For as long as we've been around (roughly 5771 years), we've been asking the question: what is god? Now, I'm fairly confident in what I can say that god is
not. God is not a dude in the sky with a white beard and a robe. God is not constantly watching us and judging us, putting us in a book under naughty or nice.
What I do feel that I know is that god is something that the human mind is incapable of comprehending. God is something beyond this plane of existence but peeking through into perceivable space. Confused yet? Just stay with me cause it makes more sense in a bit.
God is gravity. We are god. The planet 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 hear makes god "live". But just as those cells don't know how the whole body functions, we don't know everything about 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 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, I know. Now I just 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.
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| A 2-D illustration of the spacetime curvature theory. |
Einstein the best example. Until him, we'd understood the how of gravity. All objects have a gravitational pull, the bigger or more dense 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 more dense? Einstein saw why, in short it was his theory of spacetime 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 beginner entry on spacetime for us 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 could 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 Jewish. 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 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."
