Creation and Evolution - Part 12 - What is God?

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Who or What is God?

There has been some sort of concept of a Creator-God in nearly all societies. Often casual observers of foreign cultures are easily mistaken by what they witness, and may fail to properly grasp the God-concept at work in an unfamiliar society.

Ancient cultures placed objects or found objects to serve as physical representations of the Divine. More recent cultures profess to hold a more abstract concept, but then go on to use an object, place, person, or thing which they will regard as somehow more holy than its material surroundings. We may smugly think ourselves better than those who erect statues of different forms; of elephants, multi-armed icons, animals, or simply human figures…..but then we may go on to use crystals, candles, crosses, stones, ancient ruins, or modern sanctuaries, investing them with our notion of mystic energy. This is not wrong – it is merely unnecessary. To put it in perspective, a teacher of mine asked her class to imagine a modern-day equivalent version of Christian worship – with an electric chair mounted on the wall of a sanctuary! Might we have done that, if Jesus had lived in a more recent era, or if technology had been developed earlier?

There appears to be a human need to bring God down to our level, by somehow squeezing the Infinite into a space that we can grasp. This is, I feel, a philosophical cop-out. The awe that we ought to feel when contemplating the Infinite, by straining to grasp the Ungraspable, by trying to realize the immensity of what we are communing with, is diminished by substitution of something vastly smaller, whether inanimate or human.

So what is God, that we should be mindful of It?

We structure our perceptions by the process of defining and naming things; and we can do no different with God, because that is how our minds operate. We have defined God as the Creator of All. Whether we know it or not, we started in the very first line of Genesis, “In the beginning, God…..”

Now we have gained some physical understanding of this, too. Science now knows that our universe unfolded from some sort of multidimensional space-time field of potential and possibility, in an event which is popularly called “The Big Bang”. The Creator, or Creative Force, is presumably the impetus behind this. We have in fact defined it so. God, for us, can never be more than we can comprehend.

So God is what we know as the First Cause in the chain of cause and effect which we now observe and measure and figure out. Human knowledge is the sum total of all the causes and effects which we have figured out so far.

As First Cause, we are saying that this Thing we call God, (what Ernest Holmes called The Thing Itself) provided the impetus, the will, the intelligence, to initiate the processes of creation. This impetus is the force for change, and it is a property of Mind. This is why we say that God is Mind in action. Creation is not a physical action; it is an act of Mind, of ideation, of imagination.

As First Cause, we can deduce more about the nature of God. We can ask, “If God made the universe, what did God make it out of?” Because if there was anything here before, then we could ask “Who made that?” and then we would have to have a First Cause before the First Cause, which gets really silly. God therefore also includes the substance of creation – the stuff that all things are made of. For if there was 'stuff' before God, then Who or What made the stuff? We would have to have a God before God, and we go down a nonsense road with that.

So since we know from Einstein that matter is energy, God is both the Energy of the Universe, and the Intelligence that shapes or forms that Energy, and thus God creates the material universe out of Itself!

This means that all of the physical universe is comprised of energy and intelligence, and indeed we can demostrate this to varying degrees. Intelligence is that which creates form, form being that which is distinguishable from randomness or chaos. Whenever we encounter energy bound into form, we are able to recognize and distinguish it, categorize it, name it, observe it, study it.

There is an old saying that if we found a watch lying in the vastness of the desert, even knowing nothing about watches, the complexity alone would signal to us that intelligence had created this thing. We are only beginning to appreciate the quantum complexity in even the simplest rock. The old poetic phrase “See the universe in a grain of sand” is prophetically true. Wasn't it Blake who wrote it?

So far, our picture of God is not one we can easily relate to. That is the reason why the peoples of the world build those statues, those symbols and icons. We need something to relate to. We will find that that Thing is not hung on a wall or in a niche; it is within ourselves.

If we can simply accept that there is, at the center of all, an ungraspable power; not a being, but the essence of Being Itself, then we can set aside the need for physical or visual crutches, and begin to work out the truth for ourselves.

Why would I say not a being? Because a being has a form, a beginning and an end, and a being is something partial. A being leaves room for other beings – we should know, because we are beings. To regard God as a being is to whittle the infinite down to manageable size. What is left after that process is not God, but merely an aspect, a form, a partiality.

God as a being is exactly what the Greek and Hindu and other statue-makers were trying to portray. But since each is only a partial representation of the Divine, then we need an infinite number of them to fully portray the Allness of God. This is where we begin to understand the reasons for polytheistic cultures. What is being portrayed are various aspects of Deity- the activities of Godly power.

We have also created these forms within the umbrella of our so-called monotheism, without fully realizing it. We too have our many forms, but we see them as many aspects of Jesus. We have the teaching Jesus, the righteously angry Jesus, the healing Jesus, and the suffering Jesus. Then we have Mary, the mother figure, and all the vast army of saints. Each form we say is representative of God in action, and so it is; but so are Vishnu, Krishna, and Ganesh. So are Mercury, Hera, Athena, and Zeus. So are Thor, and Loki, and Freya. Many of these figures were real people once, who were regarded as heroes, and long after their death came to be regarded as Gods. Sound familiar?

A particular being cannot fully portray an infinite. Any of our God-figures can only partly reflect to us one or a few of the aspects of the Divine. To begin to approach a correct view, we must reach the conclusion that God is the very Essence of Being; that Beingness which is common to all beings, that spark which enables all to live. God is the Thing which enables Life, which permits Intelligence, which supports the movement of Power. God is the Matrix for all creation. The Creator provides the Law, or IS the Law by which the essence of Being itself can be manifested. Each being carries the stamp of the Creator, without which Being could not be.

Being is not enough, since it encompasses inanimate things, which also can be, as well as the animate. There is more than being to us; there is life. Life is the spark that provides not only awareness, but the urge to extend, to multiply, to grow. We have in us not merely an urge to be, but to become. Thus we have in us the urge of the Creator to further create. This is life.

But there is also more than merely life; life itself is a manifestation of intelligence within matter. It starts as simple pattern, as in a rock. It expands to programming, as in simple life which can reproduce itself, and it proceeds up the ladder of intelligence to Self-Awareness, and beyond that to Wisdom and Enlightenment, the ability to see beyond self to the oneness of the underlying reality.

We can see, then, that there are different degrees of livingness within life. Life is like a light, either on or off - it is either there or it isn't. But our life is different is character and quality from that of a virus or a bacterium. We can do more with our life than they can, and some have called this scale of quality livingness. It is related, it seems, to complexity, as more complex creatures have clearly more scope for livingness. It is related to evolution, as those beings with greater livingness seem to have evolved from those who have less.

This march of evolution could be interpreted as evidence of Spirit creating more and more scope for Itself to act in the physical realm. We like to think that we are the end point of evolution, but are we? More likely we are somewhere in the middle, as God is in the process of unfolding It's mightiness from the invisible into the visible. Jesus can be seen as a prototype of some future man, while we strive and struggle to approach his level of embodiment of God's nature. It that the end, or is that just the best that can be achieved with the human species? What is to come after us? Only time will tell.