Convince Me

In a conversation with a teenage girl who wanted to know if there is a God: “Suppose you convince me there isn’t a God.  It shouldn’t be hard. . . . Suppose you go back to the polliwogs and account for everything some other way. Begin with the sun and the moon and the stars and that rosebud and those oranges and the hummingbird. Tell me where order came from, and the very first seed of life. Tell about Abstracts; the need to protect the weak, to grow in knowledge, to stand up for what is right and the shame that comes from doing wrong. The human race, not all of it but those farthest from the polliwog, possesses these traits and if they don’t come  from a Higher Power, where do they come from? And tell me, if there is no God, what was it that changed me and my habits? I’m not exactly a pushover. . . . Finally, if there is no God, tell me why you and I bother to talk about Him? Nobody’s ever seen Him and His Son died two thousand years ago so what is all this? Who ever got such a silly notion and why does it hang on? . . .  There simply had to be Something bigger than ourselves! Unless there was a God, the entire setup was luck, luck or else we ourselves were gods and both were crazy. Luck could not be counted on and Universal Laws could be counted on. And we, well, we weren’t gods! So–so He had to be.” — The Late Liz by Elizabeth Burns (pseudo name for Gertrude Behanna)