He shares with others, even to the point that they will become like him."
Properly understood, you are correct, and Catholics agree with you. We are to "become like Him." We are to share in his "divine life" (i.e., by possessing sanctifying grace). But we are creatures with limitations. We cannot possibly become new gods -- equal to God Himself, capable of all those things of which He is capable. God revealed Himself as the only true God, and Him only can we adore and serve.

"There is plenty of room in the Universe for many Gods."
By "room," I hope you don't mean "physical space," since God is pure spirit who occupies no space. If you mean to say that God does not have to be the God of everything, but must be generous enough to share part of the universe with us after we die and "become new gods," then the reply is, "No, sir." By being the Supreme Being who created all things out of absolutely nothing, he will always be the only God of all the universe. We are unable, both now and after death, to create something out of nothing.

The question that your words inspires is, "Why would you even want to be a new god after you die?" You must be unaware that, if you reach heaven after death, it will be total bliss, total satisfaction, total detachment from all possessions, etc.. For you to want to be a new god or to think that those who have died are now gods (in order to have possessions, power, etc.) seems to reflect an unhealthy attachment to materialism. As Christians, we must reject such thoughts. (Or are you a Mormon?)

May the one and only God bless you.
JFG

-- J. F. Gecik (jgecik@desc.dla.mil), February 07, 2000.

Perhaps I am being somewhat awkward in my thoughts on the universe, but I would like to share a bit on why I think there are so many stars in the universe (forgive me if my logic is imperfect, but this feels right to me). This may have been discussed in this forum quite a bit, but I just recently found these pages so I here I go...God surrendered a part of his will to give us free will. I am uncomfortable with the official Catholic stand on the freewill issue, perhaps I dont understand it completely, but it seems awkward. One could certainly get into discussions of freewill (I would be more than willing to discuss freewill issues if anyone chooses to) but for now I will argue from the standpoint of the existence of freewill. This raises the crucial question of, How can we have freewill if we didnt happen by chance? I ask you, "Why not sheer chance?" We often say prayer changes things, how can this be if we dont choose to let the lord interact in our lives? The recent Marian messages I have read seem to imply a greater weight to randomness, than the vague idea that the future is set and yet we still have freewill. Our own actions and prayer, as these messages seem to be saying, have an influence on the future. By necessity we must (being limited beings) equate freewill with randomness, which equals choice. We are beginning to learn more and more about the physical world around us. The lord, in his in infinite wisdom, could have dealt with the freewill issue in some other manner, but the idea that all time is happening at once (current physics theory) and certain other physics discoveries (along with the theory of evolution) seem to point toward random chance. This doesnt conflict with the idea of a unmovable mover, indeed it would be a necessity to get the ball rolling so to speak (I will clarify this later). For example, we (physical beings) are on a molecular level composed of chaos. Unfortunately, I have forgotten the theory, but this theory (a theory and not a hypothesis) states that our own physical laws break down when we get to the subatomic level (similar to the uncertainty theory). It is more complex than simply applying a chaos math template to an apparently chaotic pattern and finding order through it, but rather seems to be a wholesale abandonment of physical laws. In addition, subatomic particles in particle accelerators seem to act almost intelligently in certain cases, behaving against known physical laws. One might say, well if thats the case, and we are just pure chance/chaos (works well with theory of evolution) what is the necessity of a creator? To answer this question, we must look at Entropy. Entropy states that all things decay and I have heard it used to refute the idea of evolution. How can we (living organisms) exist if matter exists only to decay? This argument comes from an incomplete understanding of the theory of entropy. An organism takes in ordered, efficient manners of matter/energy and converts this to disordered inefficient energy (heat), thus creating a greater entropy level in the environment around us (not to mention the organisms decay also creates a greater level of environmental disorder). So if everything decays, there has to be a point from which all decay begins (shades of Aquinas here). There has to be a point of perfect non-entropy  GOD. Therefore if we develop by pure chance, the odds of creating a complex multicellular creature are so great the number of stars has to be beyond comprehension to actually fulfill the odds of our own existence. This does raise the question, if there is no conflict with belief in god and chance/evolution, did god allow us to develop without his interference? Another poster stated (perhaps in another thread) that to believe that god created the soul, but not the body (evolution) is a conflict. I believe that intelligence can be gained evolutionarily, but self-awareness (consciousness) cannot. We will soon have computers that will be able to outthink us, but we will see that they will remain soulless (not self-aware). When we became aware (ate from the tree of knowledge) we became capable of the choice between right and wrong. This is the soul, the gift from god (and involved his intervention) that created us in his image. Forgive me if I ramble, and I may very well be proved wrong - but I am ok with thatseems there are more important issues involved in leading a good Christian life. Peace.

-- CW Hilburn (cwhilbu@comp.uark.edu), February 08, 2000.

If you believe in a universe of cause and effect, ultimately you must trace back all causes and effects to a single, First Cause: God.

There may be millions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars. Heaven only knows what kinds of ancient, sentient beings may exist out there amongst them. Some may be extraordinarily powerful, with seemingly godlike powers. Some may claim to be God. But they are not. There can only be One.

