Soli Gaussian Gloria!

A friend of mine is an author who, upon completion of certain difficult tasks or after a day of particularly good writing likes to gladly shout Soli Deo Gloria (“Glory to God Alone”) as a sort of thanks to God for his success.

It got me thinking. When I was a “believer” I did a similar thing. Whenever anything good happened I made sure to say a little prayer of thanks to God. I am a sufferer of OCD, so in terms of religion I got the double joy of a little thing called “Scrupulosity”. I obsessively worried about thinking the wrong thing or letting some blasphemy into my head and offending God. On the flip side I wanted to ensure that God was aware of my thankfulness for whatever good had happened. Often times more in hopes that God would be pleased and continue to “bless me” with future benefits.

I have never been particularly troubled by the “Problem of Evil” in that I could “buy” the apologetics and justifications for why God would allow bad events to happen. Of course I didn’t dig too deeply into that reasoning in that if God could forestall a “bad event” is it an act of “omission” to not act?

But I must admit sometimes I had difficulty understanding why God would allow certain bad things to happen. But again that was something I didn’t think into that deeply, preferring not to offend him with a possible blasphemous thought.

But all through this God seemed rather silent on the matter. I was alone in my musings.

When I was able to finally let go of “Belief” I did so precisely because it appeared to me that God was amazingly silent and, indeed, as in most of life “good” happens about as consistently as “bad”. Life is lived in a statistical distribution. One tail is the extremely bad, one tail is the extremely good and shades in between.

Sure you can “bias” the events by not taking extraordinary chances with your actions, but that works both ways. You can stay in the middle path and avoid excessive bad and excessive good.

God was merely an “unverifiable factor” that I perceived as shifting the distribution around me while I held still. One day I might find myself in the “bad tail” and the next in the “good”. But no amount of praying, no matter how obsessively, guaranteed a statistical shift in the outcome.

Past performance was no guarantee of future returns in the “Pray to Pay” scheme.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m still an OCD sufferer and like most people I hold ridiculous beliefs that are unverifiable. But God was, thankfully for me, one of those beliefs I could let go. When you hold as many silly beliefs as an OCD sufferer/Scrupolositist, being able to let go of one is a “true blessing”.

So, indeed, Soli Gaussian Gloria. To the statistical distribution of random events all the “glory” (and all the “blame”) go.

Now when something good happens I can realize that it was a combination of my choices (unconscious or conscious) and the random distribution of timing and events. And of equal importance, when something bad happens I don’t have to sit and wonder how an all-loving being who controls space and time could let this happen to me.

Soli Gaussian Gloria!