truth dancer wrote:But when we look at the gifts, or blessings, if you will, of existence, plenitude, and moral guidance (among so many others), and ask who has given us these, it's easy to see a much more certain and immediate answer than "a supernatural deity." Our lives, our health, liberty, and plenty, and our moral traditions have been given to us--by other human beings. For these gifts, we are in debt to others, principally our forbears. So, when we thank God, who stands in the place of God if not collective humanity? And when we identify our moral and religious traditions as originating with God, who, again, stands in the place of God if not those who have gone before us?
I would expand this. ;-)
We did not get all we have primarily from human beings but from everything that has ever existed prior to us. If not for the trillions and trillions and trillions of events that took place prior to our emergence, we would not even be here.
We own our very earth to an exploding star. We own our life to our earth. We owe our very form to fish. From where did we get our lungs? Eyes? How about those little creatures who figured out how to capture light from the sun? Where would we be without mitrochondria? We get our energy to exist from the sun. We got our brains from the worms. I could go on and on...
My point is... we are just a recent expression from a collective gift of everything that has ever existed. And there is yet more to come much, much more.
It is not just humankind that stands in the place of God.. it is everything that has existed. IMHO... ;-)
~dancer~
Hi TD,
I understand. Obviously human beings didn't originally create themselves. But my aim isn't to establish the existence of a self-existent God, nor of one who possesses all the classical attributes of the theistic God. I have no problem with a God who emerged through natural processes.
We do owe our existence to the Universe more broadly. But the Universe, for each of us, would not exist were it not for our human forbears. Our existence can be attributed to multiple entities--e.g., even to our immediate parents. Questions still arise though as to how to most meaningfully mark off the boundaries of a religiously avaiable God. When I think of God as everything in the Cosmos, it tends to greatly dilute, rather than enhance, a sense of larger purpose. Human beings are purposive beings; so a trans-individual, collective human God might comprehensibly be seen as a sort of purposive entity. While individual purposes have varied over time, certain purposes have been common to most human beings throughout history, and these have helped shape the trend of human destiny, which can be seen as the direction which God has been takng. Most of the rest of the Cosmos, on the other hand, outside of humanity, appears for all we can tell to not be purposive. The Universe, as you noted, doesn't really have any "aims." So to identify the Universe as God over identifying humanity as God is to make God impersonal rather than transpersonal and non-purposive rathher than purposive. I--necessarily--identify less with such an impersonal entity and draw less (if indeed I draw any) sense of larger purpose from it.
This is not to lessen the grandeur of the Universe. I think we ought to be lost in the wonder of contemplating the Cosmos of which we are part. But to me this can comfortably be quite separate from identification with a trans-personal, purposive collective human God. The
relationship of God and the Universe would then be an additional object of wonder and reflection.
by the way, there's an author whom I need to get around to reading, who suggests, using up-to-date cosmological concepts, that the fine-tuning of our universe for life may be the product of past civilizations from previous universes, who created such baby universes--something we will likely be able to do in our own species-future. Our purpose, then, should we choose to accept it, would be to perpetuate life still further in the Cosmos by generating universes capable, like ours, of sustaining life.
Whatever the merits of this idea may prove to be, it is quite compatible with what I'm suggesting, and may serve to unite the cosmic and the human levels of perspective. Perhaps God is indeed something broader than merely humanity. Perhaps God includes us, but stretches back in time before our universe to earlier civilizations who made our universe and our lives possible. God would then encompass not only our species and theirs, but the Universe itself, to which they gave rise, and which gave rise to us, all part of a grand chain of life and purpose.
Highly, highly, highly speculative, I know. I'm just saying that focusing on humankind as a religiously available, natural God need not necessarily limit us to seeing humanity alone as part of the divine.
Don