There is a common saying- “The God I believe in is not the same God you don’t believe in”. The saying highlights a fundamental point important in any discussion about God- we have to define what we mean by “God”.  Conceptions of “God” vary greatly and what one person believes in may be nothing like what others conceptualize.  If you define terms and are clear about what you are saying, people often will find that they actually believe very similar things, but label them differently.  Baha’u’llah has given us a more comprehensive understanding of God than any previous revelation, and it is an understanding that is consistent with the nature of our world discovered by science, but ultimately transcends it.  Let’s start with a essay about why it is reasonable to believe that there is a God, an Intelligence at the root of all being, based on our modern scientific worldview, and then we can build other ideas from there.

When we look at the natural world, as presented to us by the intellectual investigations of philosophy and science over the last several centuries, there are certain things we can comfortably conclude.  First, the natural world is rational, meaning it follows consistent and logically derivable rules that are present across the known universe.  Indeed, the nature of creation is mathematical. It is a remarkable and under-appreciated fact that we can make measurements in a laboratory, derive a mathematical equation, and based on purely abstract reasoning from that equation, derive further equations that then we can test back in the lab and find to be predictive of the physical system we are studying. This means that, underlying the physical processes that exist, there are abstract mathematical and rational principles that are discoverable by intelligence. In other words, the world is intelligible, and intelligible to us.  In thinking about God, both of those facts are significant.

13.8 billion years ago- immediately after the Big Bang- matter in the universe consisted of just  hydrogen and helium- two simple and relatively non reactive elements. Natural laws worked on those elements to produce structures of increasing complexity, that progressively manifested higher functions such as the ability to grow, reproduce, and eventually become conscious. The appearance of human consciousness was enormously significant landmark event in the history of the universe.  With the appearance of humans, with our powers of rationality and inductive reasoning, nature had produced an entity that could then turn around and understand nature itself.

Imagine nature and the material stuff of existence are like a book sitting on a table.  The book desired to read itself but had no power to do so, so it rearranged and evolved its own elements- the elements that made up the book itself- to create a reader who could sit beside itself and read the book.  That is essentially what has happened. Nature, by creating humans, created free will, creativity, rationality, and the ability to understand itself.  This simple fact, accepted by every serious thinker and scientist all over the world, is enormously significant when we address the question of what is at the ultimate root of existence.  One can possibly see the natural world as mindless when it produces seemingly mindless entities, but when it produces a mind that can then turn around and explain itself to itself, we’ve crossed a threshold that profoundly changes how we should think about the ultimate nature of the universe itself.

While those observations may strongly lead us to conclude that there is an Intelligence at the root of the universe, that conclusion has a major competitor- materialistic philosophy, and it is related to science. One of the “rules” of science is that we try to avoid metaphysical assumptions about reality when doing science. We assume that the answers for why things are the way they are in the natural world reside in the natural world itself, using materialistic explanations that are confined to that world.  Materialism is therefore a methodological assumption of science, and a highly useful one, because it keeps science as a coherent body of knowledge.  Though highly effective as a “methodological approach”, as the “rules of the game” in science, when we broaden materialism to a philosophy of everything- the idea that nothing exists besides inanimate matter and the natural laws that define their functions- it gets more problematic. Philosophical materialism is very popular right now as it is seen as a simple and rational way of looking at the world. It is that. Moreover, it has a certain coherence that is attractive. The success of the materialistic assumptions that underlie science itself has made it even seem like a proven idea. The problem is that philosophical materialism ultimately has a very limited range of explanatory tools in its tool box to explain the broad picture of reality, seemingly too few to explain what we know about the universe. And the place it really struggles is explaining us. 

Imagine you are walking in the woods and you find an iPhone sitting on the forest floor.  You have never seen such a device but you begin to explore its function and soon find out about its marvelous abilities and the complexity of its structure.  What is the probability that such an object could have arisen there on its own- that the natural elements could have arranged themselves mindlessly to produce such a complex and coordinated entity?  Obviously, the possibility of that happening on its own is so low that nobody would regard it as a serious idea.  But the iPhone is less complex than the simplest level of biological organisms. 

One of the simplest biological organisms is a prokaryotic cell- the kind of cells bacteria are made of.  There are billions of them on and in your body as you read this.  But the prokaryotic cell is not a simple thing.  If you were to shrink yourself and somehow get into a cell, you would find it to be an extraordinary dynamic and organized place.  The average prokaryotic cell produces 2000 proteins/second off its DNA.  Each of those proteins has a particular and very specific function and will be recycled after it completes its function.  It is an environment with a whirring level of activity, all coordinated, regulated, with feedback loops and other strategies to allow the cell to structure its activity and respond to its environment.  And the prokaryotic cell is one of the simplest biological organisms in creation!

The most complex biological entity in creation is the human brain, with trillions of cells, each more complex than the simple prokaryotic cell, and all coordinated together to help you do all the things you do in life.  The vast range of human invention, the products of the work of millions of minds over the course of history, are not even close to creating anything as complex and coordinated as the human brain.  Moreover, there are no convincing materialistic answers for why humans manifest the distinctive qualities that we do- subjective consciousness (your sense of “I”), abstract thought, commitment to abstract ethical ideals like justice and mercy, and complex language.  Even our love of music is a mystery.  One can imagine that answers might be forthcoming as science advances, but we are still left with a fundamental question as to how material things grew to manifest these remarkable qualities on their own. 

