Gods at the Dawn of Time

(spoken by Nimue, scribed by James)

For most of the time that there has been life on Earth, that life has taken the form of single celled organisms. However, most creation stories postulate the existence of human-ish gods existing before anything else. Clearly, gods focussed on farming, and human concerns make no sense at all in the context of single cell lifeforms. You can get a fair amount of drama into the life of a bacteria, or similar. They’re born, they die, they eat, the survive. It is possible to imagine that even a single cell entity, if it could think, might have some use for deity.

As an aside, we don’t really know how consciousness works, and we have no idea how the tiniest living things understand themselves or the world. Maybe, there are gods of viruses.

If you think that humans are the whole point of life on Earth, then human-ish creator gods make some sense. This is a story in which everything has been set up from the beginning to result in us. On the whole, I think humans suffer a lot from hubris and might benefit form considering stories in which humans are not the be all and end all.

We know that the conditions for life were created by the geology of the planet as it settled. We know that those first single cell life forms led to more complex life. We know that early life forms transformed the world in ways that make it possible for life to exist in the many forms it now takes. I don’t think evolution is especially intentional. We are what happened, or at least part of it, but we do not represent a pinnacle, or an end point, and maybe we need to get over ourselves as a species.

Human gods can only have evolved alongside humans. To me, there is no other way of squaring spirituality with science. I don’t think this means that human gods are therefore pure fantasy. I think it means that everything at every level is evolving or could be, and we’re all doing that together. We are able to evolve because others evolve.