The Infinity Gems Implies a Definite Proof of God

TL;DR: Marvel’s whole universe, though it may seem diverse, is extremely homogenous because it all comes down to the argument of cogito ergo valeo, humans have definitive proof of the afterlife and are welcome to it because they are capable of thought.

The whole story: Hey, I wanna start this off by saying I’m not religious. Like so many of my generation (or the founding fathers), I may be spiritual or deistic. Anyway, because I did Latin and Greek (and because of my general curiosity), I learned some things about the Judaism and Christianity (to clue you in, check out my last name, though I never read the Talmud). I want to start off with a clarification about what I’m going to talk about. Growing up, I heard a lot that usual old person hootenanny, that young people had replaced religion with politics or something like that. I think it’s because a lot of people have two parts to their religion, zealotry and faith. It’s a lot more complicated than that, but I want to simplify it because it serves my purpose. Anyway, I want to deal with the latter a lot more than the former, because zealotry is human, (relatively) simple and understandable, while faith is a matter of accepting that there are unknowns but stating flat out there are answers that you don’t have to find. Obviously, you can see how one feeds the other, but I want to treat this as an academic subject (much like how a language in the classroom never evolves or reacts to the outside world). I know that Marvel has a devil, hell and various gods in it, but let’s make something clear. These are a matter of personal taste and cannot fully describe God (in contrast with god) because they give human characteristics and understandable definition. As a matter of faith and philosophy, God must exist so outside of human perception and existence that any corporeal representation is a matter of metaphor or allegory (much like any classical paintings of the subject or stories like the burning bush, also note that I didn’t talk about Islam above because I know virtually nothing about it).

The reason why God cannot be understood or depicted in way that isn’t metaphorical is because  humans interact with God as a medium for things that we cannot understand, and the number one thing we don’t understand is death. Well, we understand most of it, but it’s just the pesky question of what happens specifically to us after death. There is no proof of a soul, and to give one would be to violate faith. Believers now have something in their life that demonstrates their value, but the whole ordeal of the faithful is to conquer doubt and human foibles to allow certainty with no proof. It is a central tenet of Christianity, for example, that we die with only hope for an afterlife in our heart. Miracles may happen, but they cannot be demonstrated, replicated, understood or argued in a scientific way because of this. As an aside, if you are interested in this argument, aliens in fiction are usually one of two ways. They are a manifestation of God or humans. One way that Jesus makes things interesting is that he is the first and only hybrid, half God and half human.

Okay, so how does this relate to the whole Marvel thing and the infinity gems? Okay, so first off, let’s list them: Soul, Time, Space, Mind, Reality, and Power. Now, these are already verging off from “what could be thought of” to “writers not understanding physics” and finally “oh boy, we have to have six stones, so what can we make up?” I mean, the power stone could easily be more understandable as energy, right? And what does the reality stone do that the others don’t? According to wikipedia it’s a gateway to alternate universes, so okay, whatever. Time and space should be one (I mean, guys, this was stuff that was already ancient history by the time this story was written). But whatever, let’s move on to the two that are pertinent to my argument, the soul and mind stones. What’s kinda funny is that these are probably the least explored in the comic (that I did read like 10 years ago or something).

Because of the very name, infinity, there is a connection to the divine and inconceivable. This may be taking a bit of liberty with the source material since Wikipedia is the only source of my understanding of where the stones came from or a lot of the nitty gritty. I, however, believe that the writers at Marvel didn’t conceptualize a whole religion of details around this story,. However, let’s act as someone who only watches the movies or has read the specific cartoon where Thanos assembles his gauntlet. Our knowledge of the infinity stones is that. Hold on, I’m going to go on a tangent real quick. Skip ahead to the next paragraph if you’re really dying to read only the salient points of my thing. As economic professors like to joke, there is no free lunch. Even if you don’t have to pay for your meal, someone does. Energy is kinda the same, and as far as we understand it, there is a limit to it, known as existence. For the same reason that are night sky is not absolutely filled with stars (take that persistent universe theory), we know that if a constellation exists, it must be because there’s dark between all of those stars. Likewise, if we get energy, no matter its source, it has to come from somewhere. Only God can create the infinite (and infinity gems if there truly is no limit to the power that they can draw on) because then there really is a free lunch out there somewhere.

Okay, the mind and spirit gems, here’s the crux of my argument for that whole TL;DR at the beginning. These recognize the human mind because they interact with our perceptions specifically. They leave no scientific (I.E. measurable, repeatable) results, unlike the power stone, which presumably we can measure in terms of watts or newtons or something. A person may say that they play upon the electrical connections in our brain or neurons or something (look, I’m not a doctor, don’t ask me). However, there’s a problem with this. We know that there are aliens in the universe (Thanos himself is one of them), and the changes in perception that the gem(s) act upon are exactly the same for them, no matter differences in biochemistry or whatnot. Even if you stated (rather human-centrically) that all brains must be of the same composition, we have a humongous intra-species difference. Each human perceives things differently, and the gems act in such a way as to create the same impact upon us. The thing is that, central to Christianity, is the existence of a soul (I kinda talked about this earlier). These gems accept as a given that something exists universally across species with consciousness and perception. We can call that our soul because it is precisely as Christianity defines it. And so a soul is the one connection that may exist between intelligences, human and aliens. And then these are infinite stones, so there is the connection between a soul and a god. I am not saying that it is a paradise, but it establishes that there is a God definitively in the Marvel universe.

My conclusion is this, that the way that the stones are constructed is kinda lazy. It implies a very ordered, simplistic universe that conforms to Christian standards of existence because it implies the big one God, the other side of existence that governs all and makes sure that there is justice and an afterlife. While this isn’t a problem in of itself, Marvel doesn’t subscribe necessarily to Christian thought. It’s just that writers, especially in Occident, find themselves very hard pressed to remain within the metaphors that litter our society. They have written themselves into a universe that we know well, that there is necessarily a normative force whose origin is God. No matter how many Scandinavian gods or whatever they put in, there is a higher power and authority because the mind gem recognizes consciousness and implies that humans are worthy of God because we can think. Cogito ergo valeo.