The ninth stupid way to think about God is GOD AS MOM NATURE. God as Mom Nature leaves a lot of questions open. For one thing, where did Nature come from? Who created her? Sure she is mysterious and seems to work miracles. She is powerful, yet balanced. Subtle in her ways, yet majestic. She has definite wisdom and, as with God, it’s not nice to fool her. It can have dire consequences.

Despite these convincing similarities, if you believe Mom Nature is God Himself, it’s really you who are getting fooled. Because she is a god who’s everywhere but also nowhere.

Nature couldn’t be God. She puts on her bonnet only after the big bang. She was born out of nothing, along with everything else in creation. Though God may be seen to work through nature, He could never really be considered merely nature itself.

If Mom Nature is God, then how come we have the power to destroy her? You’d think any God of ours would be more powerful than we are.

And then, there’s the ever-troubling question of evil. As God, Mom Nature could explain natural evils like the AIDS virus, Mt. Vesuvius, the bubonic plague, and the San Francisco earthquakes. But she is mute when it comes to explaining where moral evil comes from.

Murder, child abuse, inhumanities, war and sins of all kinds, are simply not part of a natural ecosystem. They are outside her domain. So naturally, she could never be considered a true god. Of human beings, that is.

On the contrary, God as Mom Nature could only be the god of everything in nature, except us. Our egos, our goals, our drives for perfection, our creativity, our acquisitiveness, our inquisitiveness, our intellectual gifts, our     capacity for self-sacrificial love, our spirituality are all things this simple god of   nature cannot account for.

Any God of ours must be conscious of our moral dilemma. He must be able to explain why we continue to strive, but suffer. He must be able to account for the nature of our lives – why we feel so alienated, and so   ostracized from the Garden of Eden. And, ideally, He should be able to offer us some ray of hope.

But to say that the idealized unity and goodness of nature are identical to the Unity of the One God is baloney. And dangerously close to idolatry. It is merely one step away from collapsing into multiple gods of wind, rain and sun.

God may have created Mom Nature to be His right-hand gal. And for that she deserves a lot more deference than we are currently showing her on the planet. But as a god in her own right, as our real God, she just wilts.