Anthropocentrism – the persistent idea that we are made in God’s image and likeness and that, somehow, the universe is here just for us, is one of the reasons I find religion to be lacking in imagination, and thus all-too-human in origin.
We live in a world 4.5 billion years old, where humans did not exist until 200,000 years ago. There are over 1.5 million species of animal on the planet and yet we can’t communicate properly with even our closest animal friends (dogs and cats). The musings of intelligent animals such as whales and dolphins are a complete mystery to us. They certainly don’t speak any of our languages or think like we do. Many animals (the ones we haven’t pushed to extinction, that is) seem content to live their lives oblivious to our presence. We live in a world where microbes treat us no differently to any other animals, where people get sunburn and hypothermia if they are not wearing suitable clothes. So much for us being designed for this world..
We live in a universe, 13 billion years old, where our galaxy is just one of many trillions, where our star is nothing special and where the distances between the stars are so great, we may never reach even our closest stellar neighbour. This universe is full of natural structures sometimes thousands of light years in breath, with super-heavy stars routinely exploding and black-holes capable of sucking up time itself. We now know that some of our close neighbours have planets – how long more before signals of life begin to be detected from such far away places?
And yet, despite this great knowledge, billions of people subscribe to religions that claim to put them at the top of the pyramid, where the creator of this vastness has us as the pinnacle of his achievements and where supposedly he takes time out of his heavy schedule to talk to each one of us every day.
All the major religions were born in a time when anthropomorphism might have seemed half-reasonable. Most of the world at that time was unknown (if it was otherwise, surely there might have been a mention of kangaroos or polar bears in the bible). Humans, the only known technologically adept animal around, seemed to be on their own. Knowing so little and being so close to the edge for all of their short lives, God must have seemed so real to them – a tempestuous master who permitted romance and music and children, who revealed to them the beauty and the bounty of nature, but who, at a whim, could cancel a harvest, kill hordes of loved ones and destroy livelihoods. In the light of such times, the Old Testament, with all its cruelty and savagery, seems vaguely understandable. The people who wrote and dictated all those old books were products of their times. They knew no different.
Now we do know different. In the last thousand years, our eyes have been woken up to a universe of an entirely vaster, more complex scale than could possibly have been imagined at the time of Moses, Mohammed or Christ. Instead of carrying the burden of being at the centre of creation (and responsible for its messes), we are no more in control than a song-bird would be on the periphery of the Amazonian rain forest. The notion of an arbitrarily generous and vengeful God has been thrown aside in the light of an altogether grander vision.
Religions, practically by their nature, have been unsuccessful in keeping up with the pace of discovery. “This is what God wants, no wait, this is now what God wants, no wait…”. It seems as if the ones that remain today are either wilfully ignorant of reality, or they have morphed into semi-humanist organisations adept at using psychology and bluff to avoid too many close questions from their adherents.
If a Messiah were to arrive today in the middle of a secular, humanist, scientific and rationalist world, would any religion founded on a fish-bowl view of the universe be founded?
