The Philosophy of Everything 2e — Part II, Ch 9: The Concept of God

God is not an answer. It is the name we write on a box we are too tired to open, and when I finally opened mine, the name was the only thing inside.

In brief: In this chapter I look straight at the oldest word in my head and ask what I had really meant by God all those years. I open the boxes that word was written on, from the beginning of time to the root of goodness, and I say plainly what I found inside. It matters because the answer moves heaven and hell out of the clouds and into the life you are living now, where your own hands are on the controls.

I had taken the controls of my life back from everyone I had handed them to. There was one place left where I had never quite reached in and taken them. It was the place above, where I had always assumed someone was holding a copy. So I turned, at last, to the oldest thing in my head and looked straight at it. What had I meant, all those years, by God?

What I found, when I finally looked, was not a being. It was a word. For most of my life I had carried one word that I could write into any blank, and the writing of it gave me a particular kind of relief. When something happened that I could not explain, I wrote the word over it, and the not-understanding stopped aching. When something happened that I could not bear, I wrote the word over it, and the bearing got a little easier. The word was God. Its great usefulness was that it could be written over anything, and that once it was written there, I did not have to think any more.

That is the thing to see first, because once you have seen it, the rest of this chapter follows on its own. God, for most of the people who have ever used the word, is not the answer to a question. It is the name we write across the front of a box we have not opened, so that we can stop standing in front of the box.

There is a reason we reach for the name, and it is not stupidity. A mind hates an open question the way a body hates the cold. Since the earliest days, we have gone after answers to everything our attention landed on. We do it because an answer removes confusion, and removing confusion is one of the small ways a creature improves its chances of staying alive. An animal that knows what the rustle in the grass is survives better than one that stands there wondering. We are built to close the question fast. And sometimes the real answer is not in reach. The box will not open with the tools we have. Then we do the next best thing for our nerves, which is to write a name on the lid and walk away calmer. The name does the work the answer would have done. It just does it without being true.

Thinking, the real kind, the kind that actually opens the box, costs a great deal of energy. I have said earlier in this book that there is a slow drift in all things towards the easy and the settled. Physicists call it entropy. The same drift that cools your coffee and dusts your shelf works on a mind too. It makes us put things off. It makes us rest more and look less. It makes us take a small, unchecked answer rather than pay for a real one, because the real one is expensive and the cheap one is right there. The name is the cheapest answer there has ever been. You do not even have to think it up carefully. You only have to tell a story good enough to settle the crowd, and the crowd, being as tired as you are, is glad to be settled.

Picture the oldest version of this. A group of our ancestors notice that the small lake near the village freezes over while the wide sea down the coast does not, even on the same cold nights. They turn it over in their heads. They have no way to find out why. They have no thermometers, no jars, no idea what salt is doing in the water. The not-knowing sits there, uncomfortable. Then the eldest among them, the one whose job is to settle the crowd, says the thing that settles it: "The supreme works in mysterious ways." And everyone nods. Undoubtedly. The box is shut. The name is on the lid. Everybody can sleep.

Now a child can open that particular box in an afternoon. Take two jars. Fill one with plain water, filtered clean, and the other with water you have stirred salt into until no more will dissolve. Put both in the freezer and come back later. The plain water will have turned to ice. It freezes sooner, because the salt in the other jar makes that water hold out longer against the cold. That is the whole mystery. There was never a supreme being in the lake. There was salt, and the cold, and the plain water of the small lake giving up sooner than the salted water of the sea.

To be fair, a scientist would say that salt is only part of the sea's secret. The sea is also deep and wide and always moving, so it holds on to its warmth far longer than a small lake does. It freezes over only where the winters are bitter, near the poles. But salt is the part the jars can show you. The name has come off that box. Anybody can look inside now.

I do not blame the ancestors for the name they wrote on the lake. They had no jars and no school. The name was the best they could do, and it let them get on with the harder business of staying alive. What I cannot extend the same patience to is us. We are not them. We were born into a century that has the jars, the school, and the libraries full of boxes already opened and labelled honestly on the inside. And yet the drift towards the easy answer is in us as strongly as it was in them. A great many people, handed every tool the ancestors lacked, still cannot make the small leap from a comforting story to a checked one. And it is not a comfortable thing to know that, after all the money a society pours into teaching its young, so many minds still reach for the name rather than open the box. The tools are on the table. Most of us do not pick them up.

