Does God Exist? | Tom Chi

I had a thing that kept me up at night for a while where I was trying to answer the question of does God exist? But that may not be for this particular podcast. But after a couple, couple months of waking up in the middle of the night, I figured it out.

See Tom, you can't leave us hanging like that. This is a really open minded group. If you figured out if God exists or not, we would love to know. If it's something you can share.

No, happy to share it. So I spent a lot of time kind of mulling it over and for, you know, you probably heard from the intro, I have a pretty deep scientific background, so I know a lot about how the universe works broadly. And there's been two general approaches. Like one is like from the materialistic scientific perspective, you know, can you create a materialistic foundation for the existence of God? And so far not so much. And the other approach is from the perspective of pure faith, which is like, well, you know, by our wisdom traditions, we just kind of believe that's the case. So whether science can prove it or not, hey, whatever. And this basically becomes an impasse. This is why this question lasts so long. But I basically kind of hashed through, you know, dozens and dozens of ways of looking at this problem because I would just wake up at like 2.30am, somewhere between 2 and 3am every single night with that question on my mind for a couple months, which is actually pretty annoying. This definitely was not planning to do that and it had nothing to do with anything else I was working on. But at some point I, I had the realization that God exists in the most important way, that God can exist as a really potent concept in the human mind. Now this doesn't say anything about whether a God exists in the absolute material sense. So in a way it doesn't answer that question. But you know, when you think about a lot of things in the human mind, does meditation exist? It kind of doesn't, right? There's no object that I can go out there and be like that is meditation. And if I can make 50,000 of these and ship them to Walmart and sell them to you, it is not a material thing. What meditation is, is basically a practice and a way of using the mind that actually opens a huge amount of potential within the human being, within the human system. And God is a concept that's actually very much like that. You know, God is a concept where we don't need to point at anything material in order to go prove it exists or not. And it's the materialists that are kind of stuck in the. Whether it's the materialist from the scientific perspective or the materialists from the biblical tradition as well, or other different Western traditions that are looking for the material output that proves that God exists. But if you say for a second that the most important way that God can exist as this kind of potent unlocking force within the human mind, then you get kind of the benefit of all worlds because, you know, just like meditation, it can be a concept that we can work with and shape a lot of our lives around that can be completely unlocking for how we live our lives. And at the same time it doesn't need to exist in any physical plane of reality. So from there I was like, oh well that's better than faith because certainly psychology is real, but it's, you know, and it's actually better than looking for a materialistic scientific output as well.

I love that answer. Yesterday I was driving with my son for to take him out to the kids playground and he's seven years old and he asked me, dad, what happens when we die? And that's a really interesting question because I raised my son on science, he sees religion, he comes from a multi religious background and he understands religion. But we are sure to raise him on science. And that morning before we started our drive, he was watching Neil DeGrasse Tyson's Cosmos, which is his favorite show. So how I explained that to him and how I explained God to him is also in a similar way and it's a concept in your mind. So I told him there are many different mythologies and faiths out there and different belief systems from people all around the world. Some people believe you end up in this place called heaven. Some people believe in reincarnation, some people like Neil DeGrasse Tyson, he believes that you simply become dust. But that's okay because your energy goes back to the earth for new plants and animals to bloom and nourish upon. And I said, you can choose any one of those beliefs, but the most important thing is, is the belief empowering? So if you believe that you die and you end up in hell and that strikes you with fear, that's disempowering. You don't have to believe that because there's no evidence for hell, there's no evidence for reincarnation. But if you believe that that is also empowering, then go for that. So my son is now hacking his brain to try to figure out what are the looking at all the different ideas of what happens after you die and simply going to Compose his own belief.

