IS THERE A GOD?

Is there a God? Does it matter? The very question causes pain. It hurts our human nature, which cries out for an answer. It hurts the earth itself, which needs to know about its own foundations. Is there a God?

The popular debate is now between science and the proponents of ‘intelligent design’. Science penetrates relentlessly further and further back into the origins of the universe, deeper and deeper into the structure of the material. Proponents of intelligent design argue that the universe is so immensely complicated, the structure of life so precise and finely-tuned, that it could not possibly have come about by accident.

The path of science may be amazing but it seems to lead irrevocably into a spiritless world. The idea of intelligent design somehow doesn’t satisfy our need for a complete answer.

The problem is that we’re dealing with two things of a like kind. Science assumes that everything in the universe proceeds from matter because it can see nothing else. ‘Intelligent design’ is also a materialistic notion. Its basic analogy is the watchmaker and the watch. The watch is such a precise and finely-tuned structure it couldn’t possibly have come about by accident. And of course it didn’t. The problem is that the watch is a ‘thing’ – the world isn’t. The world is a living being. Everything in it is alive and inter-related.

What creates and sustains that life? The popularizers of science are fond of pointing to DNA. They talk about it as the fundamental ‘building blocks of life’. However, this assumes that life comes out of its trace elements. You only need to penetrate the structure far enough and you will see how this happens. The assumption is that matter on its own will produce life. Hence the more sensationalistic reports about scientists creating cells in a test-tube. In fact they never do – something living has to be there to begin with.

The alternative is to see DNA not as the building blocks of life but as the traces which life leaves behind. Likewise the ‘Human Genome’ – another wonderful discovery, taken to be the fundamental map of human life. Once more this is an interpretation based on the belief – often left unspoken – that life is the product of extremely complicated physical processes. Undoubtedly the processes are complicated, but can we not see something like the human genome as the pattern that life itself imprints on the physical rather than the other way round?

Therefore if life doesn’t emerge from DNA or similar physical traces and it isn’t to be found in things like the human genome, no matter how hard you look, where is it? What is it? The only time the human being is ever purely physical is when he or she is dead.

There lies the crux of the matter. Science and such theories as intelligent design are forever dealing with what is actually dead – that is physical matter – and trying to prove, in their different ways, how life came from it or was built into it. An impossible task.

I’ve said that DNA comprises the traces left behind by human life. I’ve suggested that things like the human genome are merely the pattern life imprints on the physical. That leaves us with the conclusion that life is a creative, sustaining, non-physical force ever-present in the human being and in the world. It moulds and shapes and forms us in the most complicated and precise manner. It leaves it traces and patterns behind for us to study.

‘A creative, sustaining, non-physical force, ever-present in the human being and in the world.’ This is the first step in the answer to the question, ‘Is there a God?’.

 

Best wishes, today,

Landar

 

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