— Inspired by a classic internet comic Up-Goer Five by Randall ‘xkcd’ Munroe, programmer Theo Sanderson created the Up-Goer Fiver Editor, an internet text editor that complains if the text you’re writing uses words that are not within the list of the Ten Hundred most common words in the English language. Using it to write about complicated things is a fun challenge. I have here used it to compose 200 words of first thoughts about God.—
Simple : God
The first thing to say is that God is not something that we can completely understand. If there is a God, God is outside of space and time.
Everything we know was made all at once in a Big Flash (I like that name better, because it wasn’t really a noise). But everything we know is not everything that is, as bright people are finding out: there might even be many Everythings. If so, maybe God lives where all those Everythings sit side by side. See? I told you it wasn’t something we can completely understand!
Some of us think that God is a person, but not a man or woman — greater than that. But because God is something we know that we can not completely understand, we say instead that he or she is like a person, but more, rather than less. Now here’s a funny thing about people: often, the bigger their brains, the more that they understand and care about many little things. So maybe it makes sense that this God person, who is very very big, bigger than everything, also cares about many, many little things. Like me and you.