God

Creationism postulates the possibility that the Bible is literally true. They suggest that no need exists for a long period of time before man appears, that man is the point of creation anyway and that therefore God would be wasting his time fiddling with a creation for a vast period of time that does not include man. (This theory is remarkably similar to the old theory, also produced by the church, that the earth was the center of the cosmos). The motivation of creationists is to try to avoid the question, never far off: if God used a stepwise process in creation of the cosmos as in the scientific view, why posit the existence of God at all. Creationists know, though they have difficulty expressing it, what the danger is in this attitude. They realize that, in the absence of God, man must be the master of his fate and that that always leads to half baked schemes like communism and nazism that lead to a great deal of suffering. The other problem that creationists fear, I believe, is the loss of meaning that results from imagining a clockwork cosmos without a creative intelligence.

That is not to say that God, as currently conceived by men, must exist though. That is recourse to the old saw that, "If God doesn't exist, we will have to invent Him." Which is as much as to say that since God isn't apparent, let us invent Him in such a way as to aid us in fending off this kind of suffering. I think it much more reasonable to use the definition, "I am what am." This is the definition that God provides in some translations of Genesis. With this definition there is no question of the existence of God, just His nature. In this view, God is defined as the creative force underlying existence.

To approach the question of scientific creation, then, it occurs to me that animals have a tendency to be mouth oriented. That is, primitive animals like alligators and crocodiles have as their most notable feature a large mouth. That would seem to result from recognition in the development of one's body that the primary need is to eat and therefore concentration on the mouth as the primary organ of interaction with the world is appropriate.

From this we can define living things as engines of creation that transform cosmic energy into their own special form. We might also anticipate that they include means of changing their form to adapt to changing environmental circumstances.

Appendages exist but they are devoted to the problem of movement within the environment, not manipulation of the environment. Only when we come to mammals do we begin to see manipulation beginning to occur. This happens in the elephant with the nose. One could suppose that the reason for this is that the nose is next to the mouth and the purpose is to transfer the environment to the mouth. Several varieties of trunks occur and eventually species begin to appear with appendages whose primary function is manipulation, but this seems to happen by accident. First the monkeys come and they are still concerned with movement. But, to deal with tree branches the fingers elongate and only later is it realized that this provides an excellent tool for manipulation of the environment. One supposes that this is the branch that leads to humans.

So, God would seem to be operating in an experimental and stepwise mode. It doesn't seem that God imagines His creatures until satisfied and then builds them, as we do with cars. Instead He appears to build single celled organisms first, followed by chains of cells, which eventually arrive at something like snakes. The mouth develops as a means of ingesting the environment and then senses appear so that some choosing can occur with regard to what should be ingested. The snakes then emigrate to dry land and develop legs upon which to move about, then feathers and fur to keep warm blood at a stable temperature. At every step along the way some members specialize and remain in that form, but the trunk of the tree of life continues to grow, though perhaps it has reached its expected height by now, since new species don't seem to be appearing. This can only be a tentative conclusion however since we haven't been watching for very long, and perhaps, after another dramatic environmental change another burst of growth can be expected. Creationists constantly complain that they don't see the bridge species, but one wonders if that is because they refuse to look. Surely the penguin, a cross between a bird and seagoing land mammal is a suitable example of a bridge species.

But, the most obvious example of a bridge species is man. Man is obviously experimental. He is always seeking new environments to conquer. He is always questioning himself about the nature of being and what it means to be human. These are characteristics you would expect in a species that has not yet found its permanent niche in the world.

The stepwise approach to speciazation is not an unreasonable method for God to use. If His motives are related to a desire to manifest Himself as widely as possible, then this would seem to be an ideal method. The essence of creation would seem to be the existence of random chance, probably a very difficult thing to create, judging from the efforts of computer scientists who, until now find it beyond them. But, if God wished to not prejudge, but to provide a cosmos that would tell Him all there was to know about Him, this would be the proper method.

I have demonstrated in The Ideological Spectrum that the cosmos contains a feminine side and a masculine side. The masculine side includes awareness and consciousness. Awareness invests all animate creatures, at least, and consciousness is manifest in humans. Thus, all of consciousness in the cosmos, taken together, which may be quite a lot, constitutes the consciousness of God. In the same way, the awareness of the cosmos is constituted by the sum total of animate beings in the cosmos, again, perhaps a large amount, indeed. This constitutes the awareness of God. This is balanced by a large amount of materiel which doesn't seem to embody awareness, even a lot of living material that lacks self awareness, at least, in the vegetative world. The point is that choosing a masculine supreme God leaves out a vast amount of reality, so that, we must conclude that paganism, since it includes both feminine and masculine deities is a much more complete system.