What is God?

 

2017 Eclipse taken from 10,000 feet over northwestern Tennessee

People have been asking the question since time began, and after 50 years of contemplation, I believe I have a reasonable answer.

Throughout most of history, God has been regarded as a supreme being in many cultures. The similarities are striking. One aspect that I find interesting is that the supreme being is always depicted as all-knowing and all-powerful. When a child is killed and eaten by wolves, it is attributed to God's will, and the will of God remains unfathomable. Except for the organizers of religious institutions, who claim to possess a direct line to God's ear and can hear God's thoughts. 

The question is often posed as "Who is God?" rather than "What is God?" I believe that anthropomorphizing the existence of a supreme intelligence unnecessarily complicates matters. The question should be "What" rather than "Who" since no one in the entire history of humankind has ever truly known what God is.

Could it be a supreme being, all-knowing, all-powerful, overseeing untold billions of planets with intelligent species? As a software engineer, I have an insider's view on how data can be managed. Such a vast amount of data simply cannot be overseen. How is it measured? How is the data transmitted? How is it stored for eternity? Measurement of such excruciating details would change the outcome too. Highly improbable even for a supreme being.

Therefore, if God isn't a supreme intelligence, what might God be?

"God is a weak force that increases the likelihood of unlikely events."

That's it. 

There is anecdotal evidence suggesting that God exists in the fact that there is more matter than antimatter in the universe. Scientists have been attempting to explain this through various theoretical frameworks and mathematical workarounds, but they remain uncertain. This phenomenon might be attributed to the God force. The God force has made an unlikely event, resulting in more matter, increasingly probable. In the first moments of the Big Bang, only one atom out of a billion survived, and it is the weakest of forces—the God force—that brought about the creation of the universe.

Another piece of evidence is the existence of life on this planet and potentially on countless other planets and moons in the universe. Scientists possess knowledge of the chemistry involved in life and have a solid understanding of the necessary conditions. However, they cannot prove or recreate the precise moment when a repugnant mixture suddenly became alive. While the chemical reactions are known, the spontaneous occurrence is highly improbable. The answer, of course, lies in time. Given sufficient time, that repugnant mixture can come to life, flourish, and even create an atomic bomb.

Is time the sole requirement for life to emerge, or did some force—the God force—nudge this unlikely reaction toward probability?

At this stage, there is no way to measure or test for this seemingly magical force. It is exceedingly weak and only manifests when the balance can go either way. I suspect that at some point, a God force will be necessary to complete the theory of everything. Until then, it's just another idea.