There was one box I had to come to eventually, because it is the largest one, and it is the box the name was first written on and clings to longest. It is the box at the very back of time, the one labelled the beginning.

Most people, even now, even after everything science has shown them, hold on to the name because of how they picture cause and effect. They picture it as a straight line. This thing caused that thing, which caused the next thing, running back and back in a single chain. And suppose you follow a single thread of cause and effect backwards, far enough. That thread is one of those causal planes I spoke about earlier, and you are tracing it all the way to its start. You arrive, finally, at a first link with nothing before it, a cause that was not itself caused by anything.

The deepest of these threads is the absolute causal plane, the one that runs all the way back behind everything. It seems to end in an empty space where the first link should be. And that empty space, just before the first link, is where the mind writes the name. Something had to start it. Someone had to light the first fire. The whole long argument for God, stripped down, is the feeling that a chain must have a first link, and the refusal to leave that first space blank.

But the chain is not straight. I have walked through this earlier in the book, with the cycles of energy and the water moving round the world. So I will not lay the whole thing out again here. I will only remind you of the shape of it. The world does not run in straight lines. It runs in circles. A drop of water in your glass was rain on a mountain a year ago, and a glacier before that, and the sea before that, and it will be the sea again. There is no first drop. Ask where the cycle begins, and a fisherman by the coast will point at the sea, and a monk in the high mountains will point at the glacier. Both will be right, because the cycle has no beginning. It has only places where particular eyes happen to enter it.

The carbon that moves through every living thing on this planet runs in the same kind of loop. It is a small copy of a far larger loop the whole cosmos is turning through. Here I should say plainly that most cosmologists see that larger loop differently. They trace the universe we can see back to a hot, dense start about 13.8 billion years ago. Their measurements suggest it will keep spreading out rather than turn round again. A few serious physicists do argue for a universe that cycles, but they are still the smaller camp. And what came before that hot start, if anything, nobody yet knows.

When you trace cause and effect backwards and seem to arrive at a first cause with nothing behind it, you have not found the edge of the world. You have only forgotten that the line you were tracing was bent into a circle, with the end quietly causing the beginning. There is no first cause to find. There is no start and no stop to creation, only the same stuff being sustained and turned into something else, forever. The reason it does not feel that way to us is that we are standing at one point on the circle and cannot see it close. An eye that entered the cosmos at a different point in its turning would describe a different beginning. It would be just as wrong, and just as sure.

I will be honest about why this one was hard for me in particular. It was not the physics. It was that I wanted there to be a beginning. A beginning meant the story had an author. An author meant the name had somewhere to live. And the name living somewhere meant I was not, finally, on my own. Letting the first link go was not a tidy correction in my head. It was the quiet closing of the last place I had kept a chair pulled out for someone above. The box at the back of time is empty. There is no first cause inside it. There never was. The name was the only thing in there, and the name was something I had brought with me.

If the name was not holding up the beginning, there was a second box I had been keeping it on. This one frightened me more, because it seemed to hold up something I could not do without. Many people believe that without God there is no right and wrong at all. They believe that goodness itself comes from him, and that if you take him away, nothing is left to stop us from tearing each other apart. This is the box labelled where being good comes from. I want to open it slowly, because what is inside it is not frightening at all once you have seen it.

Goodness did not come down from above. It grew up from below, out of the same drive to survive that everything else in us grew from. Think it through. Suppose I harm you to improve my own life. I take what is yours because taking it helps me. You are not going to sit quietly and play the victim. You are going to come back at me. And then I come back at you, and your people come back at mine. The harming runs forward in a circle through the generations, each round feeding the next, with no end in it anywhere. A people living like that does not last.

So somewhere far back, human beings did the only thing that could stop the circle: they laid down a few plain rules. Do not kill. Do not steal. Do not take what keeps another person alive. The trouble was that nobody feared a rule. A rule is just words, and words from your neighbour can be ignored. So the rules were given the one backing that could not be ignored. They were said to come from the highest power there was, a power whose anger had no limit and whose eye never closed. And here, for the second time, the name earned its keep. It became the judge who sees everything and forgets nothing, the one you could not lie to and could not outrun.

And it worked. The groups whose members believed someone above was watching, and so kept the rules even when no neighbour was looking, held together and survived. The groups that had no such belief, or a weaker one, were freer to turn on each other, and a good many of them finished themselves off. Natural selection does not care in the slightest whether a belief is true, only whether it helps the believers last. And natural selection quietly favoured the ones who feared the watching eye. So the belief in God, however far from true, did a real job for a very long time. It kept us from ending our own story while we were still too young to know better. I will not sneer at it for that. It is one of the reasons any of us are here to argue about it.

