These timeless questions and others like them have kept the Christian church and other religious organizations in business for centuries. Only two or three generations after Jesus' death, the small groups of Christian Jews that had formed to follow his teachings and his life started to build an institution that soon lusted after power and wealth.

As any business does, they looked for an unmet demand and hit upon the answers to these unanswerable questions. In the early centuries of the Common Era, most people were unsophisticated, poorly educated and illiterate. This was fertile ground for manufacturing answers, claiming that you were the only entity in possession of such answers and demanding a paid-up membership as the only way to the salvation that the answers pointed to.

So what should we Progressive Christians do about these still unanswerable questions? We should recognize that they have been posed to us because of the mysterious nature of the Divine and should be considered as holy questions. We should also explore ways of using the questions themselves to build our spiritual journey, living in hope that we will be given the answers if and when God wants us to have them.

By doing this, the thinking that we put into these and other questions which will inevitably arise from such thinking will create a powerful and positive result from the "No" answers we give or receive.

A Practical Example From My Own Life

I have had a rocky relationship with the concept of infinity since we were first introduced in high school mathematics. In a finite world, thinking about anything with no beginning, no end and no boudaries resulted in some sleepless nights for me. Like most others, I have also struggled with keeping my faith in life-after-death strong.

In the back of my mind was the feeling that, if this earthly life is all that there is, then it makes no sense to me. Although I believe that Darwinian evolution can explain most of the rise of higher animal life (including humans), the beauty and complexity involved would seem to be a colossal waste for the short lifetimes that result. Besides, I find it easy to see a role for a Creator, a sort of watered down "Intelligent Design" theory, more of a tweaking or setting of initial conditions and rules than the complete design of a species.

Astronomy, cosmology and physics in general have expanded greatly during my lifetime and this has been a comfort to me as we move closer to the belief that Creation is, in fact, infinite. If one thing is infinite it follows that many other things are also. If space is infinite, so is time. If Creation is infinite, so is the number of possibilities for human existence within Creation. Finally I feel at ease with infinity and our relationship seems bound to last a long time, forever in fact!