2,00,000 years ago
In the forests of Eurasia..
A dark moonless night.. with the countless stars shining in the sky..
A homo sapiens is out on hunting
There he saw behind the bushes a pair of bright eyes something moved suddenly..
he immediately threw his spear at it.. and it ran and so did he behind it..
The chase went on for a couple of minutes and.
suddenly he stopped and looked around
he had landed up in an unknown area surrounded with thicker bush..
The eyes were not to be seen somewhere far away he can hear the wolves crying..
The territory was alien to him.. he had never been there..
something moved under his leg and he jumped screaming WITH FEAR..
A bat flew above his head.. a chill went down his spine
There was lack of information in his brain about the surrounding lack of information caused FEAR..
FEAR created an alertness in the brain.. brain moved to a fight or flight mode
The heart started pumping more blood as he started breathing heavily.. his body cells releasing more energy required for a further unanticipated action.. to fight if the enemy is weak.. or to flight if the enemy is strong..
But who and where is the enemy ? Or is there one ? He had no answer.. He didnt know about science yet.. all he knew was to hunt and kill and eat..
He looked up at the sky looked like, sky had the answer.. one can look down from sky and see where his enemy was.. is there somebody out there who can help me? he thought
The very feeling of another helping hand gave him the mental strength.. well, he was a homo sapien whose brain had evolved to a position where it can think.. but there was no science yet.. so he thought with the limited knowledge he had.. When no physical being is around to help him.. there might be a more powerful helper up there.. because the view up there was more fascinating and promising..
The unknown causes fear because anything might be out there.. anything might happen the very next moment faith in an imaginary look alike of human, the one who knows all it gave him immense mental strength, he realized the belief in a more powerful being than his enemy.. the most powerful one.. can save him he believed with all sincerity that somebody existed up there and ran back with all his might in the direction he had come.. believing hopefully that he might get back to his place.. and lo did he.. his faith was confirmed. GOD WAS BORN
THE NEWS SPREAD THE VIEWS ARRIVED
Some said he saves those who give him a share of their hunting.. you need to keep him pleased and happy.. the only thing they knew was hunting and killing.. they knew that they would be happy if they found a kill.. so to please the God, they offered the same to him THE PRACTICE OF SACRIFICE WAS BORN..
All problems that appeared were attributed to insufficient offerings to God when a problem appeared on a massive scale.. sacrifices were done on a massive scale
They used to leave their sacrifices in the place and next day found that only bones were left God was accepting their sacrifices.. Some saw other animals eating the sacrifices after the humans left.. the thinkers concluded that God came in the form of those animals to accept their offerings.
GOD STARTED EVOLVING
How does he look? what are his features? What is his nature ?
The basic definition was that he knows all that they don’t know. Then they also concluded that he created all the animals for them.. then as thinking evolved.. so did God.. and it was concluded that God created the whole forest and the stars and sky
Probably in the mean time some aliens space ships used to visit earth and the concept of Gods descending from the Heaven also was born.. God stays up there..
God has to look like humans.. initially thats how he looked like a human replica was created to symbolically represent him
THINKING EVOLVED
Man started to think.. and different views about God started evolving.. The different forms of God were getting finalized inside the minds of different humans
Some said God created the world.. he can get angry and destroy it too.. and so on This God was the one who sat outside the world monitoring it..
Then another section said that God is what we see as forest, animals, rain, stars etc.. We live inside God.. This God was the universe itself
THUS RELIGION WAS BORN Different views about God..
