At some point during my undergraduate years, I decided to research the entomology of the modern word ‘god’. My recollection is that I traced ‘god’ back to the Sanskrit, ‘hu’ which is an exclamation invoking a power higher than oneself. I do not have a dictionary of the Porto-Indo-European language, but I do have internet access, so I queried a search for the origin of the word ‘god’. I found the following from the World History Encyclopedia:***
The English word for ‘god’ first came into use through a German term applied in the 6th-century Christian Codex Argenteus, gudan (“to call” or “to invoke” a power).
‘God’ is to call or invoke a power and it is quite easy for me to believe that ‘god’ is to call upon a power greater than oneself as in, “Oh god, protect me !” Most modern folks in my experience usually go for, “Oh sh_t, I’m in trouble.” Either way, both are emotive expressions. It is my belief that the function of profanity is to express strong feelings as opposed to conveying any substantial content or information. This emotiveness is consistent with R.R. Marett’s understanding about early peoples dancing out their religious beliefs rather than conceptualizing them.
Calling upon a force greater than oneself implies that such a force exists. For the early peoples, these forces were not imagined. They were encountered frequently when hunger forced confrontations with other animals larger than themselves for food. Additionally, since those early peoples were not fur bearing animals themselves, they needed protection from the cold, snow and other elements via the use of harvested animal-skins. Hunters were very dependent upon the animals they hunted. If there were no animals to hunt, then there was nothing to eat. So, it is easy to understand that hunter societies would want to assure that they would have a supply of animals to hunt. Religious ceremonies and dances were to entice the powerful forces to facilitate that these animals were available and that these ‘gods’ or animal spirits would assist in the hunt. Rituals and ceremonies developed to call upon forces greater than the early peoples to assist in hunting, in planting crops and other activities important to their survival.
So the puniness of homo sapient anatomy when compared to the many other more ferocious members of the animal kingdom, affected their emotional state to feel their intense vulnerability to the great many forces that permeated their world. They danced and sang, poured libations, and offered sacrifices to appease, cajole, or placate the formidable powers that harassed their attempts to survive. To this natural condition of the early people, we must take note that they had a very limited knowledge base upon which to understand the forces of nature that were affecting their daily struggles.
They had no scientific idea of what the Northern Lights were about. The NorthernLights were a wonder to behold and naively explained, quite possibly, as a divine occurrence. Then there was their experience of lightening flashing and striking the ground, along with the booming thunder. The encounter of fire for the primitive mind to understand would not be the same as the modern understanding of fire as the process of oxidizing wood. They had no knowledge of chemistry, atoms or the periodic chart of the elements. What they lacked in knowledge they put into dance, libations, and songs, etcetera to placate the forces which appeared to be beyond their ability to conquer. Magic happens before science. Alchemists were predecessors of modern scientistic endeavors.
The first function of the first religion was to control these formidable forces of nature that mystified the understanding of the early peoples. The wrath of these formidable forces had to be avoided, appeased, cajoled and/or conciliated, etcetera. With the advent of domesticating plants that ushered in the agrarian culture, rituals were instituted to mark when to plant and when to harvest. Fertility rites were developed to assure a robust harvest. In that fashion a cast of holy persons began to control the behavior of the tribe around the rhythms of agrarian life.
Fast forward to modern times and we encounter Hawking’s reflection about the pope warning scientists on page 116 of A Brief History of Time that they, “should not inquire into the big bang itself because that was the moment of Creation and therefore the work of God.” The religious authority of the caste of holy persons (priests, shamans, and medicine men, etcetera) evolved into dictating spiritual laws that humans must obey if they are going to avoid the wrath of the given deities. The function of religion, especially institutionalized religions, is to control, but that control can only occur if the homo sapient individual has developed a sense of self.
A sense of self differentiates the self from the other. A sense of self does not occur without the corresponding sense of the other(s) that are not one’s self. The emergence of early peoples awakening to their sense of self is apparent in the cave paintings and drawings that depict the human hand as that which produced the images of animals and stick figures on the stone walls of caves. To me, the manifestation of a sense of self being depicted by the human hand is both poetic and prophetic. While a sense of self is critical for an evolving and maturing understanding of the place occupied by the individual in his or her world, it is also the condition that facilitates group identities that can easily lead to hated, wars, oppression and justifiable murder based upon the religious beliefs of the group exerting its sense of self that is believed to be ‘superior’ to all others.
Caution must be applied to constantly reflect upon the nature of opposites in the reality of our universe: negative or positive charges, up or down, left or right, correct or incorrect, good or bad, and on and on and on. Then there is Newton’s third law of motion. The law of action and reaction can be easily understood that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The Eastern culture of the yin-yang comes readily to mind where light and dark forces are equally encircled together in one entity. Unforeseen consequences might be the result of not fully comprehending Newton’s third law of motion when deciding upon the behavior or action to be employ.