But that was then. The job is finished, and the tool has started to do harm where it used to do good. The same belief that once held a people together is now mostly used to tell one people that another people are wrong. It is used to send them at each other over whose unopened box has the better name on it. It does not even help us be good any more. If anything, it makes us lazier about it. When you believe the accounts are settled somewhere else, in another life, by someone else, you stop tending them here. Being good is slow, unglamorous work, and the belief offers a shortcut. Hell feels comfortably far away, and you can always do the wrong thing now and say sorry to the all-forgiving later. The name that once enforced goodness now quietly excuses its absence.

So let me say plainly the thing this chapter has been walking towards, because it is the heart of it. Heaven and hell are real, and they are here. They are not places you go after you die. They are the reward and the punishment that good and bad behaviour hand you, in this life, on this planet, as part of ordinary days. We make them. Not God. Us. Do harm, and you will live in a hell of your own building: a life of people coming back at you, of trust gone, of the circle of harm turning under your own feet. Live well, and you build yourself something close to a heaven, here, in the only place there is to build one. There is no faraway country where the books get balanced. The balancing happens at home, in this life, in the small daily weather of how you have treated what is around you.

Evil, in fact, only exists in human lives, and only for one reason: we are the creatures that try to improve our own survival by harming someone else's. Any thought, any word, any action that damages you or another person is what the old books mean by sin. And the reason it is a sin is not that a judge above frowns at it. It is a sin because it works its way back, in time, and lowers your own chances of a good life. Your thoughts, your words, your actions, and the long consequences of all three (together, your karma) come home. This does not mean you lie down and let yourself be wronged. You must defend yourself against the harm others do, and you must stand up for what is just. But you do it by the path that causes the least harm you can manage. That means improving your own life without stealing the chance of a good one from anyone else, and without throwing away your own goodness to win.

Without seeing this, a person has no real reason to be good. And here I want to be careful. It would be easy to read all this as saying people are wicked underneath, and that only the fear of God or the law keeps them in line. That is not it at all. We are not evil by nature. We do bad things mostly out of not seeing, out of the same drift towards the easy and the unexamined that makes us write names on boxes. There is goodness in everyone. It is just asleep, and it needs waking.

The thing that keeps it asleep is a kind of bad arithmetic we all learned. It says that wrongdoing gets punished but kindness gets nothing back, and that nobody pats you on the back for being decent. It says that being a good person is, frankly, a little boring next to being a clever or a dangerous one. Goodness, by this arithmetic, is not exciting, not attractive, not the thing that turns heads. That arithmetic is wrong. The reward for goodness is not a pat on the back. The reward is the better world you then get to live inside: the heaven you have been building without quite noticing. Once you understand that, you do not need an external entity, some being outside yourself, dangling rewards over you. You can find the courage to go looking for what you are capable of. I mean the good you can do inside yourself and out in the world, on your own account, with nobody keeping score from above.

The truth is we barely need any special wisdom now to see what crime costs. A child can see it. What we need is not knowledge but will. Will is the strength to hold back the self-centred pull towards our own survival at another's expense. That pull is the part of us still running the old program. And where the will fails, we have built, between us, something the ancestors did not have. It is a whole patient machinery of made laws, and the people who enforce them, and the courts that try to give the wronged their due. All of it is there to hold us to the agreement we have made about how to live near one another. We do not need the watching eye in the sky any more. We have, slowly and imperfectly, learned to watch out for each other instead.

There was a third box, and it was the subtlest, and it is the one where the name had hidden best. It is the box you open when you have accepted everything else: no first cause, no judge above, no heaven in the clouds. You look at the sheer order of the world, the way everything obeys, the way the rules never miss. And you think: even so, something this orderly must have a mind behind it. Or, if not a mind behind it, then at least a watcher over it, someone holding it all in place. This is the last and best argument for the name, and it took me the longest to set down.

Here is what is actually in that box. The eight rules I walked you through earlier act and react with perfect regularity, the same way every time, under the same conditions. But they do it without anybody home. They are not conscious. They do not know they are working. They behave the way the small thinking machines we have lately built behave. These are the ones that answer when you speak to them, that seem to follow what you mean, that act for all the world like a mind, and have no one inside them at all. The rules take in the conditions, and they return the only outcome those conditions allow. It is the way such a machine takes in a question and returns an answer, with nobody deciding anything.

