Is the universe God?

Since the time humans begun to look at their environment and ponder over its workings, they have imagined and dreamed of agencies beyond the physical macrocosm. Our ideas about God have evolved probably more than any other philosophy, from the naturalistic gods, to more elegantly engineered conceptions of dualistic God. The diversity in the supermarket of Gods is staggering, of all shapes, sizes and pretexts. Among them is the pantheistic divinity, which many trace back to Spinoza in his “The Ethics Concerning God”, but which in fact is as old as any other notion of God, pluming its roots in ancient Eastern philosophy. But Spinoza’s ideas were more atheistic rather than pantheistic, despite that, many continue to propose similar divine packages. The New Age enthusiasts, among others, assert fancy philosophical ideas, which plays on the argument of ignorance, to economize the gaps in our scientific understanding. Similar musings do creep up in science as well, because hey, science does not always get the brutal scrutiny it should.

The compartments of “consciousness” has much fuzziness surrounding it, which could easily be filled with conjecture and poorly founded conclusions. One such example is bio-centrism by Robert Lanza whose misinterpretation of quantum mechanics and fad philosophy “Is the apple still there, if you don’t look at it?” is appalling. It is basically the Chopda’s version of “the moon is not there until you look at it”. Yes, the color does not exist, but the light waves which produce that color do. Yes, the passage of time is an illusion but time itself is a fundamental property of universe. To make such a naive claim that the “universe out there does not exist, and is a figment of our thought” just regressively plays out logic. Where did the thought come from? It’s a dug hole with no end.

And here is the trap, God is too vague a term to even bring down to a narrow set of meaning. Natural laws are natural laws, choosing to call it God, would just be you having a hard time getting over it. What people often mean by God is “Anything that created the universe and us”, Oh, okay then, physical laws are God, whatever soothes your heart. Or maybe they mean “everything which we cannot control” in that, there is a higher structure that determines the outcome of events at a human scale. Things which are unpredictable and whose outcome cannot be known and which requires you to invoke a structure in order to make sense of them. But that ‘structure’ is basically the statistical probabilities in a certain range of outcomes, which many adore to call God. Then, some would ask “What’s the harm in naming God?” Well, nothing, just that you do not want to spell out the faculties of the world, and simply want them to linger in mystery for a bit more longer.