As I grew older, I would not hold fast to the Hebrew faith.  In fact, during my late teens I was agnostic.  I simply did not see compelling evidence for the existence or non-existence of God.  Yet, I did not abandon the fundamentals of faith I had learned when I was younger, and I eventually began to believe in the existence of god again, but my understanding of god by way of questioning and learning had changed. 

 

During my junior year in undergraduate school, I had begun the process of self-education that led me to the idea that god may be a lot different than we ever dare imagine a deity could be.  I asked myself, “Is there room for Malcolm X in heaven?  Is Doctor Martin Luther King welcome in Jannah?  Do good Jews, Muslims, and Hindus go to the same place when they die?”  Along another line of thinking, “When the threat of reprisal is real, why do devout people look the other way when they are certain a person is being harmed?  What is stronger: the will to do what is right or the will to survive?”  In addition, everything that I had learned about the universe from a variety of different disciplines had taught me that the cosmos is a balancing act between positive and negative forces.  If this was so, then what of morality and its evil twin.  Was god still the source of everything good in the world, or was god the source of everything good and bad.  Then it occurred to me that good and bad were probably too simplistic to adequately explain the depth and breadth of god and the impulses humankind experiences on a day-to-day basis.  Maybe, hearkening back to the Torah, god is just what god says—I am.  That is, god is existence on a universal scale or life in its cosmic entirety—positive and negative.  Not a benevolent spirit that exists separately from the universe, but an entity that is the universe.  That would make morality—scientifically speaking—a function of the preservation of the universe and its balance just as morality—religiously speaking—is a function of the preservation of god and the corresponding order expounded upon in any number of sacred tomes.  But I think we all can agree that whether the topic is science or religion, the alpha and omega of each is the creation and perpetuation of life.

 

Then that begs a question: what is the goal of life?  Charles Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene writes, “We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”  In other words, Dawkins believes the goal of life is to survive.  For biological entities, this is done by reproducing and as a result transmitting genes from one generation to the next that enhance the ability of an organism and hence its species to survive.  As diverse as nature is, so to are the ways in which each organism meets the challenges of the survival imperative.  A cheetah uses speed.  A chameleon uses camouflage.  Humans, a high degree of intelligence.  But, have humans used intelligence to enhance, support, or even create other survival mechanisms, say for example, morality?  

 

Most are accustomed to thinking of morality as the best way to interact with god, each other, and as a guide for our decision making process.  This is true in many cases, but I also believe religious or non-religious morality to be an extension of the primate instinct to need to belong to and care for individuals in its social groups, care for the social group as a whole, and nurse/nurture the young.  The point I’m trying to make is that although it may well be possible for a benevolent god to be the wellspring from which morality sprung, this does not have to be the case.  Morality may have come down through the ages, A Descent with Man, so to speak, via natural selection, helping us to survive.  It is possible that humans used their intellect to incorporate what was available, a caring instinct, into their growing need to explain their beginnings and the world around them.

 

I am sure that the idea of morality having its roots in natural selection is very unsettling to some.  Most need to know that god has a plan for their life and the universe, that their course is not determined by the selfish needs of survival.  Evolution, being a mechanism of adaptation to environments, doesn’t fit the very human desire to perfect itself either.  On the other hand, natural selection would explain why morality, faith, and religion are so diverse and historically seem to also suit the environments in which they have evolved.  And, because morality may have had its beginnings among mammals and primates (or other older species) that were very territorial, violently so, we shouldn’t be disheartened.  We will continue to evolve, and our morality will evolve with us.  I believe the ultimate expression of this morality will be to cultivate an appreciation and respect for the interdependence of all life, biological or otherwise.  We don’t need a god in the traditional sense to accomplish this task.  This act of cultivation can be done by any being of significant intelligence.  Human beings being one of them.

 

Now, my goal was not to write anyone’s interpretation of god out of the picture, but to offer an alternative way in which god operates.  Humankind, being the expression of just one cosmic fractal (for lack of a better word) in an infinite line of fractals—both horizontally and vertically—from the smallest quanta to the most complete aggregate, have just begun to glimpse how much we do not know.  But at least now it may be possible to understand the answer to that all-important rhetorical question: who does god favor in the web, the spider or the fly?  A question illuminated by the first commandment in the Torah: be fruitful and multiply.