When a person looks at this regularity, this flawless following of rules, and concludes there must be a mind behind it, they are making an honest mistake. They have seen something that behaves exactly as a mind would behave, and assumed a mind. But a thing can act intelligent without being intelligent. We build such things now and carry them in our pockets.

And the order does not need anyone to watch over it, either. I made the point earlier in this book that the sun does not pause when you close your eyes. The world keeps going whether or not anyone is looking at it. This is where that comes home. There are old beliefs, and most religions among them, that get a great deal of their work out of the opposite idea. The idea is that without some great watcher holding the whole thing in mind, the universe could not so much as carry on from one moment to the next. It is not so. The rules do not need an audience. They held before there was a single eye anywhere in the cosmos to see them working, and they will go on holding after the last eye has closed. Nothing is keeping the world in being by watching it. The world keeps itself.

So let me give the right thing the right name, since this is the chapter for it. I am going to call these unconscious, rule-following eternal laws by a name of their own: cosmic intelligence. I call them intelligence because they behave with all the apparent cleverness of a mind. Out of a handful of fixed rules, they produce a world of staggering variety. The way a few letters of an alphabet can be arranged into millions of words, these few rules arrange energy into galaxies and oceans and the eye that is reading this line. And I call it cosmic because it is everywhere and answers to no one.

But the intelligence is the intelligence of a machine, not of a person. There is no one operating you by remote control. Not God. Not even the eternal laws themselves, which want nothing and intend nothing and have never once noticed you. You are not being run. You are running. Your life is your own creation, made out of your thoughts and your words and your actions and nothing else. No one above is favouring you, and no one above is against you. And nothing in your life is going to happen because some great being felt like it.

The majesty of God bows down before the eternal laws.

That is the whole of it. The order you mistook for a sign of someone above, or for the work of someone watching, was the rules. They were running in the open, asking nothing of you, the way they always have. The name can come off this box too. And once it does, a real freedom opens up. It is the freedom of a spirit no longer tormented by an idea that was poisoning it from the inside. The cure for that torment is not another belief. It is knowledge. Knowledge is how you treat the oldest addiction there is, which is the addiction to not having to think.

I will not pretend this is an easy thing to hand to a child, or even, in plain form, to a grown person. Cosmic intelligence is a cold idea to meet head-on. So I do not think we should hand it to children head-on. Children learn the way they have always learned: through people they can look up to, and stories they can hold. Give a child the right hero in the right story. They will take in more about how the world works, and how a good person moves through it, than any lecture could teach them. That is how the first lessons in virtue go in: not as rules, but as tales. They build the shape of a character before the child even knows it is being built. Then, later, before they are grown, you teach them to look at the world plainly, with the mysticism cleared away. That way, the stories that carried the virtue do not harden into the boxes their grandparents lived inside.

And if people want to give the cosmic intelligence a name, after all this, I think that is perfectly all right. We are naming creatures. It is how we get a grip on things. In the part of the world I come from, the old name for it is Īśvara. It is the same name I used earlier in this book for the unchanging half of reality, the half that gives the rules. That is no accident. The unchanging half that gives the rules and the cosmic intelligence are the same thing, looked at from two sides. There is no more harm in keeping the name than there is in the fact that we now name the small thinking machines in our phones and call them Siri and Alexa. The name is fine. The mistake was never the name. The mistake was forgetting that we were the ones who wrote it, and on what.

Most people, it is true, cannot walk a good road without a light to walk towards. They need a person to admire, a figure to hold in mind. In my part of the world this is called a Bhagavān, someone to worship and try to grow into. There is nothing wrong with that as a beginning. But it is meant to be a beginning. By the time a person is grown, the aim is to become self-anchored: to walk the good road on your own legs, with no hand holding you up. That is exactly the thing our schools are worst at producing, because they are still running, without quite admitting it, on a mission set down two centuries ago. The mission was to turn out a workforce that does as it is told and does not ask why. You cannot raise self-anchored people on a system built to make obedient ones. We will have to change that, and I will come to how, later in the book.

There is one more honest thing to say, about books, mine included. Every book ever written belongs to a world that is already passing. It was written by someone shaped by a particular time, for people living in it. The religious books are no exception. But most of them, including the religious ones, are really about human behaviour, and human behaviour has not changed much at all. So read them the way you watch a film. A film has romance in it, and crime, and comedy, and horror, and you do not walk out believing all of it was meant as instruction. You take home the part that was the point and you leave the rest in the cinema. Read every book that way, the holy ones too, and mine when you are done with it. Keep whatever in it makes you a better person. Leave the rest on the shelf.

