In a previous post, I posited that perhaps God might be a metaphor for all accumulated intelligence. I can just imagine the blood pressure of most theists shooting up when reading this. But let me explain.
First of all, I am a theist, yet the idea doesn’t bother me.
The attributes normally associated with God, e.g., a spirit being, incomprehensible, almighty, and eternal do not counteract this view.
What this view assumes is that there is a connection between life, intelligence and the laws of physics. We know that life can be embodied in matter but we can’t prove if life and intelligence can be embodied some other way. So belief in God either requires his transcending of the physics we think we know, or his being is accounted for by the physics we do not yet understand, like gravity, dark matter and energy and entanglement. Bottom line, we do not know what a “spirit” is in relation to physics. So who is to say that all intelligence is not distributed among spiritual entities such as angels, and each one of us could become one of them. Does God have to be a single entity? From my point of view, it makes no difference. It would mean that “angels” care connected in a way we are not, or consciously aware of. The key point of this idea is that all real intelligence exists in God, which is true which ever way we envision God.
What I like about this idea is that it blends theistic and materialist views. It gives materialists an acceptable way to share the world view that there is an accumulated intelligence, that it created us, that it gave us guidelines about the totality of reality and truth, and that this reality is what we now acknowledge as Natural Law. For the materialist, the “angles” might be space aliens, it does not have to be a spiritual being, which I believe is the main hurtle that atheists have. What it does, however, is acknowledge that intelligence is something real that transcends matter and energy. Hopefully this could get us all agreeing that Natural Law transcends the human entity, and is something we should all respect and follow.
We cannot prove or disprove the existence of a God. What we can prove is that actionable intelligence is necessary for the existence of life. So if one wants to believe that God is not a being per se, but accumulated intelligence, who cares. Getting everyone on the same page about how to live our lives based on a higher intelligence is the bigger issue.
Living our lives based on the principles of Natural Law is the formula that God, the Bible and our Constitution all point to. If the whole world was governed by the principles of our Constitution, we should have world peace and prosperity!