That you should post something that resonates with me. I suspect that you have more recently rejected the thesis expressed above. But nevertheless, I have always wondered if perhaps God evolved from earth-like and human-like elements. I think that makes me a theistic panthiest, that supernatural intelligence can evolve from nature.

In this model, if there were a creator god, it was like a clockmaker god that created a nature conducive to creating intelligent creatures. So in this model the creator is unimportant once nature is created. Then intelligence evolves from lower forms of life up to humans or dolphins, or whatever. The point is that intelligence and consciousness evolves physically first.

However, it's all a waste if all this intelligence and consciousness had no place to go but just disappeares when the local solar equivalent explodes, as ours will in a few billion years. So to not waste the point of our existence, the creator god made a nature that included what we call the supernatural as a place for our intelligence and consciousness to go to.

Over the last few million years, a few very superior humans became able to go consciously into the supernatural and explore it and exist there. Since they could go there and stay there, they could also comeback here, and when they did so they were so superior to the average human that they were considered gods. Yet they only recently on the universal scale of things evolved from the physical to the supernatural state.

So in this model god or gods evolved from us. Since they did so they have apparently been invested in influencing our behavior in order to make more of them. So in this model the purpose of human life and evolution is to populate the universe with intelligence and consciousness.

This model resonates with your essay at several key concepts. In particular that god evolved in a mechanistic way. It differes in that your essay puts god first designing nature, whereas in this model nature comes first without the real need of any god, and god or gods come naturally out of nature. Both essay and model hold the promise that someday, someway we can all become like a god.

• Sounds like Whiteheadean process philosophy - harvey1 - April 19, 2001 - 22:15 UTC
  • yes on whiteheadian processes - yanniru - April 20, 2001 - 11:12 UTC