God is a loaded word – It evokes emotion, a kind of abstract father (or mother) figure that can be comforting. But ultimately fixes the notion firmly in the human symbolic realm. All ideas of God are a kind of a projection of human characteristics that permit more easily relationship with something that is ineffable.
So define God first of all. The deity, the creator. For the greater part of the religious faith inclined population, the word God means a personal God. A God that has a persona, that has opinions, that judges your actions, that is capable of love. A Father figure. A beacon that guides the way through this foggy morass of confusion we call life. Who always knows the rights and wrongs of a situation even if we do not. A fixed goal. We wish to achieve union with God. In this life where we are pushed and pulled by our own desires and convictions. By others desires and convictions. To have a fixed lodestone, a destination, must be very comforting. Is he a wise old man with a beard in the sky? Or is this the childish interpretation. Whatever your interpretation, God is the creator. That specifies an individual, with will. That is the projection of the human template upon that which it has no business being projected upon.
Nothing on earth suggests that it is so. It is much more likely that is no one looking after you. No one protecting you. There is certainly no one protecting those children in T shirt factories, in whatever backwater permits such atrocities. Nor the men women and children in war zones, eating their dinner in peace and subsequently vaporised by accidentally friendly fire. Or anyone in Hiroshima, or Auschwitz. Or is it just that these humans were unworthy of its attentions? So if the all powerful deity exists, then it seems ill inclined to help us. But it's supposed to love us? Oh yeah, I forgot, this world is a vale of tears. It's supposed to be there to make us suffer so that we merit the kingdom of heaven... Then what about those who live in the garden of earthly delights. As Blake put it - Every morn and every night / Some are born to sweet delight / Every night and every morn / Some to endless night are born / Some are born to sweet delight / Some are born to endless night.
And it seems that either which, God has a way to shiv you on the deal. If you are born happy and well off. Well loved. Have an occupation you enjoy. A good marriage. Excellent children. Live a long and happy life and die satisfied and surrounded by your loved ones... Well by the vale of tears logic, you have not suffered enough.
Of course, this is simply shooting elephants in a barrel. And of course, beyond that there are more sophisticated interpretations of God than the merely personal. There is the force of indifferent creation. But there is much baggage that goes with the word God. Our desire to call something God echoes our own childhood sense of the word. The word means innocent attachment to something all powerful. Being loved. Being protected... etc. No such attributes can realistically be imposed on creation. It just is. To personify it in any way shape or form or to attach it to something that gives us comfort, that has appealing cultural resonances, is to fall into the same age old trap of making it an entity with a will and a purpose.
It is possible that you could call God everything and everywhere. It seems reasonable to postulate that since we are beings of creation, that we arise out of its activity, along with all other creatures, that Creation might well look through our eyes at the world of its own making but that still doesn't make it God. The problem lies with the word and the cultural connotations that it implies. The problem lies in the human tendency to project its own characteristics onto the forces that made us. We no longer need to do that. We have the images from the Hubble... We have the evidence of background radiation. We do know that though we are created beings we do not resemble creation. We are manifestations of it. A particular form, evolved in a specific context.
To imagine that which created us as having feelings for us – Imagining, for example some facsimile of a nervous system, which it would require to feel anything, is a certain projection because feeling things is a human characteristic – (It’s also a badger characteristic, but I can’t remember the last time I met a badger in church). But let’s just imagine for a second that there is a God. Let’s imagine the planet earth as God. Let’s imagine the Gaia Hypotheses taken to the Nth extent. The planet is alive. Not only a self regulating system, but as it happens, conscious. Let’s just imagine that it has willed us into being, so that it may know itself. That this system is peering out at itself using the medium of out sensory equipment. Even if that were true - What does it mean to us? We are still individually irrelevant to it. And it is still irrelevant to us. We cannot know it. We might like to kneel in prayer before it, but a fat lot of good that has ever done, other than perhaps to make us feel better about it all. (Not an invalid reason) It might be nice to know it's there. To understand what the hell is going on. But nonetheless, it should ultimately make no difference to our behaviour. Its purposes could not be ours. Our purposes could not be its.
Even if that Manichean, Judeo Christian scenario turned out to be true. I think I wouldn't want to have anything whatever to do such a capricious, sadistic, careless, callous being in the first place. He plants us in the middle of a game of craps and hands us a loaded dice.
So is there nothing there? You might ask. There is plenty there. There is the magnificent wonder of creation which I might add, is all the more awe inspiring due to the fact that it evolved from simple origins according to the specific behaviours permitted in this plane of existence. What other planes of existence exist I do not know. I do not know enough to accept or deny their existence. I do know enough to say that it is so unlikely that there is a God (according to any recognisable definition), that it is likewise unlikely that we exist as entities, independent of our physical bodies, and that we travel to any alternate realms when our bodies end.
(Extract from Zen in the art of exhaling Carbon Dioxide)
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