Some characteristics are common and shared between tribes, civilizations and eras. One of them is the conviction that God exists. Every single civilization has a word ascribed to God, special places for His worship and a literature about Him.
According to Jung, the study of archetypes in the collective unconscious leads us to the conclusion that there is a religion component built within the human, that affects him in much the same way as e.g. the sexual instinct. Primitives were as involved in the expression of this component, e.g. by creating special symbols that connote it or even religions, as they were with the cultivation of land, hunting, fishing or meeting of any other basic need.
The faith in God is so deeply rooted in humans that today many scientists believe it to be nothing short of a reflex: we believe in God same as we shed tears when in pain or laugh when we rejoice. We have the ability to believe in God, just like we have the ability to speak or to write or to understand and compose music. There is then a strong possibility that faith in God is actually a matter of genetics, i.e. integrated in our DNA, thus in our central nervous system.
The founders of a new scientific branch, neurotheology, believe that faith in God was incorporated in our genes, in much the same way as our ability to understand and produce language was. This happened, they say, in order to help as come to terms with the issue of death: if God exists or if a reality other than the physical one exists, then our essence is its extension and not subject to decay and death, as our physical body is. Such ideas are discussed in great depth in books such as Matthew Alper’s “The God Part of the Brain”.
But what if this is not so? What if nature’s laws are not blind and what if it was not coincidence nor natural choice that put the God gene inside us? What if it was God Himself who wanted us, in our oblivion, to be able to cling on to who we really are? Questions without a chance of receiving a definite answer ever…
4 comments:
Man is driven to explore his world. He has sought out uncharted shores and traveled through perilous new territory just to find out what was there. Once man conquered his own world, he sought out new worlds in the far reaches of outer space. There we seek our origin, we are looking for where we came from and why we are here. We seek the prime mover of the universe and we will find it. When we do...that will be God. If it turns out to be merely the laws of physics, then that is what rules all. The ultimate truth is what we seek and we are willing to face it on its own terms.
What drives man to find God may be a simple matter of curiosity or it may be as innate as the color of ones eyes. We may not know until we achieve this final ambition.
What, then, is this shared drive to look for our origins and where is it stored? Most probably in our genes, right? So, we know where to look for the drive. But we don’t know where to look for God (don’t misunderstand me, James, OK? I’m only quoting neurotheologists’ way of thinking). Where is God? We look into the telescopes and He is not there. We look into the microscopes and we can’t see Him either. Where is He hiding? What does He look like? How can He be seen? And if He can’t be seen, then what is He? The only thing we can be sure of is that God is a word and a concept (in all languages). As for the “ultimate truth”, I challenge the concept.
Genesis I is very interesting. I have seen it written " In the beginning was the ( word ) and the ( word ) was God."
You note that is in small letters. The idea is that ( word ) was a translator's note for an unknown concept : apt for a finite being trying to conceptualize the infinite. This is consistent with not speaking the ( name ) of ( God ) because that implies knowledge of an unknowable and imperceivable entity.
Would you be able to carry on with your life if you did not endorse the idea that your efforts had results ? I find it impossible to conceive that one could have a belief system that embraced chronic despair. Rather we must endorse the conceit that this is not so : otherwise we would fall into the trap of hopelessness and suicide.
Subjective experience suggests this is an oversimplification - but I am also wary of reading more into things than are actually there.
I do honour my Christian upbringing : but since that is as a 'Red Letter Christian' reducing things to their essentials and being mindful of the place of Thomas the Doubter...that's personal.
Dear John, I totally agree with you. It's very, very hard to live a life endorsing the idea that in the end it will be for nothing; that it will just go into the void. This has given rise to many conceits that have put on the robe of major philosophical or religious movements - of course you know all this already.
As for the word and the translator, I sincerely believe that the whole cosmos is written in an unknown language we don't know how to decipher; rather, in two languages: a godly one and a totally human. We spend our lives trying to understand both (perhaps the second one more intensely), but they remain a curio nonetheless...
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