I was remembering this morning, when I was a teenager I used to love science fiction. I would read every science fiction story I could get my hands on. And that was a lot because on my way home from school I used to go past 3 libraries and 2 second hand book shops every day. And I stoped at most of them every day too.
One day my mum challenged me on my reading, she said that these books were anti God and that a Christian should not read them. I thought she was crazy. I replied that these books had nothing to do with God, for or against, they did not deny his reality in the real universe, they just described universes where He did not exist. At the time this seemed perfectly reasonable to me.
This morning I realised that to imagine a world where God does not exist is the same as saying that you wish God was dead. It’s what murders do before they go and kill the person who is inconvenient to them.
Then I started thinking about the characters who come closest to a God figure in various sci fi worlds. For example Q in StarTrek. What is the difference between God and Q?
They are both all powerful beings, able to create and destroy on whim. But apart from the fact that Q is imaginary and God is real, how are they different? The first thing I thought about is character, God is Good, while Q is at best amoral. God loves and uses His power for the good of all beings in the universe. Q loves himself and uses his power only for his own pleasure and convenience. Yes there is some character development due to his interactions with Picard and others but still at base he is a selfish amoral being.
So then I thought, what gives God the right to be God? While Q is just an all powerful being? Why can’t Q be a god too? He has the powers. And as I thought about that what came to the fore is creation. God’s only right to claim our love and worship and honour and reverence is that He created us. If He had just been wandering through whatever exists outside our universe and discovered us in our expanding universal ball (I imagine the universe as a beach ball sitting on some cosmic beach that we are completely unaware of and unaffected by.) He would have had no right to do anything to or with us. The only reason He has a right to be our God is because He made us. The fact that He loves and cares for us is an added bonus. 😸 This realisation made me feel very small and repentant for my younger self and her ignorant ideas.