Most cosmological surveys confirm that the universe is not infinitely old, but that it actually had a beginning. Perhaps this "beginning" took an infinite amount of "time" to get going, but from our perspective the age of the universe is finite. It began. Really. All the galaxies, all the stars. All compacted into a single, infinitesmal dot impregnated with reality as we know it.

General relativity tells us that a 4-dimensional being, sitting on the periphery of this primordial atomic dot, would be able to look on it and see all times and all places within our universe,at once. On the edge of the gravitational field of our physical universe, the notion of time seems absurd. Somewhere in that realm God exists, and in so doing exists everywhere and in anything that is real.

And now for some wild mystical ramblings...

Sometimes I wonder whether we help create God through Christ. No I don't think this is sacrilege. I mean that God the Father ultimately set a cycle in motion where He became magnified in a feedback loop of perfection. You've heard of what feedback between a speaker and a microphone sounds like. I'm using a metaphor here about a feedback loop of Divine Light.

That is, when God is noticed, we refect His light of Truth back at Him, and He becomes more powerful, more real. The more we and other sentient beings reflect back at Him, the more powerful the Light becomes. This process has been going on since the dawn of creation. The ultimate source of this Light is God the Father. The "mirror" is like Christ. The feedback of energy and Light between the two is the Holy Spirit. When Christ becomes part of us when we accept his love, we, too, can orient our conscience toward the Source in this great and ever-rising crescendo of Love, Truth, Life, and Beauty.

Of course, this vision may be flawed, but hey, I'm only a sinner.

-- jaco (jacothecat@yahoo.com), February 09, 2000.

jaco,

Interesting comments. While cosmological discoveries of the past few years have left little doubt as to the reality of the Big Bang, few scientists are willing to venture into what existed before the bang occurred. Of course, the very fact that scientists have acknowledged that there was a Big Bang is troubling enough to them; for it forces them to concede that all the vastness of the universe actually had a beginning and some "thing" or rather "One" that started it all :-)

With regard to your concept of God's becoming more powerful and real as we notice Him and reflect His light, while it is an interesting thought, I'm going to have to disagree. From the scriptures, we know that God does not change. He is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. So while our perception of His reality is magnified as we reflect His glory and light, He, in and of Himself, was always All-powerful and full of glory.

The analogy I like to use is one of a radio. Thanks to a continual stream of broadcast signals, we are constantly surrounded with a multitude of radio signals, yet remain totally unaware of their existence until we take a radio and actually tune it to the frequency of one of the signals being broadcast.

God is continually surrounding us with His glory and light -- He is Omnipresent. When we yield our lives to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, He places His Holy Spirit within us allowing us to "tune-in" to His Presence. We become a reflection of His glory and light as we allow the Holy Spirit to do His work of transforming us into the likeness of Christ through a process of obedience and holiness.

So when the Psalms declare that we "magnify" the Lord, it is not saying that we influence the magnitude of His nature or power, but rather that through our worship and praise we are able to magnify our ability to we see Him as He truly is. Like fine-tuning the radio to more clearly hear the signal. Perhaps a better analogy with that Psalm is of an magnifying glass. It helps us to see objects more clearly, but it does not actually change the size of them except in our perception.

It is not entirely unlike your analogy, but the truth that God has always been All-Powerful, All-Knowing and Omni-Present is an important differentiation from your idea that our belief can increase God's power and glory.

I hope this helps.

You obviously have a strong mind and an ability to articulate your ideas. I pray that God will continue to reveal His Truth to you.

God bless.

Dave

-- David Bowerman (dbowerman@blazenet.net), February 09, 2000.

Or there could be just one God with a lot of different faces. Or one God made up of many other Gods! The possibilities are endless!!!

-- M.E. (kami2000@hotmail.com), April 11, 2000.

I'm sorry, M.E., but there are no "possibilities" or "probabilities" on this subject. There are only "facts," as revealed by God Himself to all of us.
There is only one God, all-perfect, all-good, all-loving.
If you pray to Him tonight, asking Him to reveal Himself to you, He will find a beautiful way to do so.
May He grant you peace.
John

-- J. F. Gecik (jgecik@desc.dla.mil), April 11, 2000.

We have the two extremes here. ''Smitty'' is a pocket with a hole in it. Mr Hilburn gives speculation a bad name!

A world without God's revelation gave us the Sphinx, a big menagerie of animal-headed deities; total darkness. OK, these people reached a high level of ''civilization'' and the other Pagan societies, Greece Rome, etc., had engineers and books.

All the wisdom of men forever, could never have discovered God, the Creator of all the Universe. But it was His Divine Will to come to us. To part the curtain and let us know He exists. No matter what all the scientists may think, the greatest wonder of all is that the Prime Mover, the Creator of ALL that is mind-boggling to us --Came down to show Himself to us!!! Yes, it is for sure, an immense universe. It can't even be grasped in our poor minds. It came from One Source; He made it! Open YOUR eyes!

-- Eugene Chavez (rechavez@popmail.ucsd.edu), April 12, 2000.