What use is God?
You might be wondering what use is God if you can’t really tell the difference between God and nature? If God is unbiased and we can’t claim He is on our side, then what good is He?
It is my thought that the undercurrent of the universe, the consciousness of the cosmos, God, is a consciousness that we recognize as joy, as love. And being unbiased as God is unbiased allows us access to that joy, that love.
One of the questions atheists like to ask is would the universe be any different than it is now if God didn’t exist? For me, the answer is easy, since God is the source of life and consciousness, a cosmos without God would be a cosmos without life, without consciousness, without joy.
You can’t make use of God in the sense of having an agenda or a plan and having God fulfill it for you. It is up to you to accomplish what needs to be done in terms of living day to day. God is the undercurrent of joy that is available when you rid yourself of self-bias and other-bias. Here’s a hint; asking what use is God, is a question that would be asked by someone filled with self-bias.
Read MoreDr. Hawking and God
Well, it’s nice to see Dr. Hawking say what I said in Philosophy, Not Religion. That there can only be one eternal, immutable, omnipotent entity in the universe, and that is the laws of physics. His conclusion does not preclude the existence of God, it precludes the existence of a supernatural God. Spinoza came to the same conclusion without the benefit of modern physics in the 1650′s.
The main difference between my view of God and Dr. Hawking’s view of physics, is that I reason that life and consciousness must be attributes of the laws of physics. We have both life and consciousness and operate wholly within the power of the laws of physics. Life and consciousness therefore are not aberrations, they are attributes.
Life must have structure, power and control. In living things the control is the brain, where our consciousness resides. The universe has structure which is matter; it has power, which is energy; and it has control, which are the laws of physics. Since our control function has consciousness, is it such a great leap to think that the control function of the universe has consciousness?
All throughout nature we see patterns, duplications and redundancy. The famous Fibonacci sequence repeats itself throughout nature. We are like a Mandelbrot variation of the greater pattern. The greatest pattern is the universe itself. It is the master pattern and everything is built upon it in infinite variety.
The difference between my view of God and the traditional theist view of God, is that where a theist sees a master plan, I see a master pattern. God cannot have intelligence and be eternal. Intelligence is a survival mechanism. Eternal beings need no survival mechanisms. God can have consciousness and life, but not intelligence. The theist’s insistence upon an intelligent God is like a gazelle insisting that God is the fastest runner of all runners. We need to understand that intelligence is as unnecessary to God as is running ability. They are both survival mechanisms.
The universe is like a great oak scattering stars like acorns and from these stars arise life, consciousness and eventually through the process of evolution, intelligence. It is a pattern of reproduction, of life. It is a pattern being repeated throughout the vastness of the universe itself.
Read MoreHarmony
I love music. Music has always been an important part of my life. Growing up in the church of Christ I took pride in how loud I sang. We sang hymns without musical instruments, simply a cappella. That was our thing. But it was great because I learned to sing in harmony. Without musical instruments I had to listen to the other singers and learn the parts from them. I loved to sing the bass lines.
Later I learned to play instruments and read music. I learned some music theory as well as getting some idea of how wave forms work and harmonize.
Harmony is a construct of wave forms. It starts with the root note. It’s the lowest note played. The lowest note on a six-string guitar is an “E”. It forms the structure that the harmony is built upon. Every subsequent note is built mathematically upon the root. The wave itself is described as having frequency and amplitude. The frequency is the number of times per second that the wave repeats itself and amplitude is how big the wave gets within the cycle.
Harmony is dependent on the frequency. To create a harmonious sound you need to divide the root frequency into parts and make another sound that has a higher frequency. In the major scale, the root frequency would be multiplied by 3 for one note and by 5 for the next note. The sound will be more harmonious the more accurately the sound is generated that matches the multiple of the root frequency. When two wave forms are not in harmony, the stronger wave form will cause the energy of the weaker wave form to be dissipated and lost. However, if a weaker wave form is harmonized with the stronger wave form it will continue indefinitely.
So what is the point of this lesson? Well, I’ve been thinking about eternal life. Speculating on how it might function, how it might be possible. Now, I’m a rationalist, I have to have some kind of rational way of thinking it might be possible for me to actually accept the possibility that it is possible. If you read some uncertainty in that statement, you read it correctly.
So I’m speculating, considering possibilities and I think of harmony. Let us say that our consciousness is a wave form. It is a complex, three-dimensional wave form caused by the electro-magnetic impulses in our brains. All of the swirls of our gray matter forming a tightly woven electro-magnetic wave that we can see and measure with instruments of science.
Our wave form is energy, just as a note from an instrument is a wave of energy passing through air to create sound. It is a wave form that is dependent upon the brain and the body to sustain it. But if I play a note on an instrument, that note will continue until it is dissipated by other ambient sounds. The energy doesn’t disappear, energy cannot be destroyed, it is simply dissipated as heat. Energy can change form, but it cannot cease to exist.
I have speculated that God is the consciousness of the universe. A complex wave form sustained by the universe itself. I have further speculated that God’s consciousness must be unbiased due to his eternal nature. So it seems reasonable to me to speculate that the way to have eternal life is to harmonize my consciousness with the stronger, more powerful consciousness. If I train my consciousness to be unbiased in all its reasoning, I train it to be in harmony with God and the universe itself. A wave form that is harmonized with the stronger wave form maintains its coherence even after the instrument has stopped playing. A biased consciousness runs the risk of being dissipated as heat. I don’t think that would be pleasant, it might be hell…
Of course, this is just speculation, playing with ideas and seeing what kind of connections I can make. But if I make Pascal’s wager to the religious, those who are biased against others because of their faith, it could be that your bias against any group or individual or idea could get you dissipated as heat. Better to be safe and train your consciousness to an unbiased state of reason. I wonder if that’s what Jesus meant when he said, “Judge not that ye be not judged.”
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