How God Exists

God exists as a concept in our mind, not as anything real. The concept of God is less important today than ever before, and will become an increasing liability for society. I wanted to post how I've come to this remarkable conclusion to help heal any harm done to my still-believing relatives and friends, who I love all the same past, present and future.

There are five main reasons I have changed my heart and mind about the existence of God. At least five that I can come up with "off the cuff"…

1. Observation of the lives, interactions and deaths of many creatures, places and planets. Claims that humans are specially endowed with an eternal soul or spirit seem hopeful, but suffer from the problem of self-aggrandizement. Placing our selves central to any thought has been the most common error of our recent civilizations. Breaking out of this source of error has occurred repeatedly, leading to a better understanding and expanded worldview every time. Thinking that we are central to the universe is a normal temptation for sentient beings, leading us to eat, shelter and procreate. But it was wrong when Rome believed what it had conquered was the world (much more was going on than found inclusion in the Mediterranean empire). It is wrong that America believes its power trumps all other people on the planet (see what a little asymmetric, decentralized civil warfare in Iraq has done to that idea). It was wrong when the ideas of Copernicus and Galileo were so dreadfully resisted (discovering the circulation of matter in the universe inside gravitational wells placed humans farther from the "center" with each realization). It was wrong to think that our beautiful living Earth was unique in space and time (look at the dry Martian stream beds, sedimentary rock and ice on Mars; also the dynamic chemical resurfacings that took place on the moon and only 500 years ago over the entire surface of Venus). The ideas of the "Veritas forum” about the improbability of life were simply wrong (life is endemic, the universe is vast and self-similar, and the greater systems of life [Gaia] are self-optimizing, making probabilities of life and its survival much greater that we ever thought possible, though quite possibly farther between outposts). People were wrong to think that human life and actions should be privileged above all other (the result of such human-centric consideration has been the upset of all life on our planet, the 6th extinction). Our common experience of mortality teaches us how important each life is while it yet moves, but are we listening to the silence when living carbon reenters the cycle? Road kill repulses, yet the bloody carcasses provide a definition of dead. The services of a life that has died are mostly a feast for microbiology to recycle the physical materials, nothing more. Death of a person results in no further self-aware consciousness, just as all of the life of a person is organized purely by mental connections in the brains/bodies of the living. The death of a creature that was providing useful environmental, intellectual or cultural services is a sad event, but perhaps less so among the masses of humanity alive today than among the other remnants of large ice-age mammals.

2. Genetic research has opened many wonderful avenues of understanding in the past half-decade. It is fascinating to track the path of human migration from Africa via genetic markers. The human species has survived some amazingly close calls with extinction in the relatively recent past, such as the super-plume eruption 72,000 years ago when only a few thousand breeding pairs survived a six-year global winter, or the collision of the comet fragment over North America which air-burst into fiery death for nearly every creature on the North American continent just 13,000 years ago. But the most amazing discoveries, I think, relate to our existential questions. God, or the feeling that there is God, has been selectively bred into our gene pool much as has been right-handedness. This innate seeming-experience of God is what Pascal called "the divine vacuum" in every person. It is a feeling that has been adaptive for individual’s sense of well-being, creating meaning of what is difficult to understand, and for social control and stability during much of the past. Too often the same feeling of God in the heart of people has occasioned extreme violence (the 30-Years-War, the Crusades, and today in Iraq and Darfur). It is this feeling of the supernatural which gives rise to our speculations about afterlife (ghosts, angels, demons). Knowing the illusion of God in human breasts simply frees us to contemplate the justice of our actions and reactions. Understanding God as a concept shared by most humans and implanted in us by our parents for good allows us to plan for a better future. I think social research into the question of manipulation of society through religious feeling, perhaps expanded to our current civil religion of nationalism, by the political or other elites would be interesting.

