God, Nature, and the Universe

Gravity doesn't approve or disapprove. Evolution doesn't reward virtue or punish wrongdoing. An asteroid doesn't distinguish between a saint and a murderer.

Nature simply operates.

We are looking at the same universe producing both astonishing order and apparently senseless disorder.

The God of the religious imagination is often described as a conscious being who sees, judges, rewards, and punishes. Yet the world seems to accept almost everything human beings do.

Wars. Massacres. Children dying. Cities destroyed. The Holocaust. Gaza. Millions of people suffering while prayers rise toward the sky.

And then—nothing.

Perhaps the simplest explanation is also the most disturbing one: perhaps nobody is there to intervene.

What if God does not exist in the form we have imagined? What if the universe is not a courtroom, and history is not a moral drama being supervised from above?

There is another possibility that I find much more compelling: perhaps God, Nature, and the Universe are different names we give to the same enormous reality of which we ourselves are a part.

People have spent thousands of years building some of the most magnificent structures on Earth in God's honor. Cathedrals, mosques, temples, basilicas—the architecture is sometimes breathtaking. Millions enter these places, kneel, pray, and perform rituals according to ancient traditions.

But perhaps they are looking in the wrong direction.

Perhaps the divine is not hiding behind an altar.

Perhaps it is everything outside the door.

The stone beneath our feet. The trees. The oceans. The stars. Our own bodies. Every animal that has ever lived. Every human being who has ever existed. Every particle of matter that has taken one form and then another.

We are not visitors in this universe. We are made of it.

For a few decades, each of us becomes a temporary arrangement of the same ancient matter and energy from which everything else emerged. Then that arrangement dissolves, and its components continue into something else.

In that sense, perhaps we are all very short-lived gods and goddesses—not because we possess supernatural powers, but because we are temporary pieces of the same reality that produced everything.

That thought is both beautiful and frightening.

It also changes the question of why God permits suffering.

Perhaps Nature does not permit anything.

Nature simply happens.

An earthquake does not hate the people beneath it. An asteroid does not choose its victims. Evolution does not consult a moral code. A star explodes without asking whether someone deserves to survive.

The same forces that produce beauty can produce destruction. The universe does not appear to operate according to our ideas of justice.

And perhaps that is why religion has always been so important to human beings. We desperately want the universe to have intentions. We want somebody to be watching. We want suffering to have an explanation and justice to have a final destination.

Religions can give people moral obligations, compassion, and a sense of responsibility toward others. But certainty can also turn into intolerance, hypocrisy, xenophobia, or violence when people become convinced that they possess God's exclusive instructions.

Perhaps the irony is that people fight over who understands God correctly while forgetting the possibility that they are already standing inside whatever God could possibly mean.

And then I think about something much smaller.

Why, in the middle of the night, does someone suddenly begin talking loudly in a building where other people are sleeping? Why does another person slam a door, drag furniture across the floor, or behave as though nobody else exists?

There is no obvious logic to it.

During the day, many of these same people understand perfectly well that other human beings exist. At night, somehow, that awareness disappears.

Perhaps this is another tiny manifestation of the same contradiction.

The universe produces extraordinary harmony, but also collisions, explosions, mutations, competition, destruction, and endless transformation. Sometimes the result looks like exquisite order. Sometimes it looks like complete chaos.

And perhaps human beings are no different.

We are Nature trying, for a brief moment, to understand itself.

Sometimes we call that religion.

Sometimes we call it civilization.

Sometimes we call it madness.

Perhaps Both Sides Are Right

Perhaps believers and nonbelievers are each right in their own way.

The idea of God may not be wrong altogether. The reality we observe certainly exists. Something—some forces, some process, some unimaginable combination of circumstances—brought the universe into its present form and continues to transform it.

We can argue endlessly about what to call those forces. God, Nature, the Universe, evolution, physical laws—or something for which we don't even have a name.

Whatever we call it, something is here.

And perhaps this is where religion deserves some credit. Virtually every major religion has developed moral principles: don't murder, don't steal, help the weak, care for others, control your impulses, show compassion, and behave as though other human beings have value.

The problem begins when believers themselves stop following the principles they claim to believe in.

The hypocrisy can be astonishing.

People can spend hours in the most beautiful temples ever constructed, recite prayers about love and compassion, and then walk outside convinced that their God belongs to their people more than to everybody else. They can preach morality while excusing violence, hatred, or cruelty when committed by their own side.

