A Theory of the Divine

I have a theory of the divine. It's not especially cheerful, though it does manage to deal with the problem of suffering in the world. What if there were some presence that basically fed off emotion?

Is my theory of the divine that there is some kind of emotion-sucking parasite floating out there?

Let's just say that if there is a food chain, we're not at the top of it. My theory is that we are the link between the material world that was created, and the vast abstraction that created it. Our job is simply to live, and to experience emotion, which presumably gets transmitted to or absorbed by whoever or whatever set the whole business of the Universe up and running. This view is not too incompatible with the Western notion of why mankind has free will, and the purpose of worship.

If we didn't have free will, the Creator would just be talking to himself through meat puppets - nothing new, no surprises, just the omniscient talking to itself throughout eternity. Worship is then seen as a particularly effective means of communication.

In other words, we are here with more or less free will in an environment where not everything is determined before-hand (I could give a whole lecture on the quantum physics reasons why God must NOT know when and where every leaf falls because the glue that holds the physical world together is uncertainty) because God was lonely and needed someone to talk to.

From the point of view of emotion, all of creation is therefore a kind of continuously running experiment in gathering sense-impressions. One could argue that since the experiment doesn't have a particular morality (it's just a mechanism to collect sense-impressions from the physical world), this idea explains the problem of good and evil. In some sense, it doesn't matter.

In case you think this assertion sounds harsh, consider this: from about 200 to 65 million years ago, there was abundant animal life, of a kind not seen since on this Earth, and what did this life do? It ate other life. In some cases, the life that was being eaten was plant life, which appears to be in no position to complain, but in very many cases, one dinosaur would eat another. Those animals had nervous systems and brains enough to exhibit behaviors. This means that these animals probably felt pain, and quite possibly, also felt something akin to fear. The point here is, in that long ago time before people, or even mammals, there was a complete eco-system of plants and animals, most of which we would now regard as quite alien. Did any of those animals achieve self-awareness, and wonder about Creation, or did they just react with autonomous but unconscious learned behavior, while feeling something we might call emotion - happiness, fear, and so forth?

What's missing from the primordial picture? Self-awareness, probably, and what we might call personality, although pet lovers will probably be quick to declare that even the family cat, with a brain the size of a walnut, has an individual, recognizable personality, and can certainly experience both happiness and fear. Since people are obviously both different yet similar in many ways to the family cat, there is at least the suspicion that what we call personality, the basis for belief in the human soul, may have been a kind of evolutionary accident or by-product.

There is a further question. Are the little bits of personality merged back with the greater consciouness upon death, or merely extinguished, having completed their task of transmitting sense-impressions? Alan Watts and similar Buddhist thinkers would probably say that we live in the Universe, so we must in some sense be part of the Divine, but that the notion of individual personality is not so important. Dr Watts' argument was that we come from nothing, from billions of years of not having existed, and that doesn't seem to bother anybody. If we then go to nothing, why is that any different? Why be afraid of nothing?

From Wilhelm Reich's orgone boxes of dubious efficacy to the statistically testable Random Event Generators at Princeton which appear to be sensitive to emotional world events, there is at least a hint that we are all connected in some as yet scientifically unknown way. The big question is, are we part of the cosmic presence that created things, or just a bit of the machinery that accidentally became aware of its own existence?