"All you need is love, all you need is love, All you need is love, love, love is all you need."
That's what the Beatles sang.
Stephen Hawking says that all you need is gravity,
and you will get a whole universe;
maybe a lot of them.
You don't need a god.
I suppose that if I were religious,
I would ask where gravity came from,
and I would smile like a Cheshire cat and say
that only God can explain gravity.
That might be partly right,
at least the part that suggests that
explanations are a bit of a mystery.
It has long been the case that,
when people walked down to the end
of the cul-du-sac that is their understanding,
they gave up and said that only God
knew where the cul-du-sac came from.
God is our name for what
we don't (yet) understand.
We gradually come to understand.
I like the earlier answers for the cul-du-sac,
or more appropriately, where the mountains
and the sea and coyote and turtle came from:
"It is a mystery!"
Unless we pretend that we are all-knowing,
the most normal thing in the world
is to say that we don't know yet.
Maybe it makes some sense to give the name
to what we don't know, and call it God, but
that is a god on a severe weight-reduction program.
One of my favorite office-door notices
was put up at the U. of Chicago to notify
that a meeting was being cancelled.
To give heart to those who wanted to meet,
it said that the cancellation was not a void:
it was the Nothingness!"
Giving grand names to our ignorance
makes them something profound.
What came before gravity?
God? A void? Nothingness?
Is it the same?
Until we figure it out?
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