Is "God" Love? Is "Creating" Love?

The Unfolding Rose is a Symbol of Love…
… and also, a Symbol of Nature’s Continuing Creation

**Is “God” Love? Is “Creating” Love?**

(Essay #27, at 7-4-25)

At the outset, we must say that most Followers of Nature’s Continuing Creation do not believe in God. But we understand that Nature’s Continuing Creation is similar to Hinduism’s Brahman, similar to Taoism’s The Tao (The Way), and somewhat similar to the Middle Eastern Religions’ Yahweh, God, or Allah; and so, we can discuss whether all or any of these versions of “God” is composed of “love.”

When people say, “God is Love,” they most often mean that God is 100% composed of love, or “God equals Love.” And when people say that “God is Love,” they are usually referring to the human type of Love – warm, intimate, caring, emotional, conscious, intentional, and purposeful – exhibited by a being who is also conscious, purposeful, and intimate.

But the God of the Old Testament and the Koran was clearly not a warm and loving God. In the Torah He kills the first-born children of Egypt when the Egyptians refuse to release his favorite tribe – the Hebrews (Exodus 11:5). In the Book of Deuteronomy 20:17, Jehovah instructs the Israelites to “completely destroy the Hittites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites…” In the Quran, Allah leaves written instructions to cut off the hands of thieves, male or female (5:38).

The Angry God of the Old Testament

In the Bible’s Book of Job, God is cold-hearted enough to make a bet with Satan that Job’s faith in God can withstand any torment Satan might throw at him. God allows Job to suffer outrageous torments, wins the bet, and then restores all of Job’s blessings and more. When Job confronts God about all these capricious events, God tells him to pipe down, saying essentially, “Who are you to question my ways?”

A carved wooden figure of Job, likely German, 1750-1850

The God of the Christian New Testament is more loving because He welcomes people of all tribes, as exemplified by Jesus’ Parable of the Good Samaritan. The Christian God is portrayed as superhuman, and the faithful picture him as manifesting human love. Christians say, “He is our Loving Father.” However, the Christian God’s “New Testament ” still says that only people who follow the new religion of Christianity, who accept Jesus as their Savior, have a chance of getting into heaven after death (even though heaven is fictitious). So even in the New Testament, God’s love is given only to the Christian “tribe” that follows Him.

Today, we know that evolution has endowed most mammals, including humans, with the capacity for emotional love, enabling us to stay attached to our spouses and, together with them, care for and nurture our young. This is particularly true for human beings because our young remain vulnerable through a much longer childhood than nearly all other mammals. Therefore, emotional Love has evolved to be the most powerful and precious feature of life for many, many human beings. It is understandable that we would want to project this kind of love onto our anthropomorphic conception of God.

Human Love is Often Transcendent

Human Love — particularly for one’s parents, spouse, siblings, and children — has such profound emotional depth and significance that it must be called Transcendent Love. It is a form of biological cooperation so strong that one’s care for these relatives is greater than (transcends) care for oneself. This love is also Wholistic (holistic) because it is greater than the sum of its components: caring, sharing, touching, sacrificing, and being kind. Other mammals, including elephants, porpoises, apes, and some species of birds) may also experience transcendent love if they possess the necessary ability and emotional disposition to communicate, nurture, share, play, teach, help, and sacrifice. — J.X. Mason

**Is God (or Nature’s Continuing Creation) Pure Cooperation?**

In biology, love is a form of cooperation. Other forms of cooperation or collaboration include the hive behavior of bees and ants, the teamwork of human workers on an assembly line, and the free exchange of information among scientists sharing their research results worldwide. So, if God is not 100% emotional Love, could we instead say that God is 100% cooperation?

No, that still doesn’t work. If God is all-powerful and all-knowing, He encompasses everything that we see. Yet, we know from daily life that human life includes both competition and cooperation. In fact, all of biological life proceeds as much by competition as it does by cooperation. The interaction of competition and cooperation drives evolution. If their environmental niches change, all species will attempt to evolve, through cooperation and competition, into new species.

Competition, Strife, Violence, & War are Part of Reality

As a practical matter, people generally know that there is more to life than “loving cooperation.” In addition to sending our kids to Sunday School, we also send them to soccer practice, where they learn the less-loving type of cooperation we call “teamwork.”

Our reality encompasses all the non-loving, non-cooperative things listed below. Humans do not perpetrate many of these things, so we cannot explain them as the result of Adam and Eve’s “original sin.” — J.X. Mason

Many nations stockpile nuclear and biological weapons, and the list is growing.
We have fighting and war over race, religion, land, and resources.
Modern times have witnessed the Holocaust in German gas chambers, in dictator Pol Pot’s Cambodian “killing fields” between 1975 and 1979, and the massacre of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994.
Many creatures kill and eat their mates; some even kill and eat their young when conditions press them into doing it.
Silverback gorillas have been filmed in the wild alternately having sex with a young female for a few minutes, pausing to beat an old female spouse, returning to sex with the young mate, and so on… until the old female is dead.
We humans are killing off other species at an accelerating rate. We are accelerating the extinction of elephants for their ivory and rhinos for their horns.
We fight against social injustice and for the rights of women.
We are destroying Earth’s climate and ecosystem and exterminating many of its species.
We continually battle forest fires, hurricanes, rising sea levels, and floods.
Our war against microorganisms and viruses never stops, and these tiny enemies continually evolve to better attack us.
And of course, countless species of microorganisms are warring against each other.
Even without help from human negligence, impersonal forces wipe out whole species, including a giant asteroid that wiped out all the dinosaurs.

