The Mind of God

Richard Venus (MVUUF Minister 1991-2005) - 2005-05-01

As I age, I am more and more confounded by my insignificance and the question of what does my life mean anyway. How am I more than a tiny speck in a universe or even a world or nation? At the same time, I am compelled by the notion that I am the final authority over my life. There is no one else to whom I can turn and say "you handle things, I'm not able." Ultimately I wonder if I need God at all, and if I do what kind of a God is it that I need?

This morning I hope to have a conversation with myself, going back and forth between what science and religion confirm or deny about the existence of a mindful creator. As some of you know, for years I have wrestled with the metaphysical, the Biblical and the rational significance of God. The God I grew up with no longer makes any sense for me, partly because of my life experiences, partly because as I age my reason does not lead me to any greater understanding than I had earlier. As I have read or discussed the many ways of understanding God with Biblical scholars and noted theologians, I am still puzzled. As I struggle with the nature of God I am regularly brought back to the question, "What good is God anyway?"

Science has explained some things about life better than religion has, especially phenomena like creation, and stars, and cows, and caterpillars and heart beats and atomic particles, to mention only a few.

Several years ago an American astrophysicist, George Smoot, and a team of researchers discovered "echoes of the Big Bang, the moment of creation. "If you're religious," he said, "this is like looking at God." Some might disagree. What Smoot discovered was not God, but fluctuations in cosmic background radiation. Those who are more fundamentally religious might argue that God is not found in some faint cosmic ripples, but rather the One who made it all happen.

Stephen Hawking, the brilliant master-mind, who wrote A Brief History in Time, noted that someday humankind will "truly know the mind of God." He's backtracked on that a bit recently, and certainly he and many of his colleagues have given reasonable explanation for Earth's origins and matters thereof without resorting to the existence of a Mind with a capital M.

Other scientists are uncovering the chemical basis for even love itself, which may boil down to a substance known as oxytocin, stuff researchers inject into rats to make them cuddle. In addition, it appears that the romance of love was designed through evolution to spread the genes of the person doing the loving. As a Columbia University professor said to a group of us recently, "The purpose of life is to create more life." And he would add, love is what helps make it happen.

Religion can no longer simply offer the inexplicable as reason for God's existence, when the past few and certainly the coming several years will offer many scientific explanations of things we once thought only were the purview of those persons of religious faith.

Yet, for some scientists there is more to this universe than meets the eye, something authentically divine about how it all fits together. Science claims to know why we are here, to make more of us, but that raises another question for me, is that all there is? That is the question I seem to be left with these days. Is there more to my life than reproduction and if so what? What is the meaning of my life, of our lives?

Who am I, I ask, but this tiny, insignificant speck in a vast, incomprehensible universe. As Rick Lux puts it, "Are we not anything more than a cow pie on the side of a barn?" That is pretty crude, but in his way Rick is asking the basic question, what is the good of our life anyway? In other words, are we of any significance in a universe so vast it will take 10,000 light years for the illumination from some star out there to reach the Earth. Now that is vast. That is hardly the furthest star away from us and it certainly puts our lives in some cosmic perspective.

One observation that comes recently from physics is that the universe seems calibrated for life's existence. If the force of gravity were pushed upward a bit, stars would burn out faster, leaving little time for life to evolve on the planets circling them. If the relative masses of protons and neutrons were changed by a hair, stars might never be born, since the hydrogen they eat wouldn't exist. In other words, if the initial conditions had been juggled, matter and energy would never have coagulated into galaxies, stars, planets or anything similar upon which life as we know it could emerge. Therefore, as some scientists suggest, only the very combination of the natural world and the mind of God could make such minute calculations possible to ensure that life would result.

There may be something that is hard-wired into our brains that will not let us rest until we discover the connection between the spiritual realm and the natural world. The reason God won't go away is because at some deep level the spiritual and the rational are truly one.

Two doctors, Andrew Newberg and Eugene D'Aquili, have studied the human brain. In one experiment they tie a string to the finger of Robert, a Buddhist monk. Robert gently pulls on the string when he is in a deep meditative state. A computer observing brain function during this time detects a slowing of brain function so there is no intake of information from the outside world. What these scientists argue is that at this point what we know as the self and all of existence merge into one. This suggests to them that this spiritual experience is intimately woven with human biology, particularly as they observed it with many others also in this deep meditative state. In some way, they argue, biology compels the spiritual urge.

