God is a supernatural being considered divine or sacred. In most beliefs, God is considered as a Creator, who lies outside the Creation (Universe). In this article I explore God and the role God has played in our lives. To start with, some musings..
Has the Creator created the Creation or Is the Creator a creation of the Creation itself? Did God create the Universe..did God create us? Or, did we create God? Or, did God create us and we discovered Him? Is God He..or She...or is God a being over & beyond our parochial perception?
Remember, as a child when you pester your mother with a barrage of questions and when your mother struggled to explain you, or wanted to abruptly put an end to the barrage, she typically did so by saying, “because that’s how God created things!” Throughout human cognitive evolution, human beings have grappled with several such “childlike” questions about the mysteries that surrounded them. We gave ourselves explanations based on our prevailing knowledge. Since we had no clue of the form, we gave God an anthropomorphic form – mostly Masculine, sometimes Feminine. At other times, we gave the natural entities the status of God – the Sun God, the Rain God etc.
“Most ancient accounts of the reality beyond our everyday experience were not only false, they had a radically different character from modern ones: they were anthropocentric. That is to say, they centred on human beings, and more broadly on people – entities with intentions and human-like thoughts – which included powerful, supernatural people such as spirits and Gods. So, winter might be attributed to someone’s generosity, natural disasters to someone’s anger, and so on. Such explanations often involved cosmically significant beings caring what humans did, or having intentions about them.”
– David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity
However, the chain of explanations invariably stops somewhere. At that point, in the absence of concrete answers, we found succour in the narration of God. The explanation of God was invoked as a collective answer to all the mysteries that could not be answered.
The “Suspense Account” Analogy
God, metaphorically speaking, sounds like the “suspense accounts” that we create in ledgers – whatever can’t be explained at the moment is clubbed in a Suspense Account, called “God” so that the LHS tally with the RHS. What are LHS & RHS here? LHS is the set of perceived observations of our ecosystem and RHS is the set of prevailing explanations for those observations. So, at any given time in history, if the prevailing set of rational explanations fall short of explaining the LHS, the shortfall is clubbed under a “Suspense Account”, saying “God did it”. As we progressed through our scientific evolution, we got answers to some of our earlier unanswered questions. For example, we discovered that the Sun is a star, just like all the other stars; we understood the rain cycle and what causes it; we understood how trees grow from seeds etc. As we kept discovering answers to some of our mysteries, we kept pulling them out of the “Suspense Account” of God, leaving the unanswered mysteries still intact in that account though. As you can see, the “scope of God” has been shrinking as we find more & more explanations.
As Paul Davies puts it in his Book, The Mind of God,
“…as science progressed, God got squeezed out….The God of the Gaps is an unreliable hypothesis.”
I agree with Paul Davies. As it turns out, “The God of Gaps”, is a very loosely knit explanation. A good explanation has two characteristics:
- It must be falsifiable – it must be able to be tested and proven wrong, but more importantly in this context,
- It must be tight – hard to vary in the sense that changing the detail would ruin the explanation
On both these parameters, the God of gaps explanation falls flat. It ends up being just a stop gap arrangement. Ever since Copernicus burst onto the scene, a scientific revolution has emerged. We are on a quest to find answers at a frenetic pace. In the pursuit, however, we are stumbling on more mysteries. Overall, I suspect that eventually, at some stage we will get more answers. We’ll probably discover the most fundamental laws on which the creation has emerged or has been created. Maybe these Laws are the God, or maybe there is a creator outside the system, who created these laws which govern the emergence of the Universe and life as we know it.
The Role of God
The “scope of God” may be shrinking over the centuries and generations, but the “role of God” has remained the same all throughout and has not shrunk one bit. It serves a very important role of balancing the ledger – giving us explanations for the mysteries. In the process, it makes us admire with gratitude, the vast system we’re all part of. It also gives us hope and guidance during adversities. And this is a big usefulness of God. Afterall, the two most fundamental purposes fulfilled by a prayer are:
- expressions of gratitude
- a source of hope
And this usefulness is big enough for us to continue to believe in a Super power, God! Afterall,
The value of a theory depends upon its usefulness.
Gary Zukav
Here’s the thing
“A belief is true, not because it can stand up to logical scrutiny but rather because holding it puts a person into more useful relations with the world.”
– William James
What we don’t know
- if somewhere up there exists a creator.
- if we’ll ever find out completely.
- even if we do eventually unravel everything, how long it is going to take.
What we do know
- we’re making some progress.
- irrespective of whether God exists or not, it is useful to believe that He does!
The Scope of God has been squeezed out by science, but the Role of God has remained the same all throughout – expression of gratitude & source of hope!
P.S.
The Business of “The Suspense Account”
The article has ended. However, I do want to leave a thought which is relevant, but spoils the main content if it is integrated with it. Hence, I leave it as a post scriptum. While, I believe in God (because it is useful to do so), I do not believe in religion. Religion is just a way of life. Unfortunately, “The Suspense Account” has been used by a few as a source of power & business. The innate curiosity of human beings about the mysteries have been turned on its head and used to instill fear & blind faith among masses. The world has been fragmented into many faiths and each faith into a sub-faith & so on. And they keep fighting among each other in the name of their faiths. The God is a truth, because it serves a useful purpose; religion is not truth because it serves none!
I do not subscribe to any of these blind faiths and would urge the reader to evaluate his/her own faith rationally.