Let's talk about God

I should be going to bed, but my head is full of dancing memories from this evening’s (Dec. 3) panel discussion of four FLC professors debating the question: “Is belief in God rational?” Excellent stories were told and arguments offered. Claims were made and responded to with counterclaims and more questions, as words upon words cascaded over each other.  

Not for the first time. I found myself wondering, if philosophy’s goal is to help us understand, why the love for adding layers upon layers of creative complexity and hairsplitting that often obscures the fundamentals? After all, isn’t it the simple fundamentals that make a coherent understanding possible? 

Please understand I come at this God question from a different and somewhat unique Earth-centrist, science-respecting, bottom-up, evolutionary perspective.

Is belief in God rational?

To me, that framing feels like a trick question of sorts. God is a belief in itself. God is not a thing.

Regarding people’s faith in a God, I ask, how does an assumption of God get transmuted into a thing? Is a belief in a belief rational? (Is faith rational?)

I’d say sure, from an evolutionary and pragmatic perspective, there are a host of reasons faith in meta-physical beliefs could and does bring benefits to believers. Regarding what God is, that needs to start with resolving the ageless question, “Who am I?”  

Fact is, I, we, are evolved biological animals, the product of half a billion unbroken years of Earth’s processes. From the beginning, all creatures have required a degree of awareness, processing and action abilities, each according to their individual biology. Ours is simply the most advanced mind, thanks to our incredibly evolved body and experiences.

Still, our thoughts are the interior reflection of our body communicating with itself as it processes incoming information. (See: Drs. Solms, Damasio, Sapolski, etc. for details.) It is our body and brain interacting with physical reality that produces our mind, sense of self, thoughts – collectively our mindscape.  

The inevitable conclusion from the scope of sciences is that consciousness is not a thing, it is an interaction. Our consciousness is produced in the living moment by our living body.

As with the dynamo that stops producing electricity when it stops spinning, so, too, when our body stops living, our mind/consciousness ceases to be produced. After that, we become memories within those we leave behind.

It seems to me self-evident from the above that God must be a product of our thoughts, which in turn, are driven by personal biological imperatives, needs, ego, bias, etc.  

The hard problem is figuring out why such a straightforward observation – that our body/brain interacting with the world produces our mind – is so assiduously avoided.

Our Gods are very real, still we should be very clear, our Gods belong to the meta-physical realm.  

Gods are not part of the physical reality that makes up the biology of our bodies, nor the substance of this miracle planet Earth that created us to begin with.

Key concepts are the physical reality–human mind divide: appreciating that our living body produces our thoughts, and that our Gods are born from within our own ego-centric thoughts. 

The other question discussed was: “Does morality require God?” How can it, if we create our own Gods? 

For me, that realization puts the responsibility right back upon us humans, collectively and individually.

– Peter Miesler, Durango