Who is God?
There are over 10,000 religions in the world, and there are even more Gods. Archeologists have unearthed evidence representing existence of the concept of God from as back as 38000 BCE. So the concept of God is as old as civilization itself, and the number of them that have come and gone are far beyond our comprehension. Whenever mankind experience forces which cannot be explained at the time, they turn to belief (An acceptance that something exists or is true, especially one without proof).
Let’s cut to the most common argument in favour of God- If there is a creation, there has to be a creator. So who created the world? Science says Big Bang, who triggered Big Bang ? Certain force triggered it, so who created that force? And the question can go on and on until someone can provide an origin, which unfortunately at this time with the existing knowledge is still difficult to answer.
So what’s the solution being adopted? we choose to believe certain religion or person to fill the void, as they are able to provide you with answers which are more convincing to you, and which you can relate to. Religion also provides you an identity in the society which you can use to connect with and benefit from. And unlike science the religions doesn’t have the burden of proof on them, because they are not build on a foundation of proof but rather a foundation of belief. If you are not satisfied with what a religion has to offer then you have 10,000 others to choose from.
From the very beginning mankind has the habit of attributing to God the characteristics they find to be most powerful. If they find an animal to be the most powerful then the deity they pray to used to take its form. When they found sun and fire to be more powerful, they turned to it for worship believing it to be the God. Whenever morality was much needed to uplift the society, moral men took the form of God, or his characteristics were attributed to that of God.
And then slowly over time God evolved, it evolved to be omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, paving the way for monotheism, the concept of one powerful God. Still despite all evolution human like attributes of God remained. He punishes if he gets angry, he gets angry if you don’t follow him, and he rewards if you follow his son or his prophet or pray to him.
We like to believe God to be human like, possessing human emotions. Even when we describe God using words like omnipresent and omnipotent, we don’t like to believe in the possibility that God can be just pure energy, with absolutely no human like characteristics or emotions.
There is a part in the web series “Dark” which equates god to an entity with no human like characteristics. It goes like this; “God mankind has prayed to for thousands of years, the God that everything is bound with, this God exists as nothing rather than time itself. It’s not a thinking acting entity. A physical principle with which you can no more negotiate than you could with your own fate. God is time. And time is not compassionate.”
The reason I mentioned this here is to look beyond the stereotype of who or what God is. This way of portraying God as just an entity with no human like characteristics may not turn out to be popular because it takes away the most important commodity that all the religions in the world sells and the whole humanity badly needs -“HOPE”. That’s the one thing that keeps the whole belief system and religions alive. But as time passes and man continue to make strides beyond earth, the chances of God being a pure force with characteristics not known to or conceivable by human kind are becoming increasingly possible.
Till we reach that stage the concept of God will continue to take many shapes and forms. And in God’s name the religions will continue to act as a parallel rule of law; drawing up moral code of conduct, providing answers on life after death, and distributing hope to humanity in the form of a God who is kind and helping. And this act in itself is Godly as this world runs on hope. And hence we can say religions are doing God’s work. It keeps the checks and balances this world badly needs to continue in its path to progress and survival, without which an immoral mankind can be quite destructive to self and the world.
This is part of a series of blogs, where I am sharing my views on questions I received on Quora.
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