So let’s ask that question more directly. What is the chance that all that we know about the world and ourselves came into being on its own?  Materialism ultimately provides only two possibilities for how mindless matter can organize itself into complex structures capable of these extraordinary functions- random chance and determinism (sometimes referred to as “necessity”).  Remember, materialism has no recourse to mind in any form. No explanation can reflect intentionality or purpose.  Things must happen by chance, or they reflect the inherent nature of a piece of matter and the natural laws that act on it. That is, things happen because they are “determined” to happen that way, by an objects inherent nature, which it cannot change.

In answering the question, we can pretty much rule out chance, but will come back to it in a minute. The other possibility- “necessity” or “determinism”- is that these qualities of material things- the ability to form more complex entities that can perform higher functions- is baked into the laws of nature and matter itself such that there are “determined” outcomes that unfold over time.  But what does it say about the laws of nature and matter when it is baked into them to produce mind and consciousness? A system that is set up to produce- deterministically- mind and consciousness is a system that was more likely designed by something with mind and consciousness in the first place.

So then we are back to random chance as the best materialistic explanation, but our world is so vastly improbable to have happened by chance that it’s really not a serious idea. One popular theory is that there are an infinite number of potential universes and we just happen to live in the one in which these highly improbable events have occurred.  Given an infinite range of possibilities, anything is possible!  This is true, but it can hardly masquerade as a serious explanation.  Any detective who came to a crime scene, looked at the evidence before him, shrugged his shoulders and said that maybe there are an infinite number of universes and “anything is possible”, would lose credibility quickly. 

The more one meditates on these issues, the more evident it becomes that material things and mindless laws are not good candidates to be the ultimate root of life. Materialistic philosophy, though useful as a guide for science, is too limited for more fundamental explanations of reality. That is not the fault of science.  Science is only as good as its assumptions, and its assumption is that everything is material, because material things are all science can study!  There’s an old story in philosophy of a drunk who is looking for the keys he lost on the street, but he is only searching one side of the street. When someone asks him why he doesn’t search the other side, he says it is because there is no light posts on that side. Think of science as the light that shines on the street.  It’s natural for materialistic science to look for the kind of answers it can prove are true, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t true answers that are non-materialistic! To look at the world in a purely materialistic way is not wrong- the world is made up of material stuff- but many people are afraid to stray out from under its canopy and find ways to shine light on the other side of the street, thus depriving themselves of a broader picture of reality.

From my personal perspective, the much more coherent view is that the ultimate basis of everything that exists is not material things in themselves, nor the mindless laws that define their actions, but intelligence.  Like chess pieces on a chess board that don’t move themselves, but are propelled by intelligence, nature and matter are similarly the result of intelligence. It is simply a better and more coherent explanation for the reality of the universe and how it has evolved creatures like us. I’d like to say that I’m somehow uniquely clever to come to this conclusion, but I’m not.  Most of the great philosophers and thinkers in the history of the human race have come to the same conclusion.

Now we can ask a second question- what is the nature of the Intelligence that produced the universe we know?  We can say with certainly that it is a vast and ancient Intelligence that far transcends any intelligence we have.  As we meditate further, we recognize that we are all completely and utterly dependent on that Intelligence.  Without it, we would not have lived and nothing else we know would have ever existed. Everything we have ever known is dependent on that Reality for its very existence.  Acknowledging and becoming consciously aware of that truth is not to believe in a “delusion”, but rather it is to awaken to the the true reality of our situation.

There are several analogies given in the Baha’i writings to explain our relationship to the Divine Reality.  One is that our relationship to the Force underlying all existence is like a fish to water.  It goes without saying that a fish depends on water. It is the medium in which it moves, how it gets its oxygen, and water permeates every organ and cell of a fish so completely that it has no life without it.  But is the fish aware of its dependence on the water?  Does the fish even know that water exists!?  It’s so permeated and dependent on water that it might not even realize that it’s there. The relationship of God to us and everything in creation is like that.

There are also a few other simple conclusions we can draw from observations of humans and human societies, that tell us a little bit more about us and our relationship to God. It is clear that belief in an Intelligence or transcendent Force at the root of all being is pretty much universal among humans, even without philosophical consideration of the question.  Virtually all societies had that conception, in some form or another.  We can also say that the desire for humans to connect with that Force is extremely powerful, as manifested by the universal presence of religion in all societies until the modern period.  In other words, we have a “spiritual instinct” that is an inherent part of our reality and consciousness.  For many people throughout history, no more noble thing could be imagined than trying to understand and connect with the Root of all existence.  Religion then is an expression of what it means to be human- truly human.

Many people, including scientists and philosophers all over the world, would not disagree fundamentally with the points above. Indeed, they are not infrequently voiced by leading intellectuals the world over. When Einstein said he wanted “to know God’s thoughts, the rest are mere details”, he was expressing a desire to understand the Root of all existence, which he believed to be intelligent. The issue then becomes, not whether there is a Divine Reality at the root of all life, but the nature of that Reality and Its relationship to us and to nature.  It is in our “concept of God” where humans most often disagree. The belief in God is diminishing in many parts of the world, not because we no longer have a reason to believe in God, but the way we believed in God in the past is no longer coherent with our modern reality. Our concepts of God haven’t evolved as much as our knowledge and understanding in other areas of life.

In part 2 of this essay, we will explore the concept of God that Baha’u’llah brought into the world and how that illuminates our understanding of our relationship to God.