IS IT AND... God
ISITism provides a clear and logical model that reconciles the differences in perspectives about the ultimate deity. Some people will love this. Some will hate it.
Who or what is God? People have been pondering, discussing, arguing, fighting, killing, and dying over this question for millennia. And ISITism is going to answer the question, clearly, right now.
To answer the question “Who or What is God”, we must start with Absolute Infinite One. There is no other place to begin. The seminal teachings of all major religions define their ultimate deity as the Absolute Infinite One. But the Absolute Infinite One is, as all these religions agree, something beyond our ability to comprehend.
Yet people seem to innately yearn to relate to this supreme being somehow. So over the generations this Supreme Being has come to take on anthropomorphic attributes. According to these belief systems, he loves certain things and behaviors and hates others. He feels various emotions like love, hate, amusement, anger and jealousy. And He is generally addressed with the masculine pronoun and pictured as a man — not as a woman or even as androgynous.
Logically, we must accept that having characteristics and attributes is inconsistent with being the undefinable, ineffable Absolute Infinite One. So how can we reconcile our Awareness of this Abstract notion of AIO with our desire to relate to God?
Let’s begin with a thought experiment.
We know that the size of the entire observable Universe is about 26 orders of magnitude larger than our human scale. We also know the size of the smallest known particle, the neutrino, is maybe 24 orders of magnitude smaller (it gets pretty theoretical at that scale). Isn’t it interesting that we humans seem to occupy a space about half way between those extremes?
The mathematics and physics behind quantum mechanics indicate that there is something smaller than neutrinos, though we couldn’t necessarily call them particles, and hence the name Strings. And we know that we can never see beyond the bounds of the observable universe due to the limitation of the speed of light. So the boundaries of scale are shrouded in mystery for us.
What we do know is that through about 50 orders of magnitude, from neutrinos, through elementary particles (like quarks and bosons), to sub-atomic particles like protons, neutrons and electrons, to atoms to molecules to compounds to cells to organs to organisms (like us) to planets to solar systems to galaxies to galactic clusters to super clusters, to the Cosmic Web we see this same repeating pattern of Objects within Objects within Objects — without exception.
Now… is there any logical reason to believe that pattern just happens to stop at the end of our Observable Universe? Think about it. What if you could go far faster than the speed of light and zoom through the Cosmic Web across our Universe. Either one of two things would happen: Either at some point you would reach the boundary of the Universe, or you wouldn’t.
If you claim that you wouldn’t reach a boundary, you are basically saying that the Cosmic Web itself is Infinite, in which case you are claiming that this pattern of nested Objects within Objects just happens to stop repeating at the point where we humans are no longer able to observe it.
Convenient.
This notion is just as anthropocentric as the ancient notion that the sun and stars revolve around the Earth.
On the other hand, if you conclude that you would indeed reach a boundary of our universe, you have to ask yourself the question: what lies on the other side of that boundary? Is it just nothing? Is the Universe encapsulated within a void that stretches on and on forever? If you were to reach this conclusion you would again be basing it on the premise that this pattern we see repeating throughout all of creation, without exception, just happens to stop repeating at that particular scale.
Logic dictates that it is more likely that the pattern of nested Objects we see repeating over and over and over so consistently continues to repeat both beyond the reaches of the Observable Universe, as well as on the lower end of the scale.
And if we assume that our Universe is simply another Object in this Pattern of nested Objects, then it follows that whatever unimaginably vast Object that our Universe is a subset of is, itself, a subset of a still larger Object — and so on and so on… ad infinitum.
Infinity of Scale.
Just try to ponder that for a while.
You’ve probably seen visualizations in movies of zooming out through space from Earth, past the planets, through our galaxy and then out from the Milky Way through other galaxies into vast nebulae and on to super clusters of galaxies before ending just about the time we come to the end of the Universe as we know it. It’s as if that is the limit of our collective ability to imagine.
But you can imagine that scene not ending there. Instead of just fading out when we reach the end of the Universe, (or transitioning to a little girl’s eye, as they did so brilliantly in the movie Contact), you just keep pulling back from our Universe, further and further until you see its boundaries, and then continue pulling away until it appears as tiny as a sugar crystal floating in an endless black void.
And just before it completely fades into Oblivion, you notice another tiny white speck. And then another, and another — each one a Universe in its own right — so remote from each other that they seem completely unrelated. But as you continue to zoom out farther, their “light” (in quotes because at this scale light as we define it could be irrelevant) blends together to form a silvery mist, which turns out to be just a wisp of a great cloud, that turns out to be part of one blob among many blobs within a still larger Object.