In the mean time thinking continued further questioning the functioning of nature As a natural byproduct of the evolution of intelligent species.. SCIENCE was born
SCIENCE was the opposite of RELIGION
While God was created out of the fear of unknown.. Science was created out of curiosity and its findings i.e out of the known
Knowledge is vast and in the beginning human scientific knowledge was almost empty.. so God occupied it all As knowledge started to evolve, God and religion had to make space for Science.. This was because, unknown was being converted into the known
God and Religion had said that humans were important for God, as he made them intelligent and gave them power.. humans lived on earth.. and earth was the center of God’s creation.. Sun, moon, other planets and stars all revolved around Earth as we can see in the night sky etc
Science slowly started finding the facts God and religion had to be accordingly upgraded to prevent their extinction.. The religions which initially said Earth was the center of the universe and earth was not moving .. had to slowly accept that Earth was round and rotating and was moving around Sun
Religion was based on intuition and faith and knew nothing about science and facts.. as science increased the boundary of human knowledge, religion and God had to be removed out from the areas encroached by science and technology
Science said Earth was created with Sun much after the creation of the universe called Big bang.. So now religion had nothing to say about the creation of Sun or Earth.. and the functioning of God receded to the creation of the universe itself.. which science is still inquiring into
Religion said God created humans and all animals in one shot.. but since, at that time science was not yet developed.. we didn’t know about microbes and dinosaurs.. so religions never talked about them.. but when microbes and dinosaurs were discovered.. religion had to leave the space of microbes and dinosaurs for Science
In the mean time religion acquired a spiritual dimension.. Great thinkers thought that the definition of God is not limited like what most religions say, as a human like figure with emotions etc so they gave him a new form.. a formless divine.. the cycle of pre birth and post death are yet not defined by science.. so religion moved into these areas.. concept of spirituality and salvation evolved.. to bring about a moral and ethical order in the society to prevent crime.. concepts of hell and heaven were created.. spirituality and meditation brought about a peaceful order in the psychology of human society.. it was a savior for those who were fed up with war and violence..
In the mean time religion had lost its original purpose and had become a root of all evils.. people were fighting and killing each other in the name of religion Religions had reduced God to the state of a public property.. Each religion had its own God.. some of these Gods didnt like people of other religions..
Spirituality had become an alternate path for those who did not like violence.. But yet the concept of God kept evolving.. with more refined definitions.. millions of pages have been written on the nature of God.. most are contradicting ones.. because it was God as the writers know him
Einstein says Common sense is a collection of all prejudices acquired by the age of 18?
Similarly I say, God is the collection of all prejudices acquired by the human race by the age of few thousand years
It is very difficult to give up prejudices.. unless one thinks afresh.. giving up all the prejudices..
God still occupies the unknown territories.. Future is unknown.. science cannot calculate human future.. So God continues to exist in that territory.. God can alter your future.. He knows your future.. he has written your future.. Some say he can change it.. you pray to him so that only Good things lie ahead..
Before the invention of the medical system.. God existed there occupying 100% area.. Any ailment or disease and you pray to God the only hope.. positive mental hope strengthens the immune system.. if a concept of God can provide positive mental hope.. why Not?
But as medical science evolved.. in terms of ailments and diseases.. almost all humans goto doctors today instead of God hospitals have replaced places of worship only when there turns out to be an ailment for which science is yet to find complete cure.. God and spirituality re enter There are many religious places of worship where drinking the water in the local pond.. dipping in the water in the local lake. touching a statue, or visiting the place itself.. etc are said to cure medically uncurable diseases ! Science cannot do miracles.. that is against the very basic definition of science.. but God can do miracles, because that is the very basic definition of God!
When there is famine because of lack of rain people pray to God for rain.. Science has not yet controlled rain harvesting clouds.. As science evolves in the future.. and when we are able to control the rains God will be out of this territory too.. people then will appeal to the governments to turn on rain clouds on their farms.. just like the way they today appeal to turn on the dam waters for their farms.
Human knowledge about the universe can be categorized into two sections..
Humans are an intelligent species and have questions.. billions of questions
The questions to which the answer is known comes under Science..
The yet to be known or the unknown is covered by God and religion.
Unfortunately there are religious heads that have been appointed by many religions.. their duty is to safeguard and spread their religions at the expense of others.. because finally everything is a game of numbers.. its like a war so these religions heads to not want their definition of God and related things to be questioned This is due to the fear of the religious follower count going down if the religious preachings are found to be false.. which is why stephen hawking was told by the pope not to enquire into the big bang!
Unfortunately the discouraging of questioning in religions has led to blind faith where questioning is not tolerated. Giordano Bruno was burnt alive and Galileo was prosecuted for questioning faith and for talking science that went against faith
Faith is like the story of monkeys
Few monkeys were put in a cage which had steps at the top of which few bananas were kept. Whenever one monkey climbed up the stairs to get the bananas water was flushed on the other monkeys that were sitting down.. So if a monkey went up to take a banana, other monkeys started hitting and pulling him down, to avoid being flushed with water..
Then a set of second monkeys were added to the cage along with existing ones.. when the monkeys from the second set tried to climb up the stage, the monkeys of first set hit them and pulled them back, because they knew they would be flushed with water..
Then after some time, the first set of monkeys were removed from the cage.. and a third set was introduced.. now neither of the monkeys in the cage knew about water flushing phenomena.. Yet, when the third set of monkeys tried to reach the bananas, the second set hit them and pulled them back.. without knowing why they are doing it just because their predecessors used to do it !
They did not ask any questions.. it was blind faith.. While in reality the flushing might have been stopped now and probably they all could have had the bananas
Conclusion
Humanity today is divided into three sections
The first who have the prejudice of God.. who do not believe in the superiority of science Their life starts and ends with God..
The second are those who are atheists.. who only believe in science and say that science is the only way ahead.. obviously if tomorrow an asteroid is arriving to hit the earth.. we cannot sit praying to God without trying to divert its path using the science and technology we have
The third are in a transition phase.. many are confused between religion and science.. most of them will migrate to science from religion.. a few might go in the opposite direction.. back to religion but then in the future when it comes down to a number game I think the second will be the dominant ones for a Type I or above star trek like civilization.. where science has answers to almost everything
Or will science one day finally prove that God exists?? Or is it possible that God has insulated himself from the universe he created (because interfering in the laws of science makes science invalid.. conservation laws get violated if there is an external interference! ) and hence God cannot be detected by science? Or does God play dice unlike what Einstein believed?
In either case Science is the only final hope for religion which is evident with all those hundreds of blogs posted and videos uploaded by religious followers to prove how modern science supports the concepts present in their religion! As science and technology evolves.. science can do without religion.. but religion cannot do without science.. which is why creationists today are doing more research on Darwin’s theory than evolutionists
Here goes the new blog http://hitxp.wordpress.com/2007/09/02/human-computer-god/ :)
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But a little deeper thought will show the difference.
Information available with us about evolution of life is also limited. That is why we are going for assumptions.
You have prompted me to write another blog, with some deeper thoughts on this!
Well, go ahead :)
Assuming that computers develop real life like intelligence along with self awareness, the argument sounds convincing :)
But a little deeper thought will show the difference.
A simple example is, when the computers trace back their fossils, they will find that almost every fossil will have command accepting parts like joystick, keyboard, mouse, touch screens, etc. And also the fossil brain parts will have comments from the software developers, there will be input and output channels, etc
So the natural question that would arise in the minds of the computers would be, ‘Who was interacting with our ancestors? Who are these ”authors’ who have commented about the logic of our brain? Were we used to do some activity for some other species? So in that case we were probably created by that some other species!’
This is just a small example of the discrepancy. For humans there are no such questions except in the movie ‘Matrix’ :)
You have prompted me to write another blog, with some deeper thoughts on this!
Or will science one day finally prove that God exists??
Science and religion talks about same thing in different words.
According to Albert Einstein everything is energy (e=mc2) and Advaitha preaches than nothing is different from the other.
Darwin says life evolved from water then got accustomed to land, finally humans evolved. The dasavatharas started from fish, tortoise, boar, man-lion, dwarf (vamana) to Ramas & Krishna.
A future day analogy: I have often thought about a generation of computers which can think by themselves and reproduce (may be computers themselves control manufacture). And there is an argument between two of them about creation and evolution of computers. One is telling that it was man who created computers and the other arguing that computers evolved through various generations. Now the first one reminds about ?missing links? between the big vacuum tube based computers and the next generation with semi-conductors/ICs. Who is wrong here? :)
Thanks Sainath!
good writeup !!
copy paste :) Yes you can !!
A link back ? ;)
“”The Evolution of God””
wonderful I too shall write a post with this title. I want to copy paste somethings .. may I ?