The Concept of ‘God’ – Preface

Any discussion about God usually involves a raging comparison of different religions across the world. These discussions normally end with saying all religions speak of the same omnipotent conscious entity to have created reality and life. And all religions refer to this entity in varying names.

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On the other hand, religions themselves depend upon a set of doctrines or scriptures that are passed on through generations of philosophers who propound their ideas about their God and how he/she created reality. The question of who or what the omnipotent entity is and how it came about in the first place, is placed beyond the human mind’s comprehension by almost all religions!

With belief in religious scriptures, humankind has progressed for more than 4000 years and has trusted in the entity for answers about reality and life. However, with developments in science and technology in the past few centuries, humankind has progressed even further in understanding about reality than what was promised by religions and their Gods. With science and technology in the picture and most of the phenomena happening across reality being explained with precision, humankind at large has begun to question whether an entity like God could ever exist at all!

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But, even as science and technology has made a huge progress in understanding reality, there still remain a few fundamental questions that can’t be answered by science yet. Questions like what are energy and time, where did they come from, why does reality exist, what is the purpose of existence, etc., have much precedence for the common man than scientific theories like relativity and research fields like quantum physics.

It is these questions that give credibility to religions in a way. With the purpose of existence unclear, and science striving to understand it, religions grip humankind again. They then provide answers to these questions by pointing towards the omniscient consciousness again.

But the consciousness, can it be real? To know the answer for sure, we must understand what consciousness means. But, natural sciences don’t provide a clear-cut definition of the term ‘consciousness’. It is just explained as an ability of living beings to perceive reality around them. How, why and what consciousness is, is out of reach for science right now and it will take a while to define the phenomenon. In the meantime, we can search for the definition in a realm of knowledge that is not generally considered scientific. This realm which gave birth to various religions in the Eastern world. This field of knowledge that can define life and consciousness in the most skilful way possible is spirituality.

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While many religions derived their foundations from spirituality, it per se doesn’t propound any religion nor support any God. Rather, it enables man to understand reality and God by understanding himself. Concepts like soul, mind, consciousness, karma, etc., each having a wide meaning, are so far thought to be non-scientific. But these ideas are holistically explained by spirituality. The science behind spiritual techniques remains unclear for the masses, so these concepts are being understood to be of divine origin.

If spirituality and its teachings are explained through science, and a merger between science’s developments and spirituality’s explanations about reality can be brought forward, the answer to the question of who created reality can be faced with reason.

Such an attempt to understand reality and then understanding the creator of reality is The Concept of ‘God’.

True, this merger between the 2 fields of knowledge has been attempted before. But the context, perspectives and the depths up to which the merger has been done so far, greatly vary from what we are about to do in the book.

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Therefore, the book per se is neither an atheist’s approach towards God, nor is it a comparative analysis of religions and their Gods, but it is rather a layman’s search for God from both within and outside him.

And once the search ends, we’ll step further to see how God works.

VINOTH M

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