The concrete reality of the early peoples’ intense experience of a profound vulnerability provoked their emotionally charged, religious dancing, singing and enthusiastic ceremonies; but we must compare this experience with Paul Tillich’s understanding of religion as reported by D. Mackenzie Brown in his manuscript Ultimate Concern: Tillich In Dialogue which documents Tillich’s dialogue with his students and selected scholars.
Tillich defines faith, and indirectly religion as “ultimate concern.” Page 2
This is a statement of abstract conceptualization as opposed to enthusiastic song and dance. The fact that the Ultimate Concern is a manuscript recording a conversation to explore and explain religious behavior demonstrates the huge movement of homo sapiens’ religious thinking from concrete enthusiastic emotional expressions (i.e. fertility rites) to the more abstract conceptualization of reality and the individual’s involvement within that reality (abstract conceptualizations). Please consider now the following found on page three of Brown’s record of Ultimate Concern.
Paradoxically, Tillich sees religion itself as one of the great dangers to religious life. Why? Because religious systems tend to become rigid with age. . . . Continuous individual research for the deepest meanings of rituals and symbols is absolutely necessary to preserve the vitality of religion. And unfortunately all religions tend eventually to defeat and discourage that search . . . Page 3
Hence the pope’s warning to Hawking and his fellow scientists that they “should not inquire into the big bang itself because that was the moment of Creation and therefore the work of God,” demonstrates Tillich’s deep insight. If not being directly stated, it is strongly implied that the work of god is beyond our comprehension (with the priestly caste being the exception and therefore being the authoritative voice of god’s will to be acquiesced).
As evolution progressed and complex societies were established, two parallel competing and sometimes cooperating ruling authorities over human behavior emerged — the governance of the secular world and the governance of the sacred world. Hence the pope’s authority over scientists carried significant weight as Galileo knew too well by experience when he was threatened with torture if he did not recant his scientific understandings. Stephen Hawking’s expressed his reaction to the pope’s warning in A Brief History of Time.
I was glad then that he did not know the subject of the talk I had at the conference . . . I had no desire to share the fate of Galileo. Page 116
In his closing chapter, Hertog records the following perception of Hawking:
Like Einstein, Stephen thought that humanity’s long-term future would ultimately depend on how well we understand our deepest roots. Page 265
It appears to me that “understanding our deepest roots” was Stephen Hawking’s Ultimate Concern. Our deepest roots were expressed in Hawking’s definition of our universe before the Big Bang exploded and that deep root was infinitely hot with a space of zero. A Brief History of Time was his explanation of that beginning reality to our present reality, but there remained unanswered questions regarding the events and continuity of the path from that beginning to the present, and Stephen Hawking expressed to Hertog that he, Steven Hawking, got it wrong and a correction had to be made.
The overriding error made in A Brief History of Time was that of perspective. Not withstanding the new advances made in science since the writing of A Brief History of Time, there were other important issues that needed more consideration. The overriding perspective of A Brief History of Time is from the bottom-up (the Archimedean-observer perspective from outside our universe) whereas the overriding perspective in On the Origin of Time is from the top-down (the earthworm’s perspective from within our universe. The bottom up perspective started at the Big Bang and wove through the events that lead to our present situation. The top-down perspective starts form our present events and reverse engineers our perceptions of events back to the beginning which was/is the Big Bang. The quest to “understand our deepest roots” is the same, but the reality of human perceptions is from an observer inside the universe (an earthworm probing the universe from the inside) and not otherwise. To my mind, how could our perceptions, our observations, not be from inside the expanding, evolving explosion which is our universe. I know of no scientist or observer who exists outside our universe. It has taken all of these centuries to admit the obvious as true. So the issue of observership must be integrated into our understanding of what is perceived.
The issue that was taught to me years ago in my high school physics class was that a photon of light sometimes acted like a particle and at other times acted like a wave. So, is a photon a particle or a wave? The answer according to the precepts expressed in On the Origin of Time is that it depends on how the photon is investigated. If the scientific investigation is from the perspective of studying it as a particle, then it acts like a particle. If it is investigated as a wave, then it acts like a wave.
Our understanding of Quantum Theory and its application has advanced. It has demonstrated quite remarkably that there is an uncertainty principle or principle of indeterminacy inherent in scientific pursuits. Quantum theory describes or defines what can be known, but, also, what cannot be known. Hence there are issues that science cannot resolve. When a scientist wants to investigate a particle like an electron or a photon, that investigation sort of freezes that particle so that it can be investigated. However, electrons and photons move. When another scientist wants to study the movement of an electron or photon that investigator perceives movement. Additionally, this movement varies in speeds from the very fast to the much slower and distances traveled from short to astronomically long distances. So one scientist sees a particle while the other sees a wave action.