What happened to the moral principles they were just praying about?

And perhaps the nonbelievers, skeptics, and people who refuse to accept religious claims without questioning them have a point too.

They look at the contradictions between religions, their mutually exclusive claims, competing revelations, and the conflicts that have repeatedly arisen from them, and ask:

Come on. Can we really continue pretending that every one of these incompatible explanations came directly from the same God?

This is one of the questions raised, in a different form, by Carl Sagan's Contact: if an intelligent civilization existed somewhere else in the universe, why would we assume that the particular religious traditions developed by one species on one small planet contain the exclusive truth about the entire cosmos?

And this brings me back to one of the strangest religious ideas of all.

How could God–Nature–Universe choose one nation and forget everyone else?

If the same reality produced all human beings, why would it have a special ethnic preference?

Why would the creator of billions reveal itself exclusively—or supposedly more exclusively—to one particular people, while leaving everybody else with different revelations, prophets, scriptures, and rules?

It seems to me not only illogical but profoundly exclusionary.

And the irony becomes almost unbearable when people who believe that their God has chosen their particular nation or group then accuse others of prejudice.

Isn't it nuts?

Maybe the truth is much stranger and much simpler.

Perhaps believers are right that there is something behind existence.

Perhaps nonbelievers are right that none of the religions has successfully explained what that something is.

And perhaps both sides make the same mistake when they imagine that the universe must think the way human beings think.

Maybe God isn't a person.

Maybe God doesn't choose sides.

Maybe God doesn't issue passports.

Maybe God–Nature–Universe simply is—and we are temporary pieces of it, trying to understand the whole.

Which brings me to an old joke.

Two guys meet, and one says to the other:

“You know, nobody is perfect in this world. Actually, everyone is crazy except you and me.”

He pauses.

“Sometimes I worry about you.”

Cracking the Secrets of the Universe

Although human life seems almost unreal in its brevity, I have to give humanity credit for something extraordinary.

In the tiny window of time available to us, we have been gradually cracking the secrets of God–Nature–Universe, uncovering the laws of physics and discovering mathematical relationships that govern matter, energy, space, and time.

Think about it for a moment.

For most of human existence, we had no idea what the stars were, what matter was made of, or why the planets moved across the sky. We watched the Sun rise and set, observed the Moon changing its shape, and looked at the stars without knowing what they were. We invented gods, myths, and stories to explain what we couldn't understand.

And then, gradually, something remarkable happened.

We began to measure, calculate, experiment, and question our own explanations.

We discovered that the movement of planets could be described mathematically, that light had properties we could investigate, that matter consisted of atoms, and that space and time were far stranger than our everyday experience suggested.

Mathematics became one of our most powerful tools—not merely for describing what we see, but for predicting things we had never seen before. Sometimes equations led us toward discoveries that our senses alone could never have imagined.

And yet, how much do we really know?

Our eyes detect only a narrow portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. We cannot directly see radio waves, infrared radiation, ultraviolet light, X-rays, or gamma rays. We have developed instruments that extend our perception enormously, but even these reveal only aspects of a reality that may be far more complicated than we can presently comprehend.

Perhaps the most humbling possibility is that the universe is not merely larger than we imagine, but fundamentally more complex than our minds are capable of understanding.

We may continue to uncover its laws for centuries, perhaps millennia. We may develop theories that explain things that seem impossible today. Or we may eventually encounter limits that we cannot cross.

We simply don't know.

And perhaps that is the most remarkable part of our existence.

We are not observers standing outside the universe, trying to decipher a foreign object. We are part of the universe, using pieces of the universe—our brains, our instruments, our mathematics—to investigate the universe itself.

Why should mathematical structures discovered or invented by human minds describe the physical world so successfully? Perhaps mathematics captures deep structures of reality. Perhaps there are still deeper principles waiting to be discovered.

And what about the limits of knowledge itself? Are there aspects of reality that no instrument, observation, or theory could ever fully reveal?

Perhaps there are. Perhaps there aren't.

The universe existed without our questions for billions of years. It will almost certainly continue long after we are gone.

Yet, for a brief moment, a small part of it has become conscious enough to investigate the whole.

And that, in itself, seems almost unbelievable.

Perhaps our greatest intellectual achievement is not that we have decoded the universe, but that we have discovered enough to realize how much remains unknown.