After watching Creation, I’ve been troubled by the thought of God and religion. The contradiction that Charles Darwin faced during his life prior to the penning of the famous Origins of Species reminded me brought me to a sudden realisation God is what the society construct him to be. (I will elaborate on this later in the post.) The real God, if there is really an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresence God/Creator/Allah, does not necessary look or behave like what is described in the bible or any other holy scripture.
I’ve always believe that one day, science will be able to explain who and what exactly God is. Ever since I took up science as my major in the university, I haven’t really been in touch with my spiritual life. I must say that studying in University changed my perspective of life. Taking a LSM1103 Biodiversity made me appreciate lots of things in life and life itself. The diversity of the creatures on earth and the evidences from DNA phylogeny and embryology describe all steps in the evolutionary pathway that leads to the emergence of human as a intelligent species. The beauty of the tree of life is enough to convince me that somehow, a being is out there, who caused the big bang, and allowing sentient beings to form and to evolve. He is in fact and indirectly the Creator, however, we are not a product of intelligent design. All the evidences points towards a long tedious process of trials and errors that is evolution. Biology is based on Chemistry, and Chemistry is based on Physics. Physics is undeniably the bedrock of science. A question worth asking should be: “What is Physics build upon?” or rather “Did law of physics existed prior to the big bang?” This is where God comes into the picture. I hypothesise that the Creator caused the big bang that formed our universe and dictated the law of physics for our universe, which eventually via a chain of events, created earth and life. In short, I am saying that there is a larger-than-life being out there who was responsible for the spark that created the universe, and we are but one of the many products unintentionally created along with the spark.
Studying in university also shaped me into a sceptical person. Few years ago, if a friend would ask me about my religion, I will not hesitate and tell them proudly that I’m a Christian. Recently however, if asked the same question again, my answer would be: I’m a Christian, but a sceptical one. I still believe that God is real and he is out there somewhere. He may be a multidimensional conscience, or just a fatherly benevolent higher being who resides in a pocket of timeless space in the universe called heaven. I believe that he exists, but I believe not the doctrines that major religions are teaching us about him.
When you discuss religion with biology, you will most likely touch about soul and conscience. The first and foremost question that I asked myself is are soul and conscience the same, and does it comes with the configuration of the molecules in our brains, or it is a spiritual component of a sentient being that does not have anything to do with the molecules in our brain? I would say that soul is the driver to he biological construct we call our body. For the second part of the question, I would prefer that it is the former because it will be easier for scientist to decrypt the mystery regarding this subject. If the latter is true, there is a probability that we might never be able to figure what soul is. Just like a human will never be able to see himself without a reflecting surface, a conscience will never be able to figure itself out without a proper tool. And I doubt that a human is capable to developing such a tool. ( Please proof me wrong on this) I have been toying with several ideas about how and what soul might be like. In Brida by Paulo Coelho, he described that in the beginning of time there was only one soul and it divides when the creature that it resides in die it divides, with each soul residing in a new body. To me it seems a wee bit funny how soul can divide and divide indefinitely. Won’t the soul become thinner and thinner? Considering how many sentient creatures are there on earth, the soul now must be soulless? If there is really only one soul in the beginning of time, a more believable concept would be that the soul is recycled after death and is put into any body in any point of time. To illustrate the idea better, lets check out the following diagram:
The soul will go into an infinite loop in time, hence it is possible for infinite number of creatures with conscience to exist at one time with only one soul. Sounds like reincarnation? Looking at the number of sentient creatures on earth and not to mention the ETs, we have been through gazillions and gazillions of life and will go through gazillions and gazillions more. If you are a Hinduist and the infinite looping soul is true, it means that it will take a long long time before we/I/you can attain moksha (Hinduism). It also means that the slave who is working his ass of for you might just be you after a few lifetimes. Hint: be nice to him.
I’ve also entertain the possibility that I myself is the God that we are talking about? Linking back the the infinite looping soul concept, what if at the end of it all, after experiencing gazillions and gazillions and gazillions of lives, we/I/you actually becomes God? This will explain why God is all-knowing. He had already experienced it all. The idea of the God is the same or the resultant of our accumulative soul, somehow reminded me of another concept in theology.The trinity. The father, the son and the Holy Spirit. They are all the same but different, which coincide with the idea of the infinite looping soul concept. They are the same, but are different due to the different accumulation of karma? Maybe Jesus Christ and other messiahs are a few lifetimes away from achieving God status, which explains why their behaviour are Godlike. This also might explain why some people are clairvoyant, they’ve experienced the future!
Anyway, what I’ve just wrote is just my imagination gone wild. This post is not written to bash any religion. It is just a personal view about God, an attempt to organize all my thoughts about the subject of religion and science. See ya in the next post.
