Oct 6, 2015

My Personal Proof of God, Part 3: Limits of Human Creation

In ancient times the sun was a ball of fire hauled across the sky on a chariot. In medieval times the dome of the sky was a revolving bowl with stars pasted on it. But when we started gazing through telescopes at planets they became strange earth-like balls. Celestial objects resolved into bursts of light and color in strange and wonderful shapes. Still no one could imagine a black hole until it too was pried out of reality by sheer force of mathematics. Now we can imagine a whole universe populated with such odd neighbors. These things were discovered, not invented.

Everything that emerges from our amazingly fertile imaginations springs from our experience. This forms our ability to imagine such things, not visa versa. But now we can imagine these wonders with ease. Experience is primary and we cannot imagine outside of human capacity. With everything in the universe expanding away from the rest, every point appears to be its center. Outside of the universe nothing exists; there is no "there" there. (Even parallel universes are just imagined copies of this one.) Like a gas filling a vacuum; the gas cannot fill a space that does not already exist. So too the universe cannot be bigger than itself and the human cannot imagine beyond its boundary.

Humans have the amazing capacity to extend our senses and find new treasure, but we cannot create prima materia. In other words a mortal creature cannot create something outside the created order, only God can do that. So how could we create the concept of a God that is greater than that created order? This is like the child saying it imagined its mother. Cute, but impossible. The only way we can think of a universal God is if somehow the reality emerged prior to our imagining. The idea of a creator-of-all could not be thought of unless it emerged as a discovery.

Whether we chose to believe in the Great Mother or dismiss Her as a fantasy is up to us. Nevertheless, as Carl Jung says, "Invoked or not invoked, God is present."

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Tim Holmes Studio

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Helena, MT, United States
My inspiration has migrated from traditional materials to working with the field of the psyche as if it were a theater. Many of my recent ideas and inspirations have to do with relationships and how we inhabit the earth and our unique slot in the story of evolution. I wish to use art– or whatever it is I do now– to move the evolution of humanity forward into an increasingly responsive, inclusive and sustainable culture. As globalization flattens peoples into capitalist monoculture I hope to use my art to celebrate historical cultural differences and imagine how we can co-create a rich future together.