3. The weather and climate research. Because global warming is of such concern, with the near possibility of our extinction in the balance, our understanding of Earth Systems is increasing at a rate thought to be impossible to fully comprehend individually, though I am making a valiant effort at least in my own sub-specialty of adaptive panning and environmental policy. The unprecedented floods in Iowa yesterday elicited public headlines petitioning for God's mercy, even as some on the religious right used the death of New Orleans following sixth-strongest-ever Hurricane Katrina to intone God's wrath on Big Easy lifestyles. (Pertinent to reason #2 above, some interesting research is being pursued on about 50 genes that make up the brain's and body's attitude toward sexuality, and transsexuals and other extreme intersex persons are providing the richest window into this mechanism of our makeup.) I have predicted that as disasters multiply in frequency and severity as expected by recent climate science reliance upon the feeling of God will become epidemic. I cry with the people's losses in Chengdu, China, New Orleans, Louisiana and in Rapids City, Iowa, but not to God. We should understand the role that liquid water plays in the tectonic balances in Earth's crust, and when precipitation cycles intensify on a warming planet that still maintains oceans and atmosphere for heat transfer. In a larger sense, the superstitious or supernatural feelings in human hearts are likely to cause miscues that will prevent appropriate vigorous adaptation and mitigation responses to climate change, ironically dooming our species. If for no other reason, human survival (not dominance) is the best reason I know to fight the urgings of that "God-shaped vacuum."

4. Lethal warfare is a reason that the feeling of God should be mistrusted today. I enjoy a contest as much as the next guy, say a Red Wings hockey brawl or Tigers slug-fest or an NFL, NBA or NCAA knockabout. Like most small boys, I once enjoyed the substitutionary ownership of gallant warfare via toy guns and model weaponry. But my experience of war, via unfiltered internet journalism from the front lines, together with the largesse of politicos who heartily embraced war as a diplomatic technique, convinced me in my adult years to "un-learn" our instinct to war. As Dr. Martin Luther (my namesake too, dear Dr.) King, Jr. eloquently reminded us, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death," and

"Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor in America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours."

Was not Dr. Martin Luther King a true patriot and benefactor of American ideals? The only appeasement that concerns me now is tacitly supporting those who sell arms to drive the U. S. economy ever higher, but its prestige and moral power ever lower. Lethal weapons have a long and storied history (see what Cain did to Able when some harvests didn't go his way, in the 4th Chapter of Genesis, and yes, I did look that up in my well-marked 1985 Zondervan study bible). You may reply, "But doesn't God condone just warfare, as in the fall of Jericho or the conquest by Israel of its promised land generally?" To the third of our population that considers my bible canonized scripture, and to the other third that goes with Koranic scripture descended from Abraham's other son, I say count the illusion of the existence of God for what it is. Could the Hebrew people so recently released from their Egyptian service have wiped out enough of the prior Palestinian residents unless their leaders resorted to an almighty source of law that forbade worship of their deities and so intermarriage, among many other useful social controls? This is celebrated in every Christian or Jewish calendar. Would Islam become the countervailing force it became if its prophet had been a Jesus-like pacifist, rather than a warring king? I think not. Newspapers reported toward the end of May that the U. S. government has chosen to supply $3 billion worth of new weapons to a subset of Iraqis for "security" purposes, in the name of the defense of my own nation. Please, not in my name! Distrust the feeling of security from lethal weapons as you distrust the human God instinct. The Earth is entering a crisis stage and human beings along with maybe a third to half of all nature a critical gate, through which not all shall pass. If losing to attrition seven of nine billion people appalls you as much as it does me, then advocate global disarmament, not global militarization. Possession of a gun will hasten extermination of those with different beliefs (I must qualify this statement, as death by natural fire, starvation or water deprivation is sometimes not preferred to death from a clean gunshot wound to the brain).