It is worth remembering what the old religious houses were actually for, because it shows how little of the name is left holding anything up. They did three things, mostly. First, they stood as a shared symbol of the ultimate truth. Think of the way a husband far from his wife will kiss the ring she gave him, because the ring stands in for her. In the same way, the temple and the figure inside it stood in for the cosmic intelligence as each person imagined it. A person can keep that image at home now, or, better, in their own head.

Second, they taught, and the schools have taken that over. And third, they were where you turned in disaster and where you gave to the poor. The work of catching people when they fall, and feeding those who have nothing, has moved, more and more, to governments using the taxes we all pay. The buildings did real work once. The work has mostly moved out of them. What is left is the name over the door, and the name was never the part that did the work.

So here is where it leaves us, with the name signed out and the boxes open. No one is running our lives from anywhere. Everything that happens to us is the consequence of what we have already thought and said and done. It is our karma, coming home in its own time. We spent so long imagining that the control room was up above, in someone else's hands. It turns out to have been ours the whole while. That is not a loss. When the name signs out, the controls do not vanish. They come home.

And what is asked of us, now that we are holding them, is not complicated, though it is hard. It is to leave the world a little better than we found it, by slowly freeing our own will from the old machinery. And it is to live in a way that does not buy our own good at the cost of someone else's. It is to live, as far as we can manage it, in harmony with the people and the things around us. That harmony, as far as I have ever been able to tell, is the whole purpose of our being here. There is no grander one waiting above it. Think of a life spent on it, and a long line of lives after ours spent on it, each one leaving the place a little better than the last. That, and nothing handed down from above, is how a paradise actually gets built. Here. By us. Slowly.

And then one thing more, said gently, because how this gets set down matters as much as any of it. Having found all this, do not turn around and force it on anyone. The forcing is the very thing we are trying to leave behind. Set it down where people can reach it, and let them come to it in their own time, on their own legs, the way you had to.

There was one fear the name had been answering for me longer than any of the others, all the way down at the bottom, in the dark. It was the fear of what happens to me when I die. As long as someone above was keeping a place for me on the far side of it, the fear stayed manageable. Now the name had gone, and the question stood there in the open with no one left to answer it but me. It was the one I had been most afraid of, and so the one I had left for last. I faced it next.

Words to Keep

• the name on the box: the word God, written over a question we have not answered, so that we can stop thinking about it.

• the drift towards the easy: the slow pull in all things, minds included, towards rest and the cheapest answer; the same drift that cools your coffee.

• causal plane: a single thread of cause and effect, each event the result of the one before and the cause of the next.

• first cause: the imagined first link in the chain of cause and effect, with nothing before it; the empty space where the mind writes the name.

• heaven and hell: not places after death, but the reward and punishment that our good and bad behaviour bring us in this life.

• sin: any thought, word or action that damages you or another person, and so works its way back to lower your own chances of a good life.

• karma: your thoughts, words and actions, and the long consequences of all three, coming home to you in their own time.

• cosmic intelligence: the unconscious, rule-following eternal laws, which act with all the cleverness of a mind but have no one inside them.

• Īśvara: the old Indian name for the unchanging half of reality that gives the rules; the same thing as cosmic intelligence, seen from another side.

• Bhagavān: a figure to admire and worship and try to grow into; a light to walk towards, meant as a beginning, not an end.

• self-anchored: able to walk the good road on your own legs, with no hand from above holding you up.

Sources and Further Reading

• This chapter comes mostly from my own looking and thinking, not from any one book. The works below are the ones whose ideas it leans on or answers.

• Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859). The idea of natural selection, which I use to explain why belief in a watching god helped some groups survive.

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae. Its "five ways" include the classic first-cause argument for God, the one I answer at the box labelled the beginning.

• William Paley, Natural Theology (1802). The best-known form of the argument that the order of the world needs a mind behind it, which is the third box in this chapter.

• Roger Penrose, Cycles of Time (2010). One serious physicist's case for a universe that turns in cycles, the minority view I mention beside the large loop.

• The Indian tradition of Īśvara and Bhagavān. The old names from my part of the world that I keep for the cosmic intelligence and for the figure we grow towards.