In principle, there was logos.
John 1:1
Occam’s razor. In lay terms, the principle says that the most simple explanation usually is the best. That definition suffices for our needs.
When we use it to explain the universe, we certainly do not come up with a personal God as it is described by the bible. If we would start there, we would just replace a miracle with a miracle, push the unexplainable to a whole other level while explaining nothing.
This is the reason that God had to reveal himself.
On the other hand, mankind constructed something like gods from the beginning. They saw their relatives dying, and while their body was still the same, something had clearly left them. This something, they said, must still exist somewhere. And thus, ancestry spirits emerged. People started to explain the unexplainable with spirits acting out. Bad things happened because the ancestry spirits were angry. To appease them, people started sacrificing.
From these beliefs, mankind started to construct gods and goddesses, projecting themselves, their best and their worst into the supernatural. Those gods had hierarchies, family trees, struggles and more human characteristics, and they soon started to fight things out, favoring their own people above other tribes. We now had warrior gods.
And with the realization of order and law, we slowly came to the notion of one monotheistic God.
According to Occam’s razor, mankind did not need a God to construct a God, though the different steps were major accomplishments of human consciousness and ever more complex thinking.
This is made clear with the next thing that happened: we eliminated God from our thinking and explanation of everything. Nietzsche proclaimed that God was dead. He thought that to be a problem because in God’s death, we were stripped of the morals and ethics that all the archetypical stories about our God brought with them.
Since then, mankind has tried to come up with a moral and ethical code of behaviour that does not rely on a God figure. Most attempts failed terribly. On the other hand, this is a task that is almost impossible because the archetypical stories have been so engrained into our cultures, that if we try to come up with a system that does not depend on our understanding of God, it most certainly will implicitly anyway.
And so we as mankind are rediscovering a spiritual dimension. We try hard not to imagine again the same humanoid Godhead we adhered to, and therefore things are mushy and goofy at times. This is where we are at.
But let’s take another approach to all this from the get-go.
We seem to know that 13.8 billion years ago, this universe came into being. We do not know whether it was the first one, or is the only one. We ironically call this event the big bang, even though it was small and silent.
What was before? The easiest explanation: there was the potential of a universe. If there were no potential, there would be no universe.
This potential does not need any further characteristics. It does not even need a form. All it needs is the will to fulfill its potential. And so it did.
Most creation stories are more concrete than this and talk about gods or a God. They were written down in a time when gods were common belief.
There are three stories that differ greatly from all others that I know of.
One is from the Dao. It proclaims that there was one, and from one came two, and from two came three, and from three the ten thousands (or everything).
In this story, the creating principles are abstract ideas that can be described with math. Pythagoras saw the same.
The seconds account is the biblical creation story as viewed by the Kabbalah and many rabbis.
They see four worlds in the creation story, starting with a very abstract world of thoughts, that through concepts and then plans manifest in reality.
Much like the third story in John. In the beginning there was logos. We translate this as the word, but it does mean so much more, like ground, plea, opinion, expectation, word, speech, account, reason, proportion, discourse, divine reason, the rational principle expressed in words and things, argument, or justification; especially personified as the source of order in the universe.
With all these words in mind, one could easily translate logos as potentiality with the will of realization.
Of course this is so much different from what most Christians believe. Yet it is not only Occam’s razor that makes this more plausible, but it fits God so much more.
God wants us to experience and eminate love, as he is love and we are to realize more and more that we are him. He is the source and we are the receivers and reflection.
God works using faith, and he wants to teach us to do this too.
If God were verifiably necessary for the universe to exist, we would not need faith.
And if we had no choice to believe or not, that is the possibility to have faith in the first place, there would be no love, because love is based on free choice.
Let us recap:
God is not necessary for the creation of the universe, unless we call the potentiality of a universe God.
The universe came into being from abstract principles and relationships.
The notion of God can well be mere human projection.
We are now in a place where believing in God is based on pure faith.
This is a wonderful starting place.
From here on, all we can do is experience the relationship with God that wants to reveal himself to us. He will meet each of us in the image we have of him for the time being. He loves us so much that he reduces his own appearance to the level of revelation we have and can bare for the moment, pushing the limits from time to time to reveal more of himself when the time has come.
The time has come.