TOMORROWS' GOD, TODAY?

A VEXING ASPECT OF BELIEF IN GOD is that, more often that not, our preference is to make this an ISSUE OF FACT. Suppose that this were just a matter of choice. On the one hand, you choose for a variety of reasons, to believe in God (as a factual being) and I, on the other and for another set of reasons, choose not to. This is just a matter of a difference of opinion. Each opinion seems as likely to be equally useful. Atheists, agnostics, and other non-theists are as likely to act morally, or immorally, and to have a sense of meaning and direction as those that hold to belief in God.

The unfortunate question is not, "Do you or do you not believe in a god, or gods?", but rather,"Is there or is there not a god, or gods?'. I have followed a course of thinking that this question does not occur spontaneously to us during the critical early years of life when we are internalizing representations of our physical selves within the physical world. Once we have acquired language we begin to encounter the much more complex world of culture and knowledge. Here we discover the musings of our culture, including whether the physical universe may be a consequence of some 'god', or supernatural being, active within or outside of it.

Christianity, and related religious views, has preserved the notion of a two level universe, the one where we live and the other where 'god' has always been and still is ('as it was in the beginning, is now, and shall be evermore'). This leads to quite a bit of mischief. Just before the beginning of the current era, an Epicurean thinker called Lucretius advanced the view that atoms comprise the world, including ourselves, and that this world is the only world (no other world where god or gods may be, and no 'next world' awaiting us after death). Lucretius was regarded by the Church as an atheist and anti-religionist. His book, 'On the Nature of Things', was suppressed by the Church and lost from the Third until the early Fifteenth Century when the only known remaining copy was discovered in an isolated monastery by a lover of old books .

The ideas of Lucretius presaged modern cosmologies based on the work of science on the nature of the substance of things. Now we see that we truly are made out of 'star dust', that the complex and amazing phenomenon of life has emerged naturally from this physical foundation, and that the soul or spirit of human kind resides only in our bodies as a consequence of our taking in the knowledge and beliefs of the culture into which we are born. This is courtesy of the workings of our fantastically complex brains and the equally amazing facility of human language, itself the foundation of thought and self-awareness.

What am I to do with this appreciation? I have no idea of what was the case before the 'Big Bang', when in the blink of an eye or less, our current world exploded into being. Perhaps 'god' was there; maybe this world of ours is fleeting phantasmagoria in the dreams of such a being. I will never know. It seems to me that, so far as we humans are concerned, the universe we know has become aware of itself through the rise of our intelligence. If a useful concept of god is to arise, it must as ever be our invention. Man creates 'god', not 'god' created man.

For myself, I embrace Mother Earth as my 'god'. I am dust of Her dust and to Her dust I will return. This is a view that cannot lead to much mischief, except by the 'sins' of omission.

Now, how to make sense of this leap of faith?