Nearer my God to Thee…

The presence or lack therein of the Creator is a personal choice and everyone has their own thoughts on the subject. Some are zealous, some laissez Faire, some disabuse the notion of a God all together. And that is ok. Boyle, the chemist, took the position that there was no harm in going to church and worshipping God – if there was a God you did your part, if not there was no harm done. According to a show on the subject the human brain is hardwired for religion and belief in a Creator. “Through the Wormhole” had an episode on sciences search for the creator. Some of the scientists featured viewed God’s plan as a huge mathematical construct, and things are or happened because of the action of particles either theoretical or known.
It is as if God wants us to come to him and has left clues to find him. Some are red herrings, some lead to discoveries that bring us closer to meeting Him. Galileo, Einstein, and scientists of that ilk could be viewed as being prophets of a sort, as could be any of the physicists delving into the origins of the universe. For my part God is within each of us, whether in the form of some physical particle or force or just in the spiritual sense and binds us (and everything for that matter) together. One neurologist advances the theory that the right frontal lobe of the human brain develops feelings of anxiety when contemplating “the end.” To circumvent this anxiety it has developed the concept of God sop that there is in fact no end. While this might be calming to an individual is it fact is God just a construct of the mind to prevent us for jumping off the nearest cliff?

Science is great and has made huge strides in understanding the how, but not the “why.” And therein lays God. For instance, why the earth? Just luck of the draw? A lot of things had to come together in one place at one time to make it suitable for any kind of life. The cards of the universe are stacked against this development for the most part. SO then why did everything come together? Just chance? And now on to humans -- we are starting to understand the how, but why? We certainly don’t benefit the earth in any constructive way; nature could motor on nicely (and probably better) without us. This is where the faith that we were just meant to be comes in.

Religion may have first developed as a method for humans to fill in the blanks. Most people become uneasy if the why part of the equation remains blank. Because God wants it that way fills in that blank nicely. This also alludes back to that pesky temporal lobe, which needs to have a ready answer to the question of where we’re going or anxiety builds. So why are we, where are we headed, and is there some sort of central figure pulling the strings to make It happen? There is no answer to this, ergo it must be God.

I do not mean to seem flippant about God or religion in general, nor do I have any answers. Certainly religion has played an important part in establishing rules to live by and providing rewards for doing so and penalties for ignoring the rules. It is good for people to have amoral compass to prevent them from harming each other, so in that sense religion has made a great contribution to the lives of humans. And it is too tough to believe that all this is just some pointless exercise, some product of evolution with no set purpose. People without a purpose in their lives would be totally useless. Just hanging on to life in anticipation of the next version of the Iphone is a poor excuse for existence and all in store for us a hole in the ground to bitter to contemplate. For now all I can offer is that God wants it this way and so it is.