For as long as we've been around (roughly 5800 years), we've been asking the question: what is God? Now, I'm fairly confident in what I can say what God is not. God is not a dude in the sky with a white beard and a robe. God is not constantly watching and judging us, putting us in a book under the naughty or nice lists.God is gravity. We are God. The planet Earth is God. The same way that all of our cells somehow manage to work together and make us live, by some bizarre bit of chance, us being heard makes God "live". But just as those cells don't know how the whole body functions, we don't know how the universe works. The mysteries of the universe: dark matter, black holes, gravity; these are the very definition of mystical forces.
Gravity is the force that binds everything together in the universe. Without gravity the galaxy doesn't stay together, the earth doesn’t orbit around the sun, and we don't stay on Earth. Beyond this, gravity is at once the most simple of forces and the most complicated. It's easy to understand that an object falls to earth but understand the why, that's where we find God.
To completely understand the ins and outs of how the universe functions is such a lofty goal the comparison to understanding God is inevitable. Even if we understand every bit of gravity, where did the design come from? Why should the universe work that way? Why should we need air to live, or be limited to our small plot of dirt and water? It takes an amazing type of person to even begin to answer those questions. Perhaps even… a prophet.
I know, now I must sound crazy. A physics prophet but hold on, there's room for them in my crazy theory. I'm not talking about Moses or Elijah. No, the prophets as I see it are people like Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein.
Every animal on earth understands on some level that when you drop an object it falls to earth. It's when man was able to think and ask the question why that we began to approach God. It was when the answers to questions like that were discovered that God was showing Itself to people.
Now don't think that this is some Contact thing where God's going to show up as your deceased father. The way these "prophets" see God is that their mind takes a step forward in evolution. The mind of someone like Newton or Einstein has opened up to a new level of consciousness and seen a piece of the how the universe works in a way that no person had been able to see before.
Einstein is the best example. Until him, we understood the how’s of gravity. All objects have a gravitational pull, the bigger or denser the object is the more gravity it has. But why? Why should an object pull other things toward it, just because it's larger and denser? Einstein saw why, in short it was his theory of space-time curvature. I won't get into describing it here except to say that it's like throwing a ball onto a sheet that has a weight in the center. The object goes towards the ball because the weight has created a well that the ball falls towards. (Wikipedia has a pretty nice entry on space-time for scientist wannabes).
Einstein was the first to be able to see into this piece of the universe; this piece of God. Then, like a prophet does, he shared what he had learned with the rest of humanity, translating God into something we can comprehend. Compare it to the idea of Moses, translating the word of God into the Torah and the Ten Commandments. He translated God into morals that the Jewish people could understand.
That brings me to a final point. I'm Catholic. I don't consider myself an atheist or even an agnostic. Can I do this? I don't know. It's a bit of a crisis of faith for me honestly, but more so I believe in the morals I was raised on. The way I was raised, especially regarding religion, taught me to question everything and explore any theory, any possibility. My thinking and philosophizing brought me to this conclusion and I think that at the end of the day that’s what religion should preach above all us: question what you're told.
On researching to make this post I found a quote by Carl Sagan:
"The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity."
True, it's not fun to worship gravity itself. The laws of physics are significantly less dramatic than the laws of the Judeo-Christian God. More than that though, a God that doesn't preside over us means that our lives are in our own hands and that is somewhat scary.
Sure, physics won't help us in a time of need and it won't smite wrongdoers, but what I don't agree with Mr. Sagan about is that this version of God is "emotionally unsatisfying". After all, what could be more magical than something completely unknown? In Italian we have been saying for centuries when someone dies that :”passed to a better living” and while I don’t know where this saying comes from or what its reason might be, the last time I saw my dad he convinced me of the existence of the soul in every human being for having witnessed it leaving the body at death and putting this concept with the infinity of energy demonstrated by Einstein I now believe that there certainly is something after death and I choose to believe that after we abandon our body old, sick or broken we (our souls) rejoin those of others we knew or loved while living in some other type of dimension created by the human mind, or the cumulative intelligence and living experience under the influence of gravity, or God.
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