Plenty of room for God

For the most part, I don’t like to make a big deal about what I believe, but one thing I do believe is that there is no reason for there to be a conflict between science and spirituality. QFT stands for Quantum Field Theory, with an emphasis on the word “theory.” All of physics is a model that matches what is observed. New science is made when observations differ from the model, and the model has to be changed. But no scientist will tell you that their model is Reality because no model is ever truly complete. There is still plenty of question about the very nature of space and time, let alone how the universe began, or if it ever really did have a beginning. And nobody can tell you what consciousness really is. So there’s still plenty of room for God in all this.

A man died, went to heaven, and asks God, “Lord, tell me how you created the universe.”

God replied, “Singularity, then the Big Bang, exponential expansion… Your physicists, in principle, understood things correctly.”

Then the man asked, “How did you create all living things?”

God replied, “Well, how… First, abiogenesis, then the world of RNA, then evolution, cells, then multicellular organisms...”

The man then asked, “And how did you create man, Lord?”God replied, “Listen, this is what Darwin described. First primates, then use of tools, speech, upright posture… Have you skipped school?”

The man then said, “But Lord, the Bible says the world was created in seven days, and that man was made from clay...”

God replied, “And how would you yourself, if you were then on Mount Sinai, explain to illiterate shepherds with bronze swords – about quarks, gluon plasma, DNA and natural selection?”

Some time ago I began research about how people in different religions viewed God, because that was Question #1 in the Three Question Model of religious thought. I wanted to know how different people spoke to this question of “What IS there?” I interviewed people of various faith traditions:

• Christianity

• Hinduism

• Islam

• Judaism

• Shamanism

• Unitarian

• Spiritually Independent

• Unitarian

• NDE (Near Death Experience)

The questions I asked were:

• Can or does God have the quality of personhood?

• Who do you see yourself to be in relation to God?

• Is God a father figure?

• Do you feel the need to praise God?

• What is sin?

• What is the relationship between God and humans?

• When we are small, tiny children, our parents are our gods. How was discipline handled in your home when you were a child?

The last question had to do with the hypothesis that people who came from homes with harsh punishment might expect God to act the same way. More than one person I’ve met said they were certain that when they died, they were going to Hell.

There are those who see God as one who “pulls the levers,” can grant favors if you ask for them in prayer, rewards the righteous, and punishes the wicked. After death, this God takes those souls who do not worship Him (God is a man, right?), are sinful and sends them to Hell for an eternity of unrelenting suffering and pain.

One thing that was interesting was how inconsistent the answers were for many of the religions. Even within one faith tradition, you had people who felt God had the quality of personhood because God was someone they could talk to, and yet another from the same tradition said that God is not a person, was infinite, but was also “our father.” For some, praying to God meant that someone was listening, and hopefully responding. Further there were those who prayed with the intent to please God.

For me, one of the most beautiful statements I heard about God as having personhood, was from a Muslim who said about having a conversation with God,

“If you walk toward God, then God comes running toward you."

One Hindu said that God could be represented in physical form, which made it easier to understand. As I understand it, Hinduism speaks of one God that has many faces, which are the wide pantheon of Hindu gods. That way, a practitioner prays to the one face of God they wish to, instead of trying to cope with the full infinite nature of God, which is too big to understand.

I chose to include in my research, those who have had a Near Death Experience because it was something direct, personal and transcendent. It’s one thing to have a belief about God, and it’s quite another to have touched Death and had a direct experience of something truly beyond this lifetime. This was the group that I found to be most interesting. Again, there was not a universal agreement about personhood for God, but all did agree that God exists. There were those who said they had a conversation with God, and for some it was just a deep experience.

The thing that was common among all of those who have had an NDE was how they saw themselves in relation to God. Though they all had their own individual analogies, it was roughly as if God were an ocean, they were a drop in that ocean. They were not totally lost, but retained an individuation.

One person described the relation of herself to God, was as though God was a bar of Gold, with uncounted quadrillions of atoms. Each atom was Gold and had the qualities of Gold, but was not the whole bar of course. In that way each soul was an atom of God.

What I’ve come to realize is that the real answer to Question #1, “What IS there?” is much more than what God is or is not. What we call thinking is really an advanced form of emotional expression. It’s not, “I think, therefore I am.” It’s really, “I feel, therefore I am.” How we answer Question #1 is what we feel it to be. Our personal history carries with it a lifetime of experiences, trauma and successes. This is all rolled into the answer to this question, and in turn, informs us as to who we are and how we should lead our lives.

When I look at this question, I like to go back to my own Sherlock Holmes approach:

• What do I know to be true?

• What do I see right before me.

I keep going back to the very last moment at end-of-life, trying to imagine the most important things to me. For me, it is always those I love. As end-of-life approaches, all of the other things of this lifetime cease to be important. I will stop caring about the money I owe, or cleaning the kitchen, my credit rating, politics, fixing that dripping faucet, or hoping to impress anyone with some accomplishment. I will be done with all that. I will be done with my personal history, and best of all, my trauma. All that’s left is love. That is the answer to my Sherlock Holmes questions.

Is there a God? What is the nature of this God? Is that really as important as the love in my heart? Is it really different from the love in my heart?

The question I would leave you with, is that as you consider the nature of God, and more importantly, your own sense of purpose and that which you love, what are you going to do with it?