Homo Motus
God is our perception of the parts in the natural world where man lacks knowledge. God takes infinite amounts of shapes. The forces of nature such as the wind, water, earth, fire are God. God is what inspires us to do. God is what drives animals to breed. God is what powers the sun. God is what made the apple fall on Isaac Newton’s head.
“I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one’s pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword.” – G.K. Chesterton.
Chesterton is speaking to how amazing humans are at finding meaning in every little thing they have in their lives. In fact many times throughout his essay he prescribes some meaning to not only simple objects, but to the natural world as well as human concepts such as chastity and the color white. He finds a preference in artists that don’t just describe the natural world in its physical properties, but artists that express the soul of those things and perhaps personify them in the shape of spirits and demons and drape them in colors that can be observed in nature. Despite having the capacity for both, ultimately humans are meaning seeking creatures above rational beings.
By default humans are much better at meaning and beauty seeking than they are at rational thought. A common belief is that there’s no way a complex system such as for example the human eye could just occur naturally all by “chance”. The rationale which is often given to this goes like this: “Well a complex system like a computer can’t have just occured out of nothing. Obviously a human being must have designed and manufactured it. So the same must apply to our own eyes.” The feeling that existence is purely meaningless is so harrowing that humans tend to almost universally add the beauty of God into the equation. Human beings create a meaning in their head rather than trying to come to some sort of higher rational conclusion.
This however, is no negative trait. It’s actually very expedient for people to think in this way. The brain fills in the gaps where it lacks knowledge, so that it can focus on what is actually important. Such as gathering resources and caring for friends and family. Why spend precious time looking for an answer about how the most complex things in nature have come to occur when no such conclusion will be reached in the average persons lifetime anyway. It’s much easier to deal with grand constructs such as God. This is why religion is something that has developed universally throughout the entire world, though in different shapes and forms, the purpose of the idea is essentially the same. To place the beauty of God where man lacks knowledge.
In fact it takes a very deliberate effort for a person to dispel all the myths they are taught as well as the fallacious ways of thinking with which they are born. That’s why most people don’t bother, and often don’t really lose out on a whole lot in terms of financial success, health, friendships and establishing families. This is the essence of being a beauty and meaning seeking creature. Humans aren’t actually all that capable at being logical and rational by default, as they come preloaded with a whole heap of biases that make their thinking fallacious and their behavior oftentimes contradictory. That’s why when a person takes deliberate effort to resist their more primal urges such as lust, gluttony and greed, that person is hailed as virtuous and exceptional, and by no coincidence, these are also considered virtues in the three largest world religions today.
There is a common belief that because the intricacies and complex nature of the human body are still beyond human understanding that this requires some sort of creator. But this isn’t nescessarily true. Simply because humans don’t yet understand how the cosmos works doesn’t mean that it had to be designed by a greater force. But it sure feels good to think that it does. It feels even better to make art and music which personifies or allegorizes the seemingly pervasive hand of God creating, destroying and moving all the things which, at least for mankind, are still in the darkness of mystery. Truly there’s certainly nothing wrong about needing the light of God to elucidate us. At least till man finds out how the cosmos works on their own.
05/20/2023