Home made religion

I take it as a given that all gods are invented by human kind. To some degree every believer I have ever talked with has modified the god offered him or her, making it tolerable. One young lady is a good example. Over a dinner hosted by a Seminary friend she insisted that she was a Bible believing Protestant, though she was sure the "submissive woman thing" was a mistake. When I suggested that her bible very specifically declares that women should be subjected to men and that she had, in fact, modified the Christian god into one she could worship, she was deeply offended. (Oddly enough she was offended at me, though I completely agreed that no real god would insist that women be subjected to men.)

In addition to rejecting doctrines they can't swallow, each believer is faced with a holy book full of contradictions. Each ends up interpreting that book as fits her or his own society, personal history, and prejudices. In addition most such books were written thousands of years ago when even the most educated person knew less about the true nature of the cosmos than does the average kid in an eighth grade science class. (Not including those in Texas or Kansas.) The gods described in the holy books are severely mismatched to the universe we see; thus even more interpretations are required. There appear to be as many different gods as there are believers.

That strikes me as curious. If there is really a god out there why is it so impossible to get a clear view of It, Him, or Her? Most of my species insists that there is a god, what if they are correct? Assuming a god actually exists what should I look for? What would I expect to see in a universe created and overseen by a real, Honest To Goodness God? (HTGG) How would such a god be noticed and described; what should I believe, really?

My first assumption is a certain level of honesty or, at least, a disinterest in deception, on the part of a HTGG. Fact is, if the HTGG, being ancient and powerful and a lot smarter than us, has a desire to deceive, then we will all be deceived. Nothing we think we see, nothing we imagine, and nothing we experience can be trusted in the least. If the HTGG lacks this tiny bit of morality, then the cosmos is a nightmare experience where there is no hope of understanding. All alone this assumption of honesty puts some serious dents in the god beliefs floating around our little planet, forcing me to look elsewhere.

To be honest the HTGG ends up being constrained - unable to do (or be) some things if it does other things. Claiming to be god makes it even more so. I consider lying a serious affront, but in no way claim I have never told a lie. A HTGG however, would not be considered "honest" if it could be demonstrated that IT had ever lied about any thing, for any reason. One deliberate falsehood on the part of a being who claims perfect morality and the whole story falls apart.

A real HTGG could not (for example) create the universe just 10,000 years ago where every observation, every natural process from plate tectonics to the speed of light to the cosmic background radiation, points to a cosmos being 13+ billion years old. To do so would be to deliberately mislead anyone who was trying to understand the nature of existence. Christians who believe in a literal interpretation of the first books of their bible are, without recourse, worshiping a lying god. That they do so with such enthusiasm is curious, but the god is fundamentally flawed and needs no serious consideration.

This essential honesty makes it impossible that the HTGG has actually written any books as a revelation to mankind. Any such book would have to be internally consistent and true in every particular, parallel the universe we observe. Such a book could simply not contain any errors about any subject, never get its history wrong, never trip over its science. If it did the only claim it could make would be a collection of some person's thoughts about what god is like. Interesting, maybe even helpful, but no more holy than are these scribblings.

Integral to that honesty, a HTGG could not make mutually exclusive claims about It's own character. For example the HTGG could not claim to be an all-loving, all-powerful, all-knowing deity with no recourse but to invoke a hell. (2300 years later, Epicurus still awaits an answer.) In the end, if the god is not honest it is a poor excuse for a god.

Honesty suggests that, if the HTGG is all powerful, then there is no Anti-G who is being allowed to deceive. I know this is a favorite of the Jewish/Christian/Muslim faith. But either the HTGG is omnipotent and therefore utterly immune from opposition, or the Anti-G roams the world. And if there is an almost-as-powerful-as-the-HTGG Anti-G who is free to deceive, we will, again, be deceived. Of course many religious folk claim exactly this. But they then make the claim that they are the exception, they alone are not deceived; without having any real explanation as to how they managed to pull that off. (And they still have the problem of not agreeing with each other.) In a universe rife with deception, accepting their claim of knowledge without a single fact that backs them up would be colossally foolish.

Thus this universe with an HTGG as its creator is fundamentally honest. What we see is what we get. The HTGG cannot contradict itself and cannot exist in contradiction to the cosmos.

The search for an Honest-To-Goodness-God gets kind of stuck right here. A look about the cosmos doesn't uncover anything that looks like a god. Nor does a look around our little planet. What we do see is a continuous evolution of natural processes. From here on all god-thoughts can be nothing but assumptions and guesses. Even if there be a HTGG, It can hold no grudge against those who sally no further in faith. This is, after all, how the cosmos presents itself to be...godless.

Could an honest god deliberately hide for some reason? It is hard to see how, but an honest god could be surprised, perhaps even delighted, by a cosmos that evolved in ways unexpected. That may leave an omniscient god out of the picture; but that appears to be the only option that fits into the cosmos. To get to some kind of god belief means looking for a different kind of god.

An engineer starts a project (say a bridge) knowing exactly what needs to be built. Each bit is designed for purpose, strength, and fit with all the other bits in mind. Tools are deployed to make the bits, and any surprise is a failure of design or execution. An artist, on the other hand, starts out not knowing the exact image that will ultimately appear on the canvas, it is a journey of discovery.

