What is "God?"

Suppose, for a second, that you were asked to describe a powerful thing/force/being that created the every living thing around us. One that created a diverse array of living creatures: everything from Golden Retrievers to E. Coli bacteria to Redwood trees. This thing made us look, act, and feel the way we do. What’s more, it gave us the concept of self-consciousness, the ability to think, and the power of love. It even helped form our moral principles and was a major influence in shaping how we set up our society. How then, would you describe this?

I ask because I would describe this thing as a type of “God.” The above list seems to describe everything that I think a “God” would do and, in essence, describes what “God” is. Others seem to feel the same way; a definition I found described god as “the creator and ruler of the universe and source of all moral authority.”

And yet the force I described above was not my description of the Christian God (or G-d or Allah for that matter). Instead, I was describing the force of evolution, as presented in a book called “The Moral Animal.” The book talked about how many evolutionary psychologists believe evolution created not only the way we look, but also the way we feel and act. The arguments are long and complex (and I think fascinating), but the basic idea is that everything from our hands to our moral system of beliefs evolved through a process of natural selection. A parent’s love for their children, for example, evolved as a way to make the parents willing sacrifice everything to help their children survive and thus pass on their genes.

At first this thought scared me. It almost made me feel “fake,” like my love for my parents (and all of you) wasn’t real and instead just a way of my genes “tricking” me. I was fine with the idea that proto-humans evolved millennia ago and weren’t just abracadabra-ed to existence by a God 6,000 years ago. But I always took comfort in the fact that there seemed to be space for some other power (God) to enter somewhere: how else would you explain morals or altruism or love? Yet here was an explanation laid out in front of me… it was all the same force and a brutal, cold-hearted, unthinking force at that… it was all evolution.

But then I stepped back and looked at it in a different way, which, I should add, I was only able to do after Gwen nudged me that way. I spent the entire book looking for a place to insert “God” into the story, but what if “God” was already there, staring me in the face the whole time? What if the evolutionary force is “God?”

When it comes to religion, I’m not certain of much. But one thing I am certain of is that God is not some guy who looks like Dumbledore and sits on a cloud. I think “God” is not a “he,” nor is it a “she,” nor, do I think, is it something that we would generally think of as being an “it.” In my mind, “God” is something that we won’t, or even can’t, fully understand; just an unknowable force that shapes our world. And the more I learn, the more that evolution seems to fit that definition perfectly.

An all-powerful force that created love, morals, and friendship? Sounds like a "God" to me. Unfortunately, it also sounds like evolution. But maybe, just maybe, that isn't the contradiction that it at first seemed. Plus, just think how deliciously ironic the religious right's campaign to keep evolution(God?) out of the the schools would then be.

More thoughts, which are all even less well developed than my undeveloped thought above.

• I’ve also thought that you could also tell a story where there is a higher power than evolution somewhere. After all, who’s to say a “random” gene mutation that would create a feeling of love between a father and son is actually random. Maybe it’s a careful manipulation by a higher power, but because we could never understand the higher power, we just chalk up to “randomness.” In that case, maybe “God” did create love and morals and creatures everywhere and used the might of evolution as the path with which to implement “its” creations.
• Evolution does some fucked up things. I still have a tough time thinking of the evolutionary force as “god” because I have a tough time thinking about a “god” that would do evil things. But maybe there’s no getting around that.
• The related thing that bothers me a bit is that humans seemingly have controlled, or at least influenced, evolution in the past by breeding only the best animals, sowing the best seeds, etc. and genetically modified products are basically a souped-up version of that. Clearly, I can't believe that we've managed to control "God." But maybe that's just me being anthropocentric. I guess you could argue that domesticated plants and animals made us evolve (by moving to cities, which changes what the "best" genetic traits are) just as much as we made them evolve (by selectively breeding/sowing them). Or, in this line of thinking, neither one caused the other to evolve, but the power of "God" caused them both, with the interaction between the two only enforcing its power.