Ramón Tamames: “there is a God… as there are Don Quixote or Hamlet”

(Madrid, 1933) Economist, political, former congressman constituent, one of the signatories of the Pacts of Moncloa… Now there arises the sense of life in his new book: Looking for God in the Universe (ed. Erasmus).

Have you been looking for God for the universe. What has been found? How have you seen it?I find him and I’m still looking for it, but still not what I have seen. I hope to see you some day. Where did we come from?Of The Big Bang. What are we?The result of the evolution. Where are we going? Artificial Intelligence (ai), to a transformation of the species, transhumanism, and we don’t know what things more. Human beings will we be as gods?No, we will not be like gods, but we will be able to destroy human civilization with a nuclear war. Is it all planned?No. There is free will and also God can not break the laws of physics, not to be, of course, to do a miracle. Many, including many scientists, believe in miracles. What god is not incompatible with science?At all. The 40% of scientists believe in something. The vast majority are not religious, but 40% think that there is something. Some of them are just as important as Pasteur, Lemaitre, or, as in the present day, Collins, who argues that the genome is the alphabet of God. Are we alone in the Universe?It is likely that you do not. The universe is very large, and in addition there may be other universes. But the distances are so great that, as he said Fermi, we will never see the little men green. If we ship to the closest star, located four light years, a probe at the maximum speed that we can take to reach 70,000 years ago, and if it adds to that the return trip we put in a 140,000 years. If we are not alone, it is as if we are.What is necessary for the existence of God?I have asked many people, including Stephen Hawking, who in The history of time says that he believes in God. There are a number of mysteries that, despite the advances of science have not come to unravel, and it is possible that you never desentrañen. In his latest book, the God Delusion, Hawking changes his mind and thinks that it is all an effect of the force of nature and specifically that of the force of gravity. The question is: who invented gravity? And do you why it considers necessary for the existence of God?For the meaning of life. In the religions of the more advanced, and especially in the christian, God is an ideal of justice, of peace, of love. And God exists, in any case. God exists as there is don Quixote, as there is Hamlet. We created a character, so that there is a God. Even if, as he says Feuerbach, God does not exist and is only a creation of man, it would be a great creation of man. And if there is a god, should it not manifest itself and put an end to the debate millennial about their existence?What and how you want it to manifest? What with a voice in off that says, “I am God”? God also, according to some, it has already been stated, it depends on whether or not you believe Moses, Santa Teresa… I’m not going by the way of revelation or mysticism, but I think that when you stop believing in God, you can believe in any thing. Have you always believed?I’ve always had a background. My mother was a christian practitioner, I was without it very little but I keep a great souvenir. My father was the opposite, believed in nothing, although at the end of his life it seems to me that he had a change of orientation. I to the 14, 15 years I quit religion and began to read Freud, Marx, Darwin. But I never stopped totally believe because, as happened to Rahner, the theologian, I believe in God because I learned it from my mother. If God exists, why does he permit the holocaust, who has cures pedophiles and all the horror of the world?Because God respects his own laws. And their own laws allow for free will, and free will allows you to be a speculator or a saint, a corrupt politician or a prophet. Is there humanity in one thousand years?That is the challenge. The great dangers that beset us are related to the destruction of nature, global warming, the fight trade, poverty and the more immediate, the atomic war. Any hacker can a day come in with a computer in the monitors, russians or americans and loaded the world.I will forgive but this vein of mystical, have you given because it has old age and, ahem, looks closest to the end time?No, not at all. This book has taken me seven years of work and would not have been able to do at another time. But the issues that I raise in the book -where did we come from, what are we, where are we going?- whenever I’ve raised, and we think about them all.