Can you imagine the experience as you continue to expand out, level after level, until our Universe is just an infinitesimal dot somewhere deep inside the latest entity? All sense of time and space has long since lost any meaning as your experience continues, faster and faster, expanding into ever greater manifestations until you finally realize that you will never, ever reach the end of this Eternal process of Expansion.
That is the beginning of the ‘scale’ of Absolute Infinite One.
So where is God in all this? Is God just the totality of everything I just described, , i.e. Absolute Infinite One? If that is what you mean when you say ‘God’, that’s fine. But it must be clear that the moment you start to attribute any kind of characteristic to this ‘God’, you have utterly invalidated your model.
But there is an alternative.
What if God is simply an Object existing as a subset of Absolute Infinite One? Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that we live in a Pantheistic universe — in other words, God is the Universe. So vast that we still can’t ever hope to see His boundaries. And self-aware. After all, just as a bacteria shows more Awareness than an atom, and an insect shows more Awareness than a bacteria, and an animal shows more Awareness than an insect, and a human shows more Awareness than an animal, does it not follow that larger objects could be Aware, and that the greater the Object, the greater it’s Awareness?
Just as we can be Aware of insects or microorganisms, (if we choose to focus our attention on them), our host Object — our Heavenly Host — could be vastly more Aware of our existence than we are of that microorganism. While we may be Aware that these microbes exist in our body, our Awareness of them is limited. On the other hand, our “Heavenly Host” may be so far beyond us in terms of Awareness that they are not only intimately Aware of us, but of those microbes as well.
So now we come down to it: Would an entity that is beyond our ability to ever perceive, that will exist for longer than we can even imagine, with an Awareness that we can’t possibly comprehend and an ability to know us intimately, be worthy of being called God — even if it meant that this ‘God’ is actually subject to a still greater Object that is itself infinitesimal when compared to the Infinite perspective of Absolute Infinite One?
From the perspective of ISITism, this God is absolutely worthy of our total awe, love, and devotion. And the understanding that our incomprehensible God is, like us, part of an even greater entity is just more cause for our wonder and contemplation.
Unfortunately, there are many people who will say “NO! My God is the All-powerful Lord of Creation! There is nothing greater than my God!” And then these same people will proceed to describe the particulars about which kind of people their God likes and doesn’t like, which behaviors he likes and doesn’t like, which animals are good or bad to eat, etc.
These people suffer from a deep Confusion. They want to assign attributes to the Infinite. They are trying to have their cake and eat it too.
The Good News is that we can have our cake and eat it, too! We can be Aware of the concept of Absolute Infinite One, and also worship God — our “Heavenly Host” that is (from our perspective) omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent.
These concepts are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they are perfectly consistent.
The only mental leap we must make in order to grasp the True meaning of Infinity and accept the fact that our God is, like us, a manifestation of the Awareness of Absolute Infinite One, and is therefore, ultimately a tiny speck in the whole scheme of things.
That doesn’t mean that God isn’t incomprehensible to us mere mortals and just as magnificent as all of the stories say, from our perspective. It only means that if we do choose to characterize God as an entity with specific attributes and preferences, He can’t be considered Infinite, and must therefore be considered an Object.
BTW, by this same token the concept of Gaia — the representation of the planet Earth as a living, self-aware entity — is every bit as valid as that of God. It could be that Gaia is our Host Object — vastly more Aware than we are — and that God is the Host Object of Gaia. Perhaps the God of Abraham is the Awareness embodied by the Host Object we call the Milky Way galaxy, and it is Subject to a still greater entity that is the entire Universe.
We don’t know the answers to these questions, as these entities never seem to provide these kinds of specifics to us about their true natures. So all we have to guide us in determining our Beliefs are logic and the patterns we see repeated throughout the Reality around us.
Fortunately, the logic is clear and undeniable: If something is Infinite, it is beyond attribution, and anything with specific attributes can not be Infinite. That’s simple enough.
And there you have it. ISITism, with its abstract concept of Objects and a true appreciate for the absolute concept of Infinity, easily reconciles the Eastern conceptions of the Tao, Brahman, and Buddhist enlightenment with the Western conception of an anthropocentric God.
The difference is that the Eastern religions like Buddhism and Taoism are contemplating Absolute Infinite One while Christianity is focused on our Host Object, which we refer to as God.
Of course this explanation won’t satisfy a lot of people with fundamentalist leanings. They will dismiss it out of hand. But they won’t be able to provide a logical reason why. Any attempts to do so will reveal that they haven’t really contemplated the concept of Infinity, but are rather seeing the world from a limited perspective.
Somebody please try to prove me wrong!