Could it be that the HTGG is an artist and not an engineer? That the cosmos is a canvas and not a bridge? If so the universe would appear exactly as it does, its history would be what we have learned, and we would fit into it exactly as we do. Creation is not a place we inhabit; it is a process of which we are a part.

I have the privilege of knowing a couple of artists. Sometimes, as they work the canvas, things appear that don’t seem fit, that have a tinge of ugly to them, things no one really wants to see. But they appear anyway and even the artist can’t explain why. What usually happens next is that the artist buries the offensive image into the painting. The image doesn’t just go away, it can’t. It has become a part of the work. But instead of projecting ugly that layer becomes the foundation for the next, and ugly is absorbed by subtlety and depth. It is a reach, but not much of one, to accept the ugly in our evolution as a parallel experience for the HTGG. Racism, tribal warfare, genocide, murder, torture, slavery; from our prospective such massive evil, such overwhelming ugly, appears irredeemable. But we can grant that the HTGG works a canvas beyond our vision, that what appears beyond redemption in this tiny corner of the canvas will be layered into the whole.

It could be that the HTGG is a duffer, that the canvas will be fit only for some attic somewhere. But I’m going to take our collective morality, even as it appears just slightly more moral than immoral, as a hint this is not so. As art reflects the artist I think we are safe to assume that consciousness and morality (nascent as it is in our very young species) could suggest that such has been infused into work by an Artist. This might be the one place where the cosmos hints at a god-like entity being involved…that an unconscious universe has evolved bits of consciousness.

With the HTGG envisioned as an Artist and not an Engineer, the cosmos as a work in progress, and life as an unexpected or unanticipated facet glowing out of the work, we at least have a god that does not contradict the cosmos we know. However, the real goal of every god belief seems to be to find a way for us to remain “alive” after we die. If the HTGG is going to make it as a “real” god-possibility of any interest, somehow, some kind of life-after-death has to fit the picture. Thus we are forced to assume that eternal life is inherently “good” and desirable, and a lack of same is inherently “not-good”. There is the problem of the 13.7 billion years of cosmic history that passed before any of us showed up. True we are a bit part of that history, but those passing eons had no real impact on our conscious selves. They passed without our realizing and left no trace in our memories. Is it really unlikely that the eons that unfold after we die will be different? Still, I think I can get there, (that is to eternal life).

The Artist and the Canvas are but an analogy, and not particularly nuanced. The cosmos is clearly more dimensional, more faceted, than a canvas. Compared to an artist, the HTGG would be equally more complex and dynamic. Imagine life, consciousness, and self-awareness emerging from the cosmos as layer upon billion year layer is brushed on; a glow imperceptible at first, lost in the flux of light washing through creation. It is an image parallel to what we know to be true. Matter and energy are two sides of the same coin, energy being nothing more (or less) than patterns in the light. Matter precipitated out of the light of the early universe. Organized by gravity, the matter (mostly hydrogen) coalesced into masses, compressed and ignited into stars. From those early stars was all of the complexity of a chemical universe bred. As those first stars expired the calcium, iron and carbon that forms the foundation of life’s chemistry flowed into new stars, solar systems, planets and biospheres; layers that built up even beyond the attributes of chemistry. We know our very minds to be layers, complexities mounded up on earlier complexities that form our brains. We know that conscious thoughts ride on the sub-conscious and that we are social creatures. Our “individualism” rides upon the structure of societies and civilizations. So deep and intricate are these layers that much of our decision making happens on a sub-conscious level; our conscious self being told only after the fact. Our self-awareness lies at the surface of the most subtle of interactions of light flowing through literally billions of years of layering.

Fragile as human life and each individual may be, it is not difficult to envision such as being interesting, even a delight, to the HTGG. Self-aware bits, the Canvas alive, looking at itself and wondering from whence it came? Why let such mastery pass away? Indeed, could the HTGG allow such to fade knowing that to do so would be considered immoral, even evil, by the bits themselves? It seems unlikely. If the cosmos is a canvas, and if life brings beauty to that work, then the HTGG might (Must?) preserve that beauty somehow.

So here we have a religion that allows for an Honest To Goodness God to actually insist in the cosmos we observe. The universe is consistent with such a Being, our existence and evolutionary history fit as well. Morality is a bit different than what we usually imagine. What the Artist sees as beauty we interpret as moral. People can still live differently as their history and geography dictate, customs will change and sometimes clash, but an underlying common existence will allow for a shared sense of being and importance.

Immoral acts, even when done in the name of the HTGG, are universally ugly, marring the artwork and a direct affront to the Artist. Such an evil line or splotch is sure to be layered away, left far from the surface when the work is completed. Only the beautiful will be visible. How one chooses to live one’s life determines one’s place in the eternal canvas; layered away and hidden forever, or part of the visible to join in an ongoing celebration.

My own prejudice is to envision the universe more like a thought than a machine, a conscious entity because we are conscious. It wouldn't take much faith to reach my Artist God, but I put no value in faith. (Nor am I convinced that "eternal life" is of much value either.) Indeed, trying to force a god onto a cosmos that shows no evidence of such is always a impediment to wisdom. Still, if a god belief is necessary there are worse ones out there than god as an Artist.