This is great. I actually was just thinking about this and spent some time on exactly the same question. The model I came up with was relatively straightforward, but it's kind of an alternative way of looking at the universe which creates the scientific foundation for the universal consciousness. It's relatively straightforward. Like, if you think about a human being, well, we all think that we're individual consciousnesses, and we have, like, this strong sense of ego and identity and all that's great. But if you were to take a baby, you know, and instead of having them be raised by a family in a society, you just kind of left them out in the woods. Well, number one, they probably would not survive. But let's say through some kind of miracle, they do survive. And you went and talked to them 20 years into their life. Well, number one, you can't talk to them. They have no language. Number two, all the reference points that exist, all the knowledge, the books, if you played the sound of a piano, that wouldn't make any sense to them. They would have no idea what a piano is. It makes it clear, actually, how much of our consciousness is a part of societal consciousness. Right. Like, the only reason that we know what a piano is or we're able to speak words to each other is because of this kind of societal consciousness. So as much as we feel that we are a single individual consciousness separate from all other things, it's kind of not true. You know, 98% of us is this societal consciousness that we've imported, right? And there's 2% that's very unique. And the other thing that's unique is the way that we synthesize the elements of societal consciousness. So I'm not saying we're not unique at all. It is possible to be both cradled by society and also be unique at the same time. And I think if you understand that very minor paradox, which, when you think about it's not really a paradox, it is kind of those percentages I talked about. Then you recognize that, oh, a human being is just a consciousness cradled in a larger consciousness. That's called societal consciousness. Societal consciousness is actually just a consciousness cradled in yet a larger consciousness. It's environmental consciousness. Because if we take away our environment, we're just like that baby left in the woods. You know, all of society dies quite quickly if the environment is not able to support us in its cradle. And, you know, environmental consciousness is within the cradle of all of life on Earth and the planet itself. And then the planet itself is within the stellar and interstellar consciousness. And I mentioned this in my talk very briefly, but I don't think that. I think people understand this intellectually, but they don't really understand it in their bodies. Even though it is 100% true in your bodies that every single iron atom in every single hemoglobin molecule came from the death of half a dozen stars, right? There's no way that iron can exist other than in these very late stage supernova events. And the composition of the Earth itself means that it came through several generations of stars exploding and reforming and exploding, which means the interaction of stars themselves is essential for us to have any type of consciousness. And that means there is no separation between this kind of interrelationship between stars and the existence of our consciousness. Just like if you take away the flowers, there are no bees, and if you take away the bees, there are no flowers. In some ways they're exactly one organism. In other ways, you can point at that and say, well, the bee is looking a bit different and doing things a bit different than the flower. Now, if you start to understand that all these different consciousnesses are just cradled within each other and that they're fully inseparable, then death actually becomes a different sort of question entirely, right? Because what Neil DeGrasse Tyson says is completely true, that we return to dust, but not any kind of dust. Like the most miraculous dust that you can ever imagine, right? The sort of dust that only happened because generations of stars died before us, which only happen because galaxies collide with each other and create new star forming regions, which only happens because galaxies are pulled together against, you know, by the force of gravity and strange attractors through massive superclusters of galaxies that are so beyond the scale of time and space that a human mind can envelop that it's almost unfathomable. But every single one of those phenomena is intimately connected to the individual consciousness. The individual consciousness cannot exist without any of those steps not being that way. So we are this kind of phenomenal dust. And this same sort of dust that we return to is the dust that creates new life. So in the same way that an apple looks different than an apple tree, our individual consciousness looks different than the environmental and universal consciousness from which we come from. But trust us that every single time that the apple falls, it renourishes the tree. Sometimes by creating a new tree, a new society, sometimes by decaying and then being reabsorbed by the roots. And as much as we feel that we're different because we look so different from the tree, we're inseparable One cannot exist without the other. And death is really just a return to the larger cradle that surrounded you in the first place.

Beautifully said, Tom. And so complete the sentence. And God is.

God relative to this is actually a concept in the mind that allows somebody to have a felt sense of this reality. And you have to realize that historically, you know, we didn't know this much science. What is a supercluster 4,000 years ago? Nobody knows that that exists. Nobody knows how stars even form, much less how the formation of stars and their birth and death is so deeply intertwined with the creation of the Earth itself. So what we needed to create in that time period was, was a concept in the mind that would allow us to have a felt sense of the connectivity of the entire universe. Now, as we get better at science, actually it's just also scientifically true. Now, the way that you end up feeling that sense of. That felt sense of connectivity of the universe, you can do it through science. Now, not that many people know, you know, I was an astrophysicist. Well, not that many people know all the stuff that know relative to how the universe works. But it's not because it's not known, you know, it exists. It's available to humanity, and there's other ways and other wisdom traditions that allow you to get a felt sense of how deeply connected the entire universe is. But God is kind of like that, that mental touchstone that we create in order to have that felt sense. Whether we call it, you know, the Buddha nature within a person or a person's, a personal relationship to Christ or many other words that we use. This is basically the individual's felt sense to the universal consciousness through many descriptors, thousands of descriptors that we found. And science is just the latest descriptor. And only recently have we figured out, you know, how connected it all is through science. It's really like the last 20 years, we didn't really know how planets formed or whether there's other planets in like 1980.

And it's amazing to think what we're going to be able to discover in the next 20.

