Some Thoughts on the Genesis of God

Perhaps in a sense this is what really happened. Whatever happened, it was rather more complex than the normal creation myth: "And God said...."

Not only the currently-dominant monotheisms, but also most Pagan traditions, ancient and modern, tend to place the existence of God outside of the time framework of everything else. One way or another, God was the Creator, and therefore had to exist before everything that was created. I would like to present a dissenting viewpoint that is exactly the reverse.

That there is a God I, personally, have no doubt. This is not for me a matter of "faith", of accepting as true something for which there is no tangible evidence and which is indeed counter to most concrete experience. I don't have to "believe in" God, as I perceive Her, any more than I have to "believe in" rocks or trees or sea gulls. But I don't happen to believe that She was involved in the act of Creation, but rather was created along with the rest of us. In fact, being an advocate of the Closed Universe and of the Big Bang, one could say that I don't really believe in a Creation at all -- we are on a wheel without a beginning or an end.

God came into existence coincidentally with the creation of this phase of our Universe, but not as a fully-formed mature entity. Indeed, for some time after the Big Bang, God was only a potential. The Universe "was void and without form", and so was God. Then over time the Macrocosmic All began to separate and differentiate, and galaxies and stars and planets to take form. God then began to divide, and ultimately there were many gods -- or many separate facets/personalities of God -- potentially one to each "place". But our God, along with all the others, was still a lifeless and almost unformed thing, because the World was dead. It had no volition, no will, no life except for the interplay of unliving matter.

Yes, God was young yet, and had much growing and developing and maturing to do. Life came into being, perhaps inevitably because of the God personality that was expressed as the "play" of dead matter. And so God came alive as well. And continued to grow and mature.

We humans, and in a different and to us still alien way the whales and dolphins, began to become the Mind of God. Our own brains contain all the layers of earlier animal life: the "reptile brain", the limbic brain of other mammals, the supralimbic which we alone of land animals possess. The whales have those, and add the paralimbic which is theirs alone. But each in our own way we have intelligence and memory, and we tell stories and pass on information from generation to generation, so we also represent "racial" memory. God now has the capacity to think and remember as well as to feel, though perhaps hasn't had much practice just yet.

Yes, I believe -- on the evidence of my own senses and my knowledge of the world around me -- that the entire world is interconnected. All parts interrelate with other parts, and the net effect is health or illness. The Mind of God, like the individual minds of many people, is to some extent fragmented and dysfunctional. But like an individual, parts of the mind realize this and are attempting to take action to improve the situation. It is unfortunate that there is no easily-available therapist; God has to do this Herself.

This is not a cold and abstract thing. God is "real" as a personality; one can relate to Her directly in any number of ways. The important thing is to realize that we are dealing with a personality -- with a living, feeling individual -- who is the Sum that is more than Her parts. We can approach Her coldly, or warmly. We can visualize Her in any way that is likely to be mutually beneficial, because this is not a one-way relationship. Through time people have formed various images of God, either as a single universal entity or as whole pantheons of specialists. I would say that all are in some sense or other "true", because they all represent abstractions of whatever the "real" truth is. It's not likely that any of us will ever know that truth.

I say that this is not a one-way relationship, because we collectively define/produce the personality of God. Both for each of us individually, and for the world as a whole, She is and will be what we make Her. We each carry part of God, one aspect of the whole, within us, so in a very real sense "thou art God". Without us, God would be stupid, animal. Without Her, we are each isolated -- cut off from communion with the universe that contains us.

It therefore behooves us to take thought on the personality of God, and to structure our interactions with each other and with the broader ecology in such a way that She will want to deal kindly with us, and not cast us out as a destructive component. By working to make this the type of world in which we would like to live, we can in turn make it a world that would like to have us live in it. If we, as individuals and as a species, demonstrate our love for God, She in turn will demonstrate Her care for us.