Published by By “God”, most people mean to say a conscious being “beyond” nature. People have used the term God to mean other things as well, but some of these uses are so woolly as to to vacuous and indistinguishable from a relabelling of atheism. Often, we find physicists talk about God in the sense of the laws of nature, the regularities of the cosmos and reality at its most fundamental and perhaps inscrutable level. Using the term God in this context is simply confusing and adds nothing to the discussion, as far as I can tell. It also provides cover to those who switch from two senses of the term God as a way to present a moving goalpost to refutation. On the one hand, God is supposed to be “the all”, “nature itself”, “energy”, or some such thing. On the other hand, God is invoked as a source of moral truths, a cosmic consciousness that pervades time and space and that has a plan in mind. The woolly version – God as nature – is used to legitimate and give “scientific” credence to the concept of a divine being, to make the more concrete version more compelling by association. Don’t buy it. It’s a word game, and nothing more. When scientists talk about energy, they mean something quite specific: something that can be measured, which has qualities (like that it can’t be destroyed but can be converted from one form to another), and so forth. They can tell whether something is energy by virtue of the properties it exhibits. Does God have these properties? Again, only when it suites. When an emotional prop is required, this “energy” becomes awfully anthropocentric. It suddenly comes to see humans (or intelligent life) as the centre-point of existence, it becomes interested in forgiving or punishing our sins, and we commune with it on matters of principle. On the one hand, we hear people say “But that’s not MY God you’re criticising” in response to a challenge that invokes the concept of a personal God. Sorry, but it is your God. If you believe that the universe (or “God”, or whatever you want to call it) somehow cares about you, that ethics is somehow woven into the fabric of existence at a fundamental level, and that by thinking certain thoughts you can commune with this being, then you believe in a personal deity. Lacking evidence for such a deity, it won’t help to find a superficial resemblance between the discourse of science and vague notions of “oneness”. There is a gap that remains, and it can be traversed only by faith. Evidence gives no credence to the notion of a creator God; hence, theism is more or less forced to seek a more “subtle” understanding of God (so subtle that it can’t be pinned down) which makes abundant use of analogy. It is hoped that, through this route, we can traverse the gap between the watered down God of Nature and the more concrete (and emotionally satisfying) God of Redemption.
By God, then, you either mean something profound – a conscious mind harbouring intentions and plans – or you mean a relabelling of physics. The latter does not in any way lend credence to the former.
Consciousness arrived late on the scene; it wasn’t there from the outset. It was the result of billions of years of evolution, and for all we know, our experience with it could be the only example in the entire universe. This isn’t cause for despair; in fact, it’s a liberating notion, because it leaves us free to come to a more nuanced and human-centric conception of what it means to be moral. There are no easy answers here, but that’s part of the reason that there is profundity to be had: it provides a challenge, and to meet a challenge we bring out and exercise our understanding, appreciate its limitations, and generate new and better ideas and interrelations. It leaves the folly of trying to please a “perfect being” where it belongs: in the scrap-heap of erroneous ideas that humanity needs to outgrow.
