An Awareness of God part I

It all came together in Florida. I was vacationing with my family, sitting on a small dock in a salt-water lagoon along the inter-coastal waterway on the Gulf of Mexico fishing with my 4-year-old daughter. It was the first time she had tried fishing and she wasn’t disappointed with all the action from the fish. In between baiting the hook and getting her line set I was looking into the clear waters of the lagoon. The mangrove trees were standing on their tiptoe roots, providing plenty of space for shellfish (I think they were a species of oysters) to gather. Small crabs climbed up the pilings of the dock resting above the water line. Below them were funny shaped green and pink tubules that looked to be made of jelly during low tide. Overhead an osprey was diving for his dinner. And it struck – everywhere possible living things strive to thrive and grow. I had been surrounded by nature before, but for the first time I thought about the essence of life in a new way. What if the creation of life so many millions of years ago was not a happy accident in the primordial soup of the ancient oceans? What if it was inevitable? What if, because of the very structure of the fabric of matter, life could not help but come into being? It was a long process for sure, but something as miraculous as living organisms, as the code of life, DNA, can’t be restricted to a timeline comfortable for human experience. I had been reading about super string theory. This theory of matter posits that at the very base of everything, all matter; there are the tiniest of things called strings, which are more like vibrations than anything. These strings make up all matter, and their behaviour creates what we see and feel around us. The theory also creates the existence of 10 or more dimensions, which is something way too intense to go into right now! What is important for what I am trying to say is that beneath everything, beneath the molecules that are made of atoms, which in turn are made of different particles, are these strings. When I linked this idea from modern physics to the philosophies of Baruch Spinoza, which reflected parts of string theory in the seventeenth centaury. Spinoza reasoned that the entire universe emanates inexorably from the immutable core of infinite substance, and that this substance if God. Without getting too bogged down in either theoretical physics or metaphysical philosophy the existence of God is in the very structure of the universe and it’s laws, and the very structure of the universe made the existence of living beings inevitable, since a happy accident could not have survived. In order for life to have begun there would have to have been many, many happy accidents, so many that we cannot call them accidents, but the inevitable result based on the very structure of matter: Spinoza’s substance, super strings, whatever you wish to call it.

I have to say I’ve always been uncomfortable with the notion that God is some narcissistic super natural ghost that zooms around randomly bestowing favours on those who swell His head with praise and punishing those that don’t. I would think that either God would be more mature than a spoiled preschooler and not so limited to a floating ethereal being. For a very long time the idea a God, the existence of God seemed to me to be an academic exercise with little or no bearing on the real world; the world men and women had to live in and make sense of. But the idea of God being so much larger than this, being the very essence of things and the laws that governed them, this impressed itself on my mind. It was not so much that I discovered a belief in God but that I realized God was in action all the time, everywhere, regardless of what I thought, as sure as gravity holds me to the earth and oxygen fills my lungs with each unobserved breath.

It is this inevitability of life which you can see after a forest fire, or attempts by humans to erase a natural setting. Tiny plants force their way in. Insects and rodents make new homes. Life is irrepressible. The very structure beneath life is irrepressible. God is irrepressible. I think as humans were are afflicted with hubris in many forms, and one is that we see ourselves like God, instead of other living things, simpler things like coral. Coral lives, grows then dies, only to serve as the base from which new coral lives and grows. This cycle has allowed coral to spread and continue, and to create an environment in which other living things can exist, even to the extent of creating entire islands! What if we are no better or worse than coral? This is not to diminish all that humans have achieved, but put into perspective the contribution of each of our lives to the greater effect on human kind, good or ill. Do we erode what we were given by those who have gone before us, or do we build on it so that humans, and the other living things we affect, continue and thrive?

An Awareness of God II