Henri Reynard Speaks Out

Do We Have The Time and The Need for War?

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I wonder how much time we have before we hit a wall that may be just out ahead of us? Our species has a time clock ticking on the dashboard of the spaceship we are all traveling on. It is ticking away the hours of cosmic time since the beginning of our existence as a thinking species, perhaps a few thousand years, and our inevitable death as a species. ? The better way to look at it would be a three minute timer turned over the day our species became distinct from other primates in that special way that new species have of distinguishing them selves. The other primates no longer looked sexy to us and we were no longer cross-fertile with them. Now I know that there are a lot of people out there who think God would have had a hard time creating as elegant a solution as evolution to the problem of creating a thinking species. Any God I can postulate that could create this wonderous universe would have no trouble setting up that system and knowing it would arrive at individuals just like you and me.

We are one small species on one small planet rushing through one small galaxy in a very big universe. Let us try to understand one another. Any God I can postulate has no trouble comprehending everything I can comprehend at a far deeper level than I can achieve. I think we can agree on that simple truth as a premise. I can clearly see why life, and eventually intelligent life, is inevitable in the universe that science has offered us a small glimpse into during my lifetime. Any God I can postulate could also see far in advance that any species that could distinguish itself from other species would be the winner in a conflict with those other species. That is, any intelligent species created by God's grand scheme of evolution would eventually come to dominate the planet on which it resides.

Go backward in time far enough and you encounter the beginning of the universe. Out of heat and chaos there came light and all of the other wavicles. Matter like light behaves like both waves and particles under the right conditions. Let us assume that God set up that event as Genesis tells us that God did. Then, at that instant, God set down the rules that govern our universe and determined that life would exist on multiple planets. Exit is a part of existence. God knew that life would start up and die out many times during the life of the Universe that he had created. If that is obvious to me then it must be far more obvious to God. God clearly wanted something to happen here, in this universe, and it seems likely that that something was intelligence. Out of the rocks and dirt that were the inevitable consequence of the beginning of this universe life and intelligent life would inevitably come.

What could be more miraculous? Now where I differ with some of the true believers out there is that I have no trouble believing in a God that wants us to learn how to live with one another without killing one another gratuitously. I think that that could be a kind of cosmic intelligence test. Any intelligent species too dumb to learn to live with itself will inevitably destroy itself. There are an infinite number of ways that could happen. We are capable of doing that today using several technologies that are becoming common in the world. Weapons of mass destruction are only one of the potential methods. Accidental misuse of technology can be as deadly as intentional misuse. Even madmen like Stalin were careful with the power of nuclear armaments. But arrogance abounds in our species, as we all know. For someone to unleash on the world a plague that ends our species by accident is possible today.

I do have a lot of trouble with postulating a God that wants us to kill the living children of the people of Iraq or North Korea or Iran or any other living breathing human being. I would understand God better if his prophets didn't keep telling us to kill someone different than we are by some insignificant degree of belief. But then I often think that those prophets are listening to the noise in their own brain and not the voice of God at all. God's voice is loud in the beautiful universe around me. It speaks to me from every tree and flower, from every child's laughing voice, from the dying breath of every generation and the creation of every new life. What it tells me is it is time for us to learn to live with one another in dignity and peace. It is far past time. The sand is dripping through that three-minute timer and our species is in danger from its intolerance of itself more than any other kind of event. God did not create the beauties of intelligence in order to see it perverted in the hatred of its own kind. Intelligence is a sharp instrument, we must learn to use it to cut the bonds that bind us to intolerance, hatred and fear, or in the end we will turn it on ourselves and perish at our own hand.