"Gaia" by Anselm Feuerbach (1875) |
What is God consciousness? From the human point of view,
it’s the awareness of God, but it begs the question of the relation of a
supreme being to those he, she or it looks down upon from wherever such spirits
reside. Does God have a conscience? Is that the motivation behind the
order we see in nature and the fact that at the day of reckoning the last end
up being first? Or is God's will a kind of value free, Buddha mind, a force of unconditional love and generosity that's ultimately
non-judgmental in spirit. Humans can’t be faulted for anthropomorphizing God,
but it’s interesting to try to conceive of forces that have nothing to do with
human wishes or will. God is often conceived of as either a bearded creature of
an earth mother like the Gaia of Greek mythology. In the former case God is a
saddened being a bit like the mythological figure ofAtlas who bore the weight of the world on his
shoulders; in the latter, the female personification often takes the form of
one of those old fashioned l930’s gum chewing switchboard operators. Requests
from supplicants come in and God plugs one in with the other, attempting to
answer prayers like ones from those seeking parking spaces near the restaurant they've pulled up to on rainy evenings. Is it possible to imagine a God who's not trafficking in human
desire and who's not presiding over the agora and deciding who gets what? Is
there a God who without being unkind is totally uninvolved in human affairs.
Let’s take a planet like Kepler 62f, in the Goldilocks part of the universe,
1200 light years from earth ("Two Promising Places to Live, 1,200 Light-Years From Earth," NYT, 4/18/13). Such planets, with climates that would allow for water, seem like candidates
for familiar life forms, but who ever said the dice throw that resulted in mankind was
going to be replicated? In other words, if God tried to keep tabs on all his creations, he would have his or her hands full. And it’s not hard
to imagine God quitting while she or he were ahead. Copernicus proposed the
heretical notion that the earth was not at the center of the universe. From
then on mankind has had to deal with the probability that its not likely God’s chosen people.
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