Hollow Point

"Although we may be frail and helpless,"-- Stephen Hawking

The Churchmen has a deliberate subtext. We're frail and vain and cruel creatures formed of the dust, and thus to dust we shall return, even if hit men acting to avenge a Russian criminal fail to give the actor Samuel Jouy a kill shot for the sake of series continuity. I'm much like his Jose, with a fervor worthy of destruction, a poor atheist and lousy Catholic both, I'm of course overjoyed the European studio system made him a paraplegic who is allowed to return to being a seminarian, and the Modern Catholic might be equally gratified by the admission, that, if I open my heart, I'm right back in Sunday school with the choir and a few hosanna's of my own, except it would be of little use. If I returned and did penance, I'd soon defy Francis and face excommunication. I don't like this Pope, and it's wrong to feel this way about a third world bishop playing the Vicar victims advocate on one lung. My decency is too tarnished for anything useful, still, Hawking set me thinking about why there necessarily need be particle motion and forces  in  the vastness of space. I can't think of any plausible reason why a void simply cannot remain a void, why gases have to react, why elements have distinct features. We can explain it, make analogies, but nothing about matter or our language for its laws is necessarily rational without God than with one, insofar as I can see. Our relatively stable star will one day nova, perhaps after humans go extinct, and what then? Awareness is almost unnecessary, and our minds will never fully understand physics, but take the observer out of the picture, and neither material processes nor supernatural ones have much validity. Neil De Grasse's question about what the purpose of a divine being would be may be valid, but so is the question of why electrons orbit a nucleus, why energy even exists, why I don't go to bed, with my swollen feet.