And Speaking of God...

On another, albeit only slightly related, topic, I've often heard people say that God doesn't have time to worry about all of the little prayers people are sending up and that he isn't involved in the day to day lives of people. And it occurs to me that people who say this, like I myself used to, are considering God to be human-like. But he's not.

There is a book called Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott. It's a book about geometry, but also a social commentary on the 1800s and a bit of a religious-philosophical book. It is the story of A. Square who is visited in Flatland (a flat land, much like the surface of a piece of paper) by a Sphere. Now, since A. Square lives only in two dimensions, he cannot see up or down, only left, right, forwards and backwards on a single level. So, he can't realy see the sphere; what he can see is the sphere passing through Flatland (since the sphere lives in Space and can move in the vertical direction as well as the horizontal directions) as a circle changing its size. (You can read the book to get details about how he can tell the circle is changing size if he can't look down on it. Obviously, if the Square can only see along the surface of the plane, then the circle will look like a ine to him, but the idea of luminosiy rescues Flatlanders from confusion.) Anyway, the sphere can look down on all of Flatland at once, and see everything that's happening, even looking into Flatlanders' houses and seeing what they're doing behind closed doors.

The book only talks about zero, one, two and three dimensional figures this way, but the implication is that the example translates into four or more dimensions as well. A fourth-dimensional being would appear, to us, as a shape-shifting three dimensional being. And if we could figure out a way to synthesize the three-dimensional images we were seeing, we could visualize the fourth dimension. But, like flatlanders who can't imagine what height is, we can't imagine something beyond width, depth and height.

Anyway, I imagine that this is what God is like. A being who can look down on all three-dimensional places at once, and can see what is going on everywhere without needing to fly from here to there the way we three-dimensional beings do. Of course, his abilities don't only include spatial ones, but temporal and spiritual as well. There is nothing that God is not privy to and cannot respond to if he chooses.

So, for people who think God is not listening, he more than likely is. He either chooses not to respond (Garth Brooks: Unanswered Prayers) or he has responded and you just don't realize it.