When we examine cosmological evolution outside our solar system, we have so far seen nothing resembling human love. We find no evidence of human warmth outside of Earth. Stars “cooperate” in galaxies, but stars also destructively collide, and galaxies can also collide. There are black holes at the centers of all galaxies, which consume all the stars, planets, and moons spiraling around them (See “Black Hole Apocalypse” on NOVA). These events may wipe out thousands of non-human intelligent life on planets outside our solar system. Surely, God is “in charge” there as well, no? Well, no, not if God wound up the whole universe, set it spinning, and then took no “interpersonal” role in events thereafter!

Even if God is not pure Love, and not even pure Cooperation, we can still say that God at least includes Love. God consists of both loving peace and hateful war — both creation and destruction.

When we look at the Asian & Middle Eastern religions, we see that Hinduism clearly understands that Brahman (God) both creates and destroys. In fact, everything except Brahman is created and destroyed, created and destroyed, over and over again. Only Brahman, which has been translated as “God,” “pure consciousness,” “ultimate reality,” and the “creative principle which lies realized in the whole world,” remains eternal. This book of Essays you are now reading renames the outdated anthropomorphic name of “God” to “Nature’s Path of Continuing Creation” (or “NCC” for short).

Modern, Abstract Conceptions of God

In the last century, many educated Westerners have also come to conclude that “God” is not an anthropomorphic super-person who alternately punishes and loves humans. Modern theologians have come to envision and refer to God as “The Ultimate Reality,” the “Ground of All Being,” or the “Whole of All Wholes.” Our appellation, Nature’s Continuing Creation, is one of these new visions. They all are reminiscent of the Hindu conception of Brahman, “the highest universal principle, the Ultimate Reality of the Universe.”

If God (or Nature’s Continuing Creation) Cannot Be Described as Pure Love, Can It Be Described at All?

Many of the new theologies argue that this more abstract vision of God “cannot be described,” because it encompasses everything and involves workings that mere humans cannot understand.

Even Judaism and Islam, in a moment of insight, agreed that God cannot be portrayed in art or sculpture. Hinduism, on the other hand, has no problem making pictures and statues of Brahman, nor any of its thousands of gods and goddesses, because Hindus understand that all these images are arbitrary, often capricious, human creations.

In fact, Nature’s Continuing Creation (NCC) can be described. NCC is the sum of all the natural systems that generate and change the Universe through time. These systems are described in various fields, including modern physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, ecology, psychology, and sociology. Principal among these systems are Emergence and Evolution, which we discuss at length in this Book of Essays. These descriptions have evolved, becoming increasingly broader, accurate, and precise, as science has progressed over the centuries. The many descriptions of NCC also include the wisdom recorded in history and in the great literature of human civilization.

The Growing, Organizing, and Direction of the Cosmos encompasses all the natural processes of Nature’s Continuing Creation – those that build up and those that tear down. However, we see a clear trend toward building up and continuing to create, as long as our sun shines energy onto the Earth and as long as we preserve Earth’s ecosphere. It is this Continuing Natural Creation, not Love, that is the centerpiece of our Path and Practice.

Does this mean we set human Love aside? No, not at all. We hold that human, emotional Love is a vital type of Creating – it creates relationships. Powerful relationships. In certain mammals, including elephants, humans, and perhaps dogs, love is an emotional bond so strong that it is transcendent: the whole of the relationship is greater than the sum of its parts. In such cases, one person may willingly give up his or her life to achieve the safety of another person(s) who is (are) loved. It is also true that a human can love an entire group, tribe, nation, other mammals and birds, and even all humanity. Religious examples include Jesus, Saint Francis of Assisi, and Martin Luther King.

What About “Divine Grace?” Isn’t that a Form of Love?

“Divine Grace” is the Love that God freely bestows upon us, disobedient and unloving humans. The Christian concept of “grace” is portrayed as a spontaneous gift from God to people, despite our Garden-of-Eden fall into “Original Sin.” It takes the forms of God’s favor, love, clemency, and a share in the divine life of God. God’s gift of grace is generous, free, unexpected, and undeserved.

The Grand Canyon in Arizona

Can non-Christians, including Agents of Nature’s Continuing Creation, and secular-spiritual people in general, experience anything like “grace?” Yes, we can find it in the peak experiences of life. We see it in the smile of a child, in the flow of a brook, and in a sunset over the Grand Canyon (especially when listening to composer Ferde Grofe’s evocative “Grand Canyon Suite“). We find it in the grandeur of galaxies photographed by the Webb Telescope, in the balanced proportions of the Greek Parthenon, in the kindness of goodhearted people, and in the science of biological evolution. Our secular-spiritual grace is the sum of all the good and beautiful stuff in the universe.

Therefore, something like “grace” is experienced by both religious and secular people. It’s just that secular people may prefer the secular words “awe-inspiring,” “peak experience,” “wholistic apprehension,” and “transcendence” over the religious word “grace.”

Note: For related (and more practical) information on the subject of Love, see our Essay, “Love’s Role in Our Lives & Practice.”

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— J.X. Mason ContinuingCreation.org

[There are no footnotes for this Essay, #27]