God's Mind

Where is it, one wonders. Where is it located. Where is he located. In heaven, is one answer. Up above.

But of course, we’ve been there. Done that. Looked there with our instruments. Our speculative devices. Drive about in the atmospheric soup as far as the soup will go. Drive about in that cloud-land up there. That blue-land. That bird-land. But then past the blue, where the blue thins out and the dark begins, fewer nip about. A thinner bunch. Only a handful at a time whistle through that grave place.

Stars. Black holes. Planets. Asteroids. Comets. Gas. Dust. And what else. The whole business itself curved. Curved. Shapely. Formic. Formative. At least in theory.

So here is his body. The cosmos. The physical universe. The material everything and everywhere. But where pray-tell is his mind.

It’s the old mind-body problem from Philosophy 101, isn’t it. The old location of mind bit. Except in this case, we’re dealing with the infinite. We’re dealing with a being in which we cannot begin lopping bits off to find his mind. As we might in a human.

Crush a finger in a vice. Blow off a leg or arm in a war. Burn off a face in a kitchen fire. In each case all you’ve done is to mangle someone’s body. A someone who still has his mind. Scoop out his brains, however, with let’s say an ice cream scoop. And now we’re talking. But our subject isn’t. Not once we’re done. More fish than human once we’re done with our scooping.

But God. Well, you see. There is no brain. Per se. No gray matter. No. No. Nothing analogous. Oh maybe there are large black holes that one might perform thought experiments on. One might remove the one at the center of the Milky Way, for example. But I don’t know. It sounds rather silly, really. Like maybe clipping God’s toenail. The one on his little toe.

No. I think what we have here is a failure of the power of analogy. If the universe is God’s body, he has no mind. But of course that is ridiculous. A god with no mind is like one hand clapping.

People will patiently explain, No Bill. No. You don’t understand. You see, God made the universe. The universe is not God’s body. He made it and then he set it out here in the courtyard, like a Henry Moore sculpture, for us to enjoy. Just like Henry Moore. He lives somewhere else. His being isn’t in the sculpture. His being is in his home or in his studio, working. He walked away, you see.

And then I will have to say, just as patiently to my friends, I think you are confusing your ideas with reality. I think you are mindlessly repeating things that people like to say for some reason that have no basis in experience. I think you sometimes like to say things because you want to feel comfortable. You want the uncertainty and ambiguity and ambivalence and indeterminacy and cloudiness of things to go away.

You want to pare away some of the unknown about God. You want to amputate part of the body of thought about God that makes him difficult to get. You want to take the canyon of his being and fill it with a manmade lake and silt and power boats full of beer, pulling water skiers.

What if the universe itself were the brains of God. What if God’s body were all brains. And what if the property of mind is an emergent property. Is a property that emerges as the brain begins to make sense of things. So to say. What if mind and soul and spirit and even heart were all aspects of this emergent property. What if we had the ability to touch this emergent property from time to time, with our mind-soul-spirit-heart beings. The part of us that is emergent.

But no. No. No. No. This won’t work. Because God is more like Henry Moore, isn’t he. His mind-spirit-soul-heart being has shaped our universe and in its shaping has imparted a sense of his mind-spirit-soul-heart being to the sculpture.

But the thing is. He didn’t walk away. He doesn’t live elsewhere. He lives right here. Along with us. Inside the sculpture he designed and built.

Otherwise, how do you explain all the sightings. All the God appearances here. All the intimate God encounters here. All the mystical physics, for example. The miracles. The daily miracles momently making.

But maybe he’s here and there, you might say. Here but also out there. Outside of time and space and inside of time and space. Both at once.

There you go, I’d say. There you go. Now that’s more like it. Now you’re talking.

So maybe God’s mind is both here and there. In here and out there. Some other dimension or set of dimensions and here, in these dimensions. In this material reality. Rubbing up against our material beings and our immaterial, emergent mindliness. Our heart-mind-soul-spiritness. A mode of being in which we live, along with living in our bodies. Here and there. Emergent and literal. Figurative and material. Both at once. A little like God maybe. Only limited. Much more limited. A bunch of dullards, really. A bundle of quarks, maybe, to his universe.