Vor Gott sind wir alle gleichmaßen weise und ebenso törricht”
Before God we are all equally wise – and equally foolish. –Albert Einstein
A remarkable feature of human history is that we know very little for sure as to when or where many matters relating to Homo sapiens arose. We have theories about biogenesis and anthropogenesis. We conjecture where the first humans emerged: Africa, as prehistorians assure us. But no one really can tell when or where the first wheel was shaped and rolled on a path, who first domesticated the horse or the dog, or when the first grunts morphed into words and languages. These were ushered into human culture by groups or individuals in the very remote past. None of our ancestors claimed priority or copyright for any of these significant elements in human culture.
Many factors that have enriched humanity are intangible: for example, music and numbers, the concept of truth and the apprehension of beauty. We don’t have the faintest idea as to who started or uncovered these. All we know is that we have inherited these from our distant ancestors who probably did not have a thousandth of the creature comforts we enjoy and were far less sophisticated than we are in many ways. But it was they who launched us on the path of cultural enrichment. We must not forget our indebtedness to our forebears who introduced many useful, inspiring, sublime, and fascinating additions to life. As Kenneth Patton put it, “It is not easy to give thanks to five hundred generations, from whom we have received our customs and our arts, our laws and our learning and our civility.”
Our cultural history includes things that range from the notions of truth and justice as also the capacity for humor to modes of dancing and the urge to compose poetry and rhymes. And God is one of the most powerful ideas in human culture. We don’t have the faintest idea as to how God as a cosmic or supra-cosmic being entered the heart and mind of Homo sapiens. No one can tell when and where this happened first. We can be more precise about when the universe erupted with a big bang than about when God seeped into human psyche.
Whether God actualized Its, His or Her existence in our context through the evolutionary process, or whether God was yet another of the myriad abstract imaginings of the creative human brain is anybody’s guess and many people’s certainty. So this has been a matter of never-ending debates among the keenest minds and the sincerest human hearts. But these will not be our primary concern us in this book. What we do know is that like spinning wheel and spoken language God has become very much part of many human groups. Though in principle we can live without words or wheels, in practice we simply cannot do that anymore. Likewise, in principle one can live without God – indeed many do quite well. But God in one form or another, with one name or another, continues to be an integral part of the lives of almost seventy percent of the human family. This is sufficient reason to inquire into the variety of ways in which God or the idea of God arose
Spurts of Thought 