The very careful thinker and physicist Paul Davies describes a similar finding. He notes, "The very fact that the universe is creative, and that the laws have permitted complex structures to emerge and develop to the point of consciousness--in other words, that the universe has organized its own self-awareness--is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all. The impression of design is overwhelming." 1

Deepak Chopra, who has written some 25 or more books on the subject, suggests that we are on a journey of the soul, which is in some way independent of us, but when we do good our soul is directing us and leading us to God. The soul, he writes, "is the organizing intelligence that keeps me intact."2 We are, he says, all moving toward oneness with God, which ultimately means that our prayers are to ourselves. God is elusive because he exists in the domain of uncertainty where time and space are not fixed.

Your deepest intelligence knows more about what is good for you than you do...If you give 1 percent of your life over to God every day, you would be the most enlightened person in the world in three months…God lives in the unknown, and when you can embrace it fully, you will be home free."3

Because God is outside the reach of the measurement of a person's subjective experience, Dr. Chopra adds, the reality of God can't be challenged--at the quantum level objectivity and subjectivity merge into each other. The point of the merger is the soul and the fact of the soul is undeniable. He then concludes that "God is elusive because he exists in the domain of uncertainty where time and space are not fixed."

While I am an admirer of Dr. Chopra and his evident concern for the welfare of us all, I must ask him, "Why do you need God?" It appears that "God lives in the unknown and exists in the domain of uncertainty and the path to God is through the soul. Yet if he or she or it is "beyond measurement" I wonder of what value is a God who lives in "the domain of uncertainty."

Science offers a glimpse at least of certainty. Presumably if you let some simple molecules randomly reshuffle themselves over time the fundamental of creation, DNA, would emerge. And Nobel laureate, Ilya Prigogine, sees physical systems that rather than be driven away from stability tend to regain it at a higher level of organization. In other words, the systems themselves create more complex systems and over time evolution has pushed the envelope of complexity and intelligence outward. Evolution of higher forms seems to be continuing.

Philosopher Richard Rorty writes, "Neither those who affirm nor those who deny the existence of God can plausibly claim that they have evidence for their views. Being religious in the modern West does not have much to do with the explanation of specific observable phenomena."4 "My sense of the holy," he continues, "insofar as I have one, is bound up with the hope that someday, any millennium now, my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law."5

Professor Rorty is a secularist who wishes to hold conversations with others who do not share is views, and just such a person is Gianni Vattimo who wrote an essay in response of Dr. Rorty. What they both suggest, one a secularist, the other a Christian, is that our lives are lived in the historical and concrete and because Jesus has had such a profound influence on history and culture even those who do not consider themselves followers cannot live outside his influence. To which I might add, so it is with Santa Claus, both an historical and a fictional character, who is real because he is so much a part of our culture. Just as a babe in a manger and bodily resurrection from the dead are of the hopes and imaginations of the story tellers of their time, that does not make the very special nature of Jesus' life and truth irrelevant or meaningless. Both professors conclude that love is where it's at.

Dr. Vattimo writes, "According to Jesus, the truth that shall make us free is not the objective truth of science or even that of theology: likewise, the Bible is not a cosmological treatise or a handbook or anthropology or theology. The scriptural revelation was not delivered to give us knowledge of how we are, what God is like, what the 'natures' of thing or the laws of geometry are, and so on, as if we could be saved through the 'knowledge' of truth. The only truth revealed to us by Scripture, the one that can never be demythologized in the course of time…is the truth of love, of charity."

Certainly after Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin and Charles Lyell's discoveries that the earth was shaped by geological forces, the notion of a God "up there," pulling the strings on human behavior is barely believable.

The notion that God intervenes in history leaves us with the question, "Why Auschwitz?" In other words why would a God who could intervene in history not stop the extermination of his people before the numbers became too immense to even comprehend? What kind of a God with any relationship to his people not intervene, unless he or she or it has very limited power. Then we ask just what is it about such a divine being that commands our allegiance or prayers?

Science can explain much that occurs in our lives and in our universe, but not all. How do we explain the altruism of heroic soldiers in battle, or mothers sacrificing their lives on behalf of their children? These do not lend themselves easily to a purely rational or scientific explanation, although many argue that these acts are simply due to an inherent drive to have the species survive.

At the end of the day, however, I am left with the notion that most often the concept of God diminishes us because it makes us whole persons only in relationship to something outside ourselves, and denies our own ultimate worth and authenticity.

To which Dr. Vattimo would add, "Our only chance of human survival rests in the Christian commandment of charity."6 That commandment, he would argue, is central not because of the church, or the life of Jesus, or the existence of God, but because of its inherent truth. In other words, we can explain how science and religion coincide or not, but that is somewhat irrelevant if our understanding does not lead us to the fundamental command to love one's neighbor by doing good.

When I began I asked, "How am I more than a tiny speck in a universe or even a world or nation?" I answer, when I serve others in their time of need I become more than I am alone.