God an Idea

God, an Idea

I will start with this, knowledge of Universe workings has no bearing on its existence. Realization of this has probably given us this idea of God as a Creator. As our consciousness took shape out of the primordial fog, we began to see two realities. We could see the tangible physical, those things that we could touch and feel, taste and smell, see with our eyes, and hear with our ears. But we also sensed the intangible spiritual in our minds. We sensed those things that controlled the behavior of the physical, but could not be detected except through the actions upon the physical. We saw that living things had a will and could control their actions to some degree. We saw other things that were physical and behaved in certain unchangeable ways, like a rock that falls when it is dropped. But we saw other things like volcanoes, the weather, lightening and rain, that didn't behave consistently, but yet there was no evidence that it was alive. This lead us to think that there was some unseen spiritual being whose will was being imposed upon the conditions causing them to change.

In the beginning we confused the two realities and lumped them together in our thinking. Mythological stories might have said “the evil Spirit came upon the world and the sun was smitten.” In reality, a volcano might have erupted 500 miles away and produced an ash cloud that blocked a portion of the sun light in their area. Our reasoning associated human traits with a spiritual God in order to explain the physical actions that we were seeing. This is because all variable and inconsistent actions we had observed were caused by living things with a will. When bad things happened to us physically, we thought that God did that to us directly as a punishment for something we had done, or that God was allowing some lesser evil spirit to control the physical circumstances we were in because we had been bad. We thought that God must be behaving like an Almighty Tyrant, and we gave God traits of anger and vengeance.

As civilization developed, religion and politics became prevalent. Certain individuals arose and became very powerful by inserting themselves between God and the common people, such that all had to go through them to experience God. In some cases, the religious and political leaders became the physical representation of God here on Earth. They made all kinds of laws that people had to follow, and condemned those who weren't faithful, to death. No one dared to think differently than they had been indoctrinated to believe. This seems to be the story across the globe where any type of civilization began, from the Eastern Asian countries, all the way around to the Americas. Lust for power and control of others always seemed to prevail in a civilized society.

As our thinking became more distinct, and we became more observant, probably because we had more leisure time in a society, we began to see that some things in our physical reality behave in certain unchanging ways regardless of what we think or do. The quest for truth and the study of the natural behavior of things came to be known as science. Even though we didn't know the cause of existence, we were able to establish the natural behavior based on laws we had formulated from observance. Of course, during this time there were those who stubbornly clung to the ideas of Wizards and Witches, Alchemy and such, as in the Harry Potter stories. Even some of the religious hierarchies clung to these ideas for fear of loosing control, and condemned any science that would challenge the religious philosophy of the creation as they had interpreted it. Galileo is a good example of this.

At this stage in our evolutionary development, scientists have been able to observe the behavior of all that we sense as physical around us, and have been able to characterize and predict these actions with mathematical models and natural laws that seem to control them. But they still do not know how or why the behavior exists! They don't know what causes gravity or inertia, or what causes time to pass. They don't know what energy is, or why there is a speed of light limit on moving bodies, and how the velocity of bodies in space affects the apparent time in that space. We have made great strides in the last 150 years to describe the physical behavior of the Universe, but the cause of these actions are still unknown. In spite of that, some Scientists have become arrogant, and have made proclamations that God does not have to exist. But what about our own existence? What are we really? Are we just an arrangement of elements? Has our consciousness and awareness of existence come from the natural unchanging laws of Physics? I think the answer is no! There is evidence everywhere of the spiritual. Any living existence has a spirit and can somewhat sense and react to its changing environment. It is called Evolution. The tiniest little fuzzy seed of a Sycamore tree is alive, and knows when the conditions are right for it to sprout. It knows which way is up and down. Its intangible genetic software, which is a sacred thing of the Creator that is not to be tampered with, takes the Elements of the Earth and energy from the Sun to make a beautiful towering tree, and it produces improved versions of itself to continue the life in a changing environment.

The spiritual part of us resides in the ever-present. We are not alive in the memories of yesterday, or in the anticipation of tomorrow. We are alive now, and a part of us has been alive since the very beginning of life on this Earth. The living spark of life was passed to me from my father and mother. Their parents passed the life to them, and their parents before them, all the way back to the very beginning. And if you believe in Evolution, all life is connected from the very beginning. Truly, life on this Earth is like a big family. If you look inside the DNA in each of our millions of cells, you will find vestiges of primitive life DNA in them. And think of this, our consciousness and self awareness is what we think of as our being, but there are millions of little cells in our bodies that are alive, and each of these cells has a spirit that causes it to be alive, and to be doing specific functions, even sacrificing itself to keep us alive.

We may never know the answers to these questions: What are we? How did we get here? And what is to become of us? But we must remain ever humble and grateful that we have been allowed to exist here at the pinnacle of consciousness on this Earth at this stage of our development. We must never think that we are in control to do as we please in this living Paradise that we have been given.

Dan Bowlds