Goines On: “Oh God!”

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For almost a week after Goines’ reflections on Maslow’s plateaus and peaks, he felt as though he needed to, or should, abstain from climbing peaks. He wasn’t sure why he felt that way, but he supposed he would come to understand it at some point. In any case, a few days later, he felt released from the injunction and decided to test the feeling by sneaking a piece of chocolate before the evening hour during which he and Mrs. Goines routinely had a couple of rectangles from a giant bar of Hershey’s milk chocolate. He was relieved to discover that he seemed to be up again to scaling the peak that chocolate had come to represent for him.
    And while scaling it, the idea was revealed to him that there might be a different, purely naturalistic interpretation of the “Oh God” utterance.
    Say that a God did create Nature, with its imperatives to eat and procreate. Wouldn’t it then seem pragmatic of such a God to reward both activities with sensations of pleasure that would urge repetition after repetition, again and again? It seemed a sweet deal all around.
    And if God could arrange that, then why could she not – and why would she not – contrive for creatures with speech to exclaim “Oh God!” when they earned the reward? It seemed only natural.

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