5. The failure of the church itself. If ever there was an unjust war, the second war of George W. Bush was that. It was in the titanic societal struggle that led up to that war that I first openly condemned the church. Regardless of its pro-life stance, no mainstream church was willing to offend any of its membership with clear pronouncements against the open deceit that led to war and the horrible killings that were to follow. Instead, it defended the biblical history of warfare and the disengaged policies of the American church over the past century. The large church I attended upon the eve of war recognized that people of faith could legitimately come down on either side of the question of war. By then the people of the world had largely split from their governments to oppose the war, yet the governments were treating organized state-sponsored murder of thousands as unavoidable. Royal Dutch Shell issued a statement hoping that the war would be short and waste few lives. The cognitive dissonance, when added together with that of creationism, support for the death penalty, disempowerment of women generally, lack of family planning assistance and abolition of Roe v. Wade, simply became too much to handle, and admittedly I snapped. My parents’ usual answer of “Some things are not under our control, and God requires we turn these things over to Him” no longer performed the hand laundry.

All reality we see and partake is formed at every moment from the complex addition of every one’s (and every thing’s) simple actions. It is one reality, though there is no God other than the resultant that Frank Lloyd Wright called "Nature, with a capital N." The Earth’s mountains build as upper mantle convection of a hot-liquid solid pressures colliding crustal plates, and these same folded layers of earth weather when it rains, flowing away stabilized CO2 to be buried under the sea, even as plants germinate in the detritus of their forebears to unlock the storehouse of those minerals buried so long before, to build their mighty cellulose structures, to be fallen, some eventually eaten, eventually by us at the top of Earth’s recent food chain. We each harmonize three trillion cells with the energy released from those same minerals and from that great ocean of ancient oxygen bequeathed us by so many unsung plankton algae a billion years ago. Each of our breaths lasts an average of four seconds, and without replenishing the water that makes up most of our human mind and body, we die within three or four days. We burn slowly but intensely due to the (especially American) layers of fat stored under our skin, though what remains of our teeth can last practically forever, just like the calcium shells of ancient mollusks that crushed together underground for ages provide the layered stone with which we like best to erect our edifices, and we think them lasting. Just four hundred feet under the waves of recent eustatic sea level, the stones of other civilization which may predate the last glacial maximum lie in the tumult of enraged seas newly boiling. Do these ruins of a megalithic goddess culture hold the record of how humans reacted to the three or four times prior that civilization was threatened by catastrophic global fires and floods?

6. This brings me to a sixth point, and though I suspect I could go on, I’ll end here. The unadjusted and immutable textual history, bravado and poetry that Christians and Jews deify as Holy Scripture contains highly amended (Rabbinized) records made consistent to support a belief system that still satisfies about a third of the world’s people. Those who either remain captive to that feeling of God in their heart, or who calculatingly propose to use it or adjust it for their own purposes and/or the greater good, continue to adjust scripture and religious practices to currently relevant purposes. Like glacial and geological processes, this seems to happen very slowly. However, evidence is mounting that the greater environment of life on Earth tends to remain static within the narrow bounds needed by contemporary life-forms for as long as possible, only to change radically and violently to substantially new conditions in a short time period, perhaps a century. Such a shift has occurred in me, knocking me off the God pedestal I occupied since confirmation in the church, spiritual growth through Intervarsity, and the adventure of planting a new church in urban Detroit. The change brought me not to a new understanding of the divine, but a realization that like the economy, the divine is socially and personally constructed for good or ill. Most people simply observe and do not truly use the construct at all, allowing the “invisible hand” free rein; others marshal divine force for curing diseases or launching war. Now is a time we cannot continue as bystanders of the divine. We have multiplied our numbers and effects to the level of a considerable force of nature, and as with Earth, we must now transition to be caretakers and true stewards. Can we steward the Earth or the concept of God itself? In some ways, assuming control of the Earth or the divine is distasteful on the face of it, a blasphemous usurpation of attributes ascribed to God alone. But if we continue to live unaware, according to a divine or invisible hand, we may fail at the end of 13,000 years of human efforts to sustain civilization beyond the natural disasters that attend the end of an ice age, and we truly risk possible extinction as a species. It is time to change our views of God into a belief system we all can live with through horrifying injustice, wars, earthquakes, volcanism, floods, storms and fires just around the bend. This complex result of simply burning too much fuel too fast and not allowing the forests and ocean to remain in place is the hallmark of our remaining lives and those of our children: our current climate crisis. Let us not conflate it with religious and tribal warfare.

Our concepts of God must change. This indeed is why mine has.