What resolves this predicament is probability. Consider again the electron. A scientist cannot know where, exactly, an electron will be found in the electron cloud. However that scientist can calculate the probability of where that electron might be found in that electron cloud. There is a potential for the electron to be anywhere so the probability of each probable place must be calculated and in that fashion the scientist can design the experiment according to the highest probability where the electron can be studied. Probable outcomes, not absolutes are the best that can be done. So, we probably know what we are doing. Probabilities exist, absolutes are dismissed.
The above description of current issues in modern science, to my mind, indicates that perspective is absolutely (just kidding) critical. Therefore, perspective is critical to what is learned, but perspective is subjectively dependent on the point of view from which the observation is perceived. All of human or homo sapient perceptions are from within the reality of which we are an insignificant, significance. I know this is problematic, but it is absolutely (again, not at all possible) true. From the bottom-up point of view, which is the old Archimedean perspective, I am insignificant. From the top-down point of view, which is the earthworm’s point of view and my personal perspective, I am significant.
In the first paragraph of his essay, Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson states clearly: “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius.” The quest, then, is to discover what exactly is true for you; not what you publicly present as being true for you. The quest is to discover your true ultimate concern.
At this moment in my writing and the reader’s reading, there is a choice to be made from all of the many potential probabilities that are possible at this moment regarding what has been said. It is also critical to acknowledge that neither the reader, nor I, have calculated the probability of the benefit of each of the potential probabilities of said choice. What is true: both, neither, the former, the latter, or some unknown number of other options? At this point, the unknown reader, may choose to stop reading, walk away, mumbling, “This is all nonsense.” Choice is freedom. Slaves have no choice. Slaves do what they are told to do (or suffer the consequence). In this situation, I choose to continue writing to try to explain a point of view that arises out of my 73 years worth of uncountable events lived through here on Earth.
According to the consciousness that fills my mind, the following are three defining points around which my conscious has evolved.
1. Our deepest root is anchored in Thomas Aquinas’s Uncaused Cause of the First Cause (the UCFC) which was/is infinitely hot with a space of zero. Religion, the Arts and Science are united.
2. What homo sapiens need to understand as evolved creatures living in the 21st century is a deep understanding of their own reality and its relationship to the Reality which is our evolving universe in which we are but a small, active element affecting and effecting the future evolution of the Reality that defines our future. We are effected by Reality and we affect that Reality.
3. “… to avoid humanity pitting its many powers against itself,” human beings must individually and collectively choose cooperation over competition (especially in the field of economics).
Hertog states on the bottom of page 265 and onto page 266, the last page of his main text:
Obviously, the arc from quantum cosmology to a moral universe is extremely long and fragile.
Stephen firmly believed that the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers would allow us to navigate planet Earth safely and wisely into the future. . . . His parting message, beamed into space during a memorial service on June 15, 2018, In Westminster Abby, encapsulates it all: ‘. . . We must become global citizens’
From the top-down perspective, employing quantum theory with:
• its uncertainty principle;
• its need to average out the probability of each potential possibility;
• its need to incorporate observership that is critical but subjective, and • having multiple points of view:
• from different observers,
• living in different places,
• with different personal histories, • at different times, etcetera,
we must choose what to integrate and what to dismiss from our own understanding of our living, active relationship with the reality we, each of us individuals, perceive regarding the function of religion.
To my mind, I am presenting here for your consideration, my understanding that the function of religion is to control. Religion seeks to control the experience of vulnerability. As vulnerability increases, fear increases. However, if the individual or a group of individuals are unaware of the vulnerability that truly exists, then those individuals do not experience fear and therefore have no need to control a vulnerability they do not perceive.
So, as awareness, knowledge, understanding, and perceptions increase in quantity and accuracy, so does the fear associated with the real vulnerability that resides in the current situation of those individuals. In the struggle to survive, early peoples lived with their vulnerable condition which they sought to control with their religious dancing and singing that enshrined their concrete religion. At the same time it is equally relevant that as awareness, knowledge, understanding, and perceptions increase in quantity and accuracy, so goes the ability to discover concrete ways to reduce vulnerability apart from religious ceremony. Old vulnerabilities could be overcome with tools like the spear, the bow and arrow, or gunpowder and lead ball from flint rifles. With evolution, old vulnerabilities were resolved with secular action as opposed to sacred action. Advancements lead to new possibilities and new possibilities presented new challenges with new potential vulnerabilities. Evolution, itself, might be wave movement.
*** https://www.worldhistory.org/God/ #:~:text=The%20English%20word%20%27god%27%20first,to%20invoke%22%20a%20power).