At the end of the last essay, I floated a possibility that’s been on my mind for some time: the simultaneous existence and nonexistence of God. The reader can reasonably ask: How could this make any sense at all?

To begin, allow me to point out that God actually does exist in at least two undeniable ways. First, the experience of God is real. This I assert from firsthand knowledge, but there have been countless independent descriptions of encounters with God. Whether in the form of apparition, voice, or mere sense of presence, millions of people have entered transformational states of mind that felt exactly like Godly visitations. The ultimate meaning of these experiences can be questioned, but not their occurrence. Yes, they may simply point to neurologic activity that simulates a sense of divinity. But for the person who enters such a numinous frame of being, there can be little question that it is highly significant, if not life-changing. The God experience happens.

The second sense in which God certainly exists is as a meme: an idea with high transmittable potency. The concept of God is so alluring it endures no matter how much scientific materialism works to undermine it. People want or even need to believe in a spiritual principle. Not everyone demands the personal sort of God we read about in the Bible, but a large majority of us want to believe in sacred forces underpinning human life.  The powerful idea of God has driven many historical events, with consequences both lovely (e.g., renaissance art) and terrible (e.g., the inquisition). God as a concept has had substantial impact on humanity, and so must be granted a measure of ontological reality.

So God clearly exists in the human mind and culture, but does it exist independently? Was there any God quality in the cosmos before there were people to conceive of it? This, obviously, is a more difficult question.

First, let’s work out what we would consider a ‘God quality.’ There are many definitions of God, ranging from a white-bearded man on a throne in heaven to a diffuse sacredness that permeates everything but has no independent or even conscious existence. For the purposes of this discussion, I’m going to define ‘God’ to mean a global awareness that originates outside the material brain and nervous system.

The most adventuresome scientifically-informed philosophers propose that pervasive cosmic information flow could arise via quantum mechanical means. Specifically, a pixelated pseudo-vacuum at the Planck (i.e., vanishingly minute) scale would manifest changing states at the depths of reality that might permit data storage and processing independent of biological form. I find such arguments interesting and plausible. They by no means prove the existence of such cosmic computing, but they permit it.

So we have a somewhat plausible mechanism whereby computing and memory might occur outside biological (and silicon) form. This activity is postulated to be holographic across the cosmos, so that every component of the universe would have access to the entire matrix of embedded information, albeit with reduced resolution. Thus, each human brain may float immersed in this cosmic information pool, and could potentially access vast amounts of accumulated wisdom.

How would this information appear, once accessed? To a Christian mystic, it might appear as a luminous being radiating infinite love. To a Native American, a totem animal might be recognized as laden with mystery and power. A Buddhist adept might observe a disintegration of ordinary formed existence, with ultimate reality emerging as a conditioned and impermanent whole. To an Einstein, busily working his equations in the patent office, the encounter might take the form of an astounding and elegant mathematical solution to a difficult problem. To an atheist, nothing might ever appear at all.

Remember I defined ‘God’ as an awareness that originates external to the material brain. By this proposed model, the information matrix exists outside the brain, but encounters with Godlike awareness occur within it. Some of people described above, if their experiences arose in the proposed fashion, would encounter God by this definition. For them and them only, God exists. Thus, God would exist for the Christian, but not for the atheist. The heightened animal wisdom seen by the Native American is something we could embrace as God. Einstein’s writings make clear his appreciation of sacredness in his work, but it’s not clear that he believed in or experienced an actual divine consciousness. The Buddhist meditative state is certainly numinous, but does not involve a focused, externalized presence and so probably would not qualify as a manifest God.

Thus, if there is indeed a deeply buried stratum of information stored in the universe, a human brain might at times be able to tap into it in a way that appears as concentrated cosmic consciousness, i.e., God. In this view, God is a pervasive and omniscient quantum data stream that originates outside the brain, but depends on a permissive human mind for manifestation in discrete or personal form.

Of course, dogmatic materialists will scoff at this argument. Those of us who explore novel ideas tend to get ridiculed by those threatened by outside-the-box thinking. Nevertheless, I assert that this is all possible even if unprovable.

Furthermore, the religious believer will insist that God is not merely an awareness, but also an agency. God doesn’t just observe the cosmos, He directs it. We can negotiate a way out of this looming conflict, however. If the information matrix exists as suggested, it lies embedded within all matter/energy and all space/time. Everything we observe happens as a consequence of energetic and material activity that occurs several levels above this pixelated ground of being. To the materialist and rationalist, all events appear random. Such a person can reasonably point to stochastic processes bubbling up through quantum uncertainty as determining the evolution of life and the universe at large. On the other hand, the devout person could insist that the randomness is only an appearance, and that in fact the Ground of Being ultimately determines how history expresses itself: what appears random is actually guided by the deeper pool of information. Both views could be defended. By the argument developed above, both views might even be true for the ones who hold them.

The good thing about this model is that it would release us from the prison of either-or thinking. We would no longer have to debate whether God exists in the way proposed by the faithful. We can grant that they experience such a being. We can likewise grant that for others, the universe never displays any sacred presence along those lines. For each of us, Beauty appears in the form we most appreciate.

14 February 2012. A relative of mine expressed interest in this essay as someone who experiences spiritual manifestations beyond those that suggest God in the usual sense of the word. I therefore extended the original posting, as shown above, with the following appended paragraphs:

Of course, Spiritual experiences extend beyond those that bring to mind God as defined above. Angels, ghosts, deja vu, precognition, clairvoyance, serendipity and many other phenomena are encountered regularly. The skeptical stance on these claims is that they are products of dream-states, imagination, fraud, or random coincidence. But if the cosmos does store information in the manner described, or in any equivalent fashion, then our brains may be able to access that data. We wouldn’t expect, and don’t find, that this information would come online in raw form. It would be far more likely to show up as images, archetypes, visitations, intuitions, and so on. The conscious regions of our brains work with visual imagery, symbolism, social interaction, and emotional valence. Only the lower pre-conscious parts of the nervous system process raw data. All manner of spiritual experience could thus be considered moments of discourse with the deep memory of creation: the mind of God, so to speak.

I realize that much of this discussion sounds dry. It may seem to rob mystical states of their sacred nature, but this is not at all my intent. I’m merely trying to explain, in a scientifically plausible (though highly speculative) way how different people can experience transcendent life in such diverging ways. And why people of a particular faith regularly discover manifestations of higher reality that match the tenets of their religion, a fact which confirms their beliefs (not necessarily a bad thing), but sometimes reinforces their rejection of alternate viewpoints (leading to wars, inquisitions, and all the negativity that organized faiths have sometimes caused).

If the skeptics are wrong, as I believe, then there must be an explanation for spiritual life that fits with the empirical findings of science. This isn’t to suggest that experimental and theoretical work in the scientific arena can provide us the best description of higher realms; only that the cosmos must be of one cloth. It seems highly unlikely to me that spiritual reality would stand completely outside the capacity of observational work on a material plane. Instead, I suspect that we have yet much to learn about the nature (and spirit) of matter itself.

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