Imperfections of God?

Only humans draw straight lines — nature does not. God likes frac­tals (the end­less crooked­ness of shore lines, rocks, canyons, and the bark on trees). Cre­ation mean­ders. DNA is a double-helix all coiled up like a slinky tossed into a kid’s closet. Your body lacks sym­me­try. Your left side is a lit­tle weaker than your right side. No one has a per­fectly even face. We do not actu­ally look like the “per­fected” paint­ings we make of ourselves.

What is it about humans that we are always try­ing to clean up God’s act? We label as imper­fect a uni­verse that was here long before we arrived (and one that may be around long after we have destroyed our­selves with our supe­rior “polit­i­cal and sci­en­tific skills”). Grav­ity kills, but with­out it we would float off the planet. Some peo­ple blame God for car acci­dents. Since when did God cre­ate the automobile?

We con­ceive of God in our own image — instead of the other way around. If we made the world, it would not have tragedy or such com­plex­ity. It would be dumbed-down so that math would be sim­pler. Real­ity would be pre­dictable. All ques­tions would be answered. No mys­tery would be left unsolved. Instead, we have: yearn­ing for ful­fill­ment, unfin­ished lives, half-angel/half-animal beings called human, a planet in con­stant change, ani­mals that have the capac­ity to hunt us — even when we hunt them, etc.

God makes a gar­den; humans make a hell­ish Orwellian social machine. In cre­at­ing the sys­tems lead­ing to our own demise, we blame God for an “imper­fect” world. Ever get the feel­ing that we are not own­ing our imper­fec­tions but blam­ing them on some­thing actu­ally per­fect? In short, do we ever ques­tion our own def­i­n­i­tions of perfection?

Some­where in the mys­ter­ies of the One that cre­ated it all are the roles for: the crooked, the dis­eased, the lim­ited, the unknow­able, and the end­lessly irre­solv­able pat­terns of physics. Light will for­ever con­tra­dict itself as par­ti­cle and wave — but still ful­fill its role as one of God’s per­fec­tions. We are the sopho­moric (lit­er­ally “wise fool”) stu­dents try­ing to cor­rect the teacher.

With a lit­tle humil­ity, our per­ceived imper­fec­tions of God fade into the real­iza­tion of Absolute Perfection.