Yeah, but I think every time that we discover more, it really is just painting a more complete picture of how all those wisdom traditions were actually correct that, you know, the universe and all consciousness is deeply interconnected. Interconnected is deeply intertwined. Now, I'm not saying that there isn't a bunch of superstition and a lot of crazy shit in there too, and stuff that can lead you awry. You have to understand that these people are trying to pull it off with no science or no ability to observe zero telescopes, zero anything. So they did pretty good considering that they were throwing darts in the dark. But now that we can light these things up, we can actually see which elements of those traditions are also scientifically true.

So let me ask you this, and I know this is deviating away from the script of what we're going to talk about, right? But this is such an important idea for so many people. Why is it then that so many people have disempowering beliefs about God, beliefs on hell that you are born a sinner, beliefs on a woman's role in the world, which might be disempowering to your wives and sisters and mothers. Why does that exist? And how can people liberate themselves from those beliefs?

So the reason that that exists is that spirituality is just one of the passengers in the car that we call religion. And every religion has got at least four components to it. It's got spirituality. And actually, if you examine the spirituality of all the world religions, huge amount of overlap, like 80% overlap, they use the words a little bit differently, There's a couple little technical differences, but it's like 80% the same message, that you are part of something greater, that all things are connected, that your individual life matters, and so on and so forth. These tend to be true of every single spiritual part of every religion. But there's these other things that are in every single religion. There tends to be a system of laws, there tends to be a. A metaphysics around how the world was created. And there also tends to be a method of propagation. Now you have to understand why these things exist inside of religion. They exist because religion is one of the most at once. It's the, you know, it is both kind of the most pernicious and dangerous, but also one of the most elegant social technologies that have ever existed. Because when you think about the history of religion, most of these religions came up when there was no written word, there was no printed word. We could not actually pass knowledge in other ways. If you tried to put all the wisdoms of your society into a specific tribe, a lot of times those tribes were overrun by a neighboring tribe. So we needed a mechanism to pass human knowledge forward through the generations during times of significant turmoil. And what knowledge did we need to pass on? Well, definitely spirituality. And this is why all religions have that. But we also needed to pass on laws, and we also needed to go pass on what we believed about the natural world. And we also needed to. And no religion was able to pass that on without having a means of propagation. And the means of propagation are things like, oh, you should procreate and like go conquer the earth, and other ones, you know, you should go teach. But, you know, they have different means of propagation. But every religion has at least those four components. Now, there's a time and place when those components were the best technology that we had for the day for those things. So if you think about biblical times, a lot of communities were just really collections, extended collections of extended families. So there might be four, five, six extended families all living together in a tribe of 80 or 100 people. That's a pretty normal configuration. Now, when you think about why you would stone an adulterer to death, it's like, well, adultery involves three families. Three families in the space of a tribe of five families could completely tear apart the entire tribe and put everybody's life at risk. So during that time, even though it's a barbaric law, it's not a completely unfathomable law that you would just stone the adulterers to death and be like, you3, you up, we're going to stone you all to death and we'll just go on with our lives. The other 80 of us will just keep going. Now that's an incredibly stupid law today, right? You know, right now, like today it's like you have that kind of falling out, you get a divorce, you move to another city. It's not a big deal, right? But it's like at the time, it was actually not an incredibly stupid law. Now what happens is when we take the package of religion as a whole without ever looking at it and without seeing it alive and lived sense in our modern lives, then we choose a kind of active ignorance relative to all these different components. So something like laws about adultery or the place of women in society and so on and so forth. Maybe it made enough sense a couple thousand years ago, but they're stupid now, and we have better systems of laws. This is why there is ongoing friction between government and religion, because religion used to be the way that we propagated government. And those aspects of religion run into modern forms of governance. They don't totally jive with democracy. They don't totally jive with freedom of speech. They don't totally jive with all these things that we found to be better ways of governing and organizing people. Metaphysics is another piece where, you know, in every religion, they had to say, well, how is the world created? And you know, what does it mean when there's a terrible storm and all these sorts of things. So all of them also had to create these creation myths and talk about how the world was and that, you know, they did the best they could at the time. It was their rough version of science. And modern science doesn't ton better at explaining how the universe came into existence, which is why we're not arguing about turtles on top of turtles or, you know, things being created in six days. You know, a couple thousand years ago, that's madness. Now, it was fine enough for the answers that people needed a couple thousand years ago about how the world was created, because those were good enough answers for them to get on with life. But what happens is imagine religion is a car, and there's four passengers in the car. Spirituality, governance, metaphysics, which is their take on science and propagation. And the other passengers in the car are really unruly. Propagation is why we had the crusades. Two different propagation that's running into each other on how religion spread leads to religious war. And this is the essential distinction that most people don't get. They think to themselves. And you have to understand why it's like this. It's, you know, part of the method of propagation is to ask people not to question religion, because if you question it too much, it starts to fray too much. So as it tries to propagate from generation to generation, you lose too much of what it was, and then it eventually crystals out. So a thing that had been a perfect, elegant way to propagate knowledge from through generations thousands of years ago stops being the perfect, elegant way, because the other religions that were a little bit more loosey goosey and frayed and nobody could tell what they were anymore, they just, you know, a little bit of Taoist beliefs are inside of this, and a little bit of so and so is inside of this. But it was too frayed to have the same sort of weight and energy as a religion that taught all of its adherents to not mess with what was in the box. Don't mess with the passengers in the car. They just are how they are. You just have to deal with it, right? So it's a cleaner method of propagation, which is perfect if you want things to, you know, a message to stay for hundreds or thousands of years. But in the modern society, as we start to blend with each other and learn from each other, it's a bit outdated to never question those things, Never understand that the point of religion in the first place was to create better, a better experience of life. And if you're not able to go back and look at those questions and religion, this is exactly what you told your son. It's like if those beliefs do not create a better experience of life, you need to drop them. And that's the element that has not been allowed to be in religion. The people that understand spirituality already understand that the stuff's all fucking the same, that all the other stuff was baggage, and that the reason that the car exists is to deliver spirituality. But the religion itself has programmed inside of it a type of error checking to keep it from making propagation errors beautiful.

