Saturday, February 03, 2007

A Couple of Unanswerable Questions

I ran across a couple of rhetorical questions on some Live Journal blogs the other day. I usually don't pay a lot of attention to stuff like that, but these two made me think a little bit.

The first question went something like Does Superman have to exercise? The blogger's commentary went something along the lines of, if the Man of Steel puts on a few extra pounds, does he get winded when walking up stairs, or does he have just as much energy as he does when he's fit and trim? Can he eat a whole bag of potato chips, a gallon of ice cream, and a half dozen candy bars and not gain a pound? Certainly this is an unanswerable question. Superman is a fiction to begin with, so there's really no way to answer it. The answer depends on the people who write the comics. My guess is that somewhere over the past 69 years since he was created, one or more of the stories has dealt with this very issue.

The second question was a little more thought provoking, one that I've heard asked in other places as well. Is God male, female, or genderless? It really isn't that important to know and I'm sure God would answer in some cryptic fashion such as "I am that I am" or something to that effect. Most Bibles refer to God in the masculine although there have been a few that have had a feminine slant and others that endeavored to remain neutral on the subject. If you go back to the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, my guess is they probably use the masculine. But when you really stop to think about it...what would God need with gender anyway? God doesn't need special body parts to create.
Man was created in God's image, but does that mean a physical image, or just a philosophical kind of thing? An unanswerable question to be sure, but intriguing to think about nonetheless.