Dear friends at "Culture" Forum,

Yesterday (July 29 1998), as I was reading some pithy material in the bus to and from Hula, in Galilee, I culled a lot of material to be developed for the D-SP. But that was yesterday. Today, I turned to a more mundane matter, to wit, SCIENCE FINDS GOD. Can YOU believe that title?! I was not flabbergasted, because there is now a flurry of writings on theological subjects, supported by --what else?-- science...
Not long ago, as you are aware of, I was moved to write on a NEW PHILOSOPHY, without knowing what was moving me. I entertain serious doubts that God is behind this recent intellectual inclination, for reasons that should be clear to you, my friends. Well, I read a few hours ago the Newsweek's article in the July 27 issue, about science finding God. Started feeling angry, I did, reading the dangerous rubbish written by minds that feel in need of self-deceit. I said to myself: This fellow doesn't realize that there was an Holocaust, that there are now people dying of hunger, and war, war, war!
And I concentrated on reading that nonsense, realizing now that the subject was a PARADOX. Now, I believe that I've written a good --perhaps the best-- essay on that subject. Please read it, Paradoxes , and apply it to the following, as written in Newsweek's page 46, column 3:

"Physicists have stumbled on signs that the cosmos is custom-made for life and consciousness. It turns out that if the constants of nature --unchanging numbers like the strength of gravity, the charge of an electron and the mass of a proton-- were the tiniest bit different, then atoms would not hold together, stars would not burn and life would never have made an appearance."

I was dumbfounded, but immediately I had a REVELATION, that is, an EMERGENT, like Athena, hatched from my head! And, friends, that's the subject of the title of this post.
Every physicist, when musing about the Universe, starts by taking for granted that matter was always as it is known in our actuality. But not long ago, every biologist believed that the species had been created as they were known in their day. And then, Bingo! Darwin said, "Not so," and provided sufficient proofs to support his words. So now I say, "Matter was not always as we know it." Ninety-two elements are found in Nature, yet man has been able to create a few more, showing that the Book of Matter has not been closed. Matter itself has been evolving, and it was only when it reached the present state that the universe and planet Earth could become the way they are. We just need to find fossils of inchoate matter…

And, I say, you and I, my friends, belong to an exclusive club of well-to-do, educated, white people. As such, we are potentially prone to hiding the glum reality of not-so-lucky others with veils of I-believe-in-God bromides. Therefore, I hereby DECLARE: I do not believe in God, because such belief betrays a commitment to the improvement of several disgusting manifestations of Nature, which I've defined as the product of dumb physical laws! J'accuse Nature)