And so religion is almost. Religion, almost is in a situation where the religion with the highest. With.

With.

With the highest levels of propagation science are the ones that stay into the future. Even if. Even if they are not necessarily the ones with the best government laws or the best rules for metaphysics or the best ideas of spirituality. It's the propagation science that determines a religion's existence, right?

It determines its longevity. So there's definitely religions. There's religions that say you need to be abstinent. And because of that, they don't have any kids. Because of that, they run out pretty fast. And other ones because they allow too much dilution of the religion to interpret the beliefs in a gajillion ways. I mean, this is what happened to, like, the Greek myths. Everybody, like, took little bits of them, but, like, all coherent as here's the one thing that we believe in. So it kind of exists as like a thing that we still talk about from time to time, but not like, packaged as a single religion. So there is a type of. There is a type of brilliance in the way that those are packaged to propagate. It's just like anything else in DNA. There's some DNA that is packaged to propagate really, really well. But, you know, I think a lot of the work that you're doing and actually definitely the work that I also am doing and engage in is that question of, you know, it's the practice of bringing the question back to the individual to say, what is it that actually empowers your individual life? Now, I know that there's a lot of things to go draw upon. And like, here's the other distinction between the past and the present, which is, in the past, you wouldn't travel anywhere. You would be born in a specific spot. You would probably die within 50 miles of that spot. You would be exposed to one culture and one religion, unless you happen to be in a really vibrant trading town or port, right? And because of that, nobody actually had a Choice. So these religions that had like this perfectly packaged propagation, you know, ability that could just go for generations and generations. Well, a thing that's different about today is actually almost every person in the world is aware of at least three or four religions. Now, how well they study them, how well they understand them, how well they. They try on different aspects of them to see whether life is improved or not remains to be seen. But I think a lot of the work that we do around asking people to look at how their consciousness works and playing with different ways of improving their lives is really that energy trying to go explore the different wisdom traditions in order to go create almost a new mesh of consciousness which is even more robust and more serving of human dignity than the others were. Right? The things that are healthy are actually cross hybridized. The places where there were really active trading towns, that's where culture sprang from. Not from the place that everybody would be born and die in the same place and everybody looked the same and they all follow the same religion perfectly. Culture really sprung from these intersections. And the same thing about genetics is true too. Really. Vibrant species exist because there's an ongoing interplay of material. So right now what we're looking at is kind of the intellectual interplay of all this material. And we're looking at creating a society where people are able to go do that, you know, not just once in a generation, the way that you do DNA, but like once, you know, a year, as you start to learn more and more things from more people and you understand different traditions and you try them out and you figure out what works for you and you stick with a little bit of. At a time, like, this is kind of the opportunity of the 21st century.

And so it seems that even religions with really solid propagation strategies are going to face a disruption in the coming years.

Well, we see this already. I mean, I see a lot of people. My mom is a Buddhist, so I partially came up in that tradition. But I see a lot of people that adopt elements of Buddhist belief and they're like, oh, