God and man – where things went wrong?

Today’s conversation with a very dear friend made me write this up and ponder over this profound topic which has been reduced to a petty squabble in today’s context with the daily conflicts we see mankind engulfed in across the globe. This should make us wonder where things went wrong?

When we think of God, the first question that comes to mind is who made whom? Is it the humans who came up with the concept of God or was it God who created the humans? Now again, if we see, this question itself is reeking with the arrogance of humans – to even consider that God is a construct humans came up with is ridiculous. God has been there always – metaphysically speaking, God may be a word that humans came up with but He’s been there from time immemorial. Humans, as we exist today, have walked on this Earth for less than a few hundred thousand years but this Earth has been in this universe for 4.5 billion years – so, humans have just existed in about 0.007% of Earth’s history. Further, this universe has been in existence for 13.8 billion years and in its history, humans have contributed to just about 0.002%! Assuming, it is God that created this whole universe – which is exactly what all major religions of this world tell us – then, in God’s history, He’d have created and destroyed countless universes and in all those infinite numbers of universes, what’s the significance of humans and their history? The answer we all will agree with is an unequivocal “nothing!” Yet, here we are today squabbling over ownership of God and He must be very amused thinking that after all the primitive forms of life that He created such as the dinosaurs (who once ruled this Earth) et al, He created humans thinking that they were a creature with consciousness and the ability to think and reason – therefore, they would not squander away the chance to thrive and bring balance to life on Earth unlike all other species before it – yet, here we are, acting just like the dinosaurs did some 70 million years ago – perhaps it is time for Him to take a call and decide on the fate of humans just as He did to dinosaurs!

Before I go ahead and describe what God has kept in store for humans, let me first delve into how we reached where we are today. It is our arrogance that we think that we came up with the concept of God – the fact is, not so long back one famous astrophysicist, Carl Sagan said that there are surely many intelligent alien races that occupy this universe and thus was set up the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) and after decades of this search, what they came up with that we are all but alone in this vast universe and that what we have on Earth is a very rare accident where too many happy coincidences occurred all together nearly 4 billion years ago and life appeared on Earth! Who brought about all these happy coincidences? Someone would say it was mother nature – well, that mother nature was existing across the whole vast universe but why all these happy coincidences did not happen anywhere else in the vast universe but only in its remote corner, on Earth? This perhaps was the first recorded act of God in the current version of the universe as we know it that is now nearly 14 billion years old! Were humans there when this act was done by God? No! So, this proves one thing that God is eternal and humans are just a blip in that eternity and that we take ourselves any more seriously only exposes our vanity, nothing else!

Jumping back to human history i.e. the last few hundred thousand years – we know that the earliest humans lived in caves mostly in hunter-gatherer communities. Along the way, we would have seen mother nature in all her raw glory – the heat of the sun, the wrath of the rains and the wind storms, the power of lightning bolts and the ferocity of fires – all of these would have instilled fear and awe in him and thus they became first symbols or representatives of his earliest God. So, we somehow came to believe that God is a concept made by man! Slowly, as his understanding of mother nature grew, man could control all these forces of nature to a certain degree and even overcome them, and thus his concept of God too grew complex. So, just as humans migrated from Africa some forty thousand years ago and went around the world, this concept too evolved just as how humans settled across different corners of Earth. This led to the eventual formation of religions as they exist across the world today.

The common denominator here is what we call religions that exist on Earth today aren’t representing God but the concept of God as we humans perceive Him.

The problem is further exacerbated by some religions who think that their “God” is the only God that is the true one and the God of all other religions are false and thus all humans who follow any other God should give in and follow their God or be eliminated. If you see, this whole premise is flawed as God that created the universe (long before the humans came to walk on Earth) is universal – He is the source of all that has been here and all that will be there!

So, how can a human concept of “God” ever replace this universal God who is the source of all creations of the past, present, and the future, including humans or excluding them? For all we know, just as dinosaurs went extinct, humans too may go extinct in the future, and along with them, all their concepts of God!

Further, if all religions believe in a universal God, then, why is there strife in the world today among humans over God? That’s the question for all of us to ponder about.