I think it would help cut through the dust and noise if we asked the correct question about "God".
Let me respectfully offer a candidate question that seems to me better than the questions and frameworks typically used.
As science evolves, the legacy "billiard ball" models of "life" are yielding to more nuanced models of something that is hierarchical, multi-level, with both near-term and long-term feedback loops, and somewhat more diffuse than would be simple.
Our own bodies turn out to be massive structures of mostly independent entities, "cells", some of which like white blood cells are not even "attached" but wander around on their own.
This is profoundly important. The mulltilevel cooperating swarm model has also proven to be extremely successful in design of computer networks and "supercomputers". But in particular, computer architectures consciously utilize "layers" of "systems" which hide significant details on purpose between layers.
Thus, the application software which "writes to disk" no longer needs to know the details of which sector of which cylinder of which disk it is writing to, or if it is even a real disk or a virtual disk, located here or in Singapore. Those details are delegated to lower-level processes to manage, with blessed relief.
And multi-level evolution of "the fittest" embraces simple single-level models, but also embraces all levels of altruism as successively higher levels of organization co-evolve, which, net, improves the survival of their lower-level agents.
So, entirely without needing to get into spirituality or extrapolation 200 orders of magnitude or more to "God", there is a very real question that Science is mostly ignoring of whether, in fact, such levels of life extend above humans as well as below them, even by just one or two.
Now, a key principle of Cosmology is that "we are not special". We, Earth, Mankind, is not "in the center of the universe", or at the very edge, or the highest form of anything, etc. This should be taken as the base case, and anyone wishing to deviate from it bears the burden of proof, not the other way around.
Given that, and the model of life that we clearly both exemplify and copy into silicon, we have to ASSUME that there are, in fact, at least a FEW levels of hierarchical life "above us", where "above" means in this very specific framework.
So, we must ASSUME until proven otherwise that we humans are, akin to white blood cells, going about our lives happily and mostly unaware that we are, in fact, part and parcel of a much larger "body" and "being" that is also, simultaneously going about its own business, probably on a much larger time-scale than our own.
I have not touched the nature of God here, or any "religion" -- I have entirely based this reasoning on solid science and cosmology and debunking legacy models and frameworks that make mankind more "special" than proven, or that make "life" more atomic, binary, and magical than proven.
There is more evidence every day that human "beings" are, in fact, caught up in a web of distal causality where the experiences, lives, actions, decision, and happiness of "other people" nearby has a surprisingly strong "impact" on our own psychology and physiology. It is AS IF the boundaries of "our bodies" is not, in fact, our skin, mathematically. It behaves as if we are actually PART, biologically, of larger entities with their own somewhat insulated levels of life.
Perhaps "religions" and "cultures" and "nations" and "peoples" are, in a very real mathematical sense, alive. Perhaps earth ("Gaia") is itself alive with an independent consciousness. Perhaps the entire galaxy is alive.
The point is, to be scientific, until proven otherwise, the cosmological principle asserts, with the power of Occam's Razor, that we MUST ASSUME that the upper extremum of "life" does NOT stop at US, or that that WE are the "highest creation of God." Just as we MUST ASSUME that the Earth, despite being our home, is NOT the center of the solar system, or the galaxy, or the universe.
The burden of scientific proof, in fact, is on anyone who wants to go against the Cosmological principle and assert that, in fact, somehow, we and our viewpoint ARE, magically, special and define an end point, let alone the upper end point, of all that is or could be.
Seeking to understand or model what is ten thousand levels above us ("God") is probably a tad ambitious, I would suggest, and not really necessary and in fact does not help the research.
First, let's solve the problem of how to detect and analyze ONE level above us.
We KNOW there are "things" we "belong to" that are geographically and perhaps in time larger than ourselves -- things such as "family", "neighborhood", "culture", "a corporation", "a country", etc.
What is less obvious is that these much larger things around us may be, in fact, themselves alive and conscious.
Despite our theoretical legacy view that the scale of "life" stops at humans, nevertheless we have all seen circumstances where larger things APPEAR to "take on a life of their own".
The singularly profound concept I'm arguing for here is that that perception is correct, and that things DO take on a "life of their own".
We need to take a leap and change our definition of "life" and "alive" to admit those observations that otherwise would be viewed as "exceptions" or heretical.
If you truly cannot let go of the biology texbook definition of "life", then at least consider the larger mental model to be "MAWBA" -- "Might as WELL be alive.", which is a superset of what Biology texts tell us is "alive", and also finally includes viruses, phages, and the increasingly dominant life form on this planet, "corporations".
We should seek more diligently to find redefinitions of "life" which include this hierarchical, mutli-level type model used by software engineers (because it WORKS), and then seek to find out not WHETHER, but WHICH higher level large movements, structures, behaviors, around us that we have been perceiving as something else are, in fact, mathematically, independently alive entities that we are "part of " in the sense our white blood cells are "part of " ourselves.
INDEPENDENT of those arguments, I would then suggest that the various "religions" of mankind could be viewed as clumsy attempts by uneducated laymen to attempt to put into some kind of words the socially observed reality that "SOMETHING LARGER IS GOING ON HERE".
Religion asserts that as a fact, though embellished with a variety of details that vary by location and time.
Science seems to be busy with its eyes down the microscope tube, looking for ever smaller "God particles".
I suggest we should combine forces of Science and Religion and look "above" instead, and try to make sense of what we see going on in the newspapers in a framework of "metalife", of things that "Might as well be alive" because they behave like they are. (Eg, "corporations").
I seem to perceive that this exploration of the regions "above" is avoided by scientists on the sometimes explicit grounds that it would give aid and comfort to religious idiots. Such childish emotions have no place setting national research policy on the single most important SCIENTIFIC question that could organize the data in a totally new way and reveal causal relationships we always noticed but never fully understood.
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One of the immediate applications of this framework would be to consider a core message of Christianity, say, paraphrasing only slightly " For Christ's sake, act like you're parts of the same body!"
Specifically, if we ARE in fact parts of the same meta-body, then what we see around us in the daily headlines is essentially an autoimmune disorder, with parts of the body, in good faith, not recognizing other parts of the body as being legitimate, and consequently attacking them as being "not us".
Our human eyes are seeing the differences, but not the same-metabody signature being broadcast on our own internal IFF (Identification, Friend or Foe) system.
Perhaps, viewing this as an autoimmune disorder, and many events as, essentially, anaphylactic shock, would let us have the insights required to actually CURE the disorder.
To quote the title of a Baha'i book: Peace: More than an End to War.
It is important to grasp that I am NOT saying that the situation is "like unto" members of one body, or similar to, or analogous to that. I am making a MUCH stronger statement. I am asserting that we ARE, in a true mathematical and physiological and biological sense, all members of one (or more?) meta-bodies, despite, like white blood cells, not being fixed in geographic location or attached at the hip to each other.
In that case, if that is true, then things that happen to even "the least of these" happen to __me__, although the time-scale for the impact to percolate through the metabody to me may be longer than I usually wait around to examine.
Also, but now working from possible scale-invariant design architecture, ( stronger than analogy), we notice that human cells are extremely difficult to grow in the lab because a human cell, if removed from its metabody (our body), goes into flat decline and shortly commits apoptosis, ie, pushes the do-not-push big red button and commits suicide and dies.
Humans, disconnected from each other, in say solitary confinement or worse, in public aloneness, similarly go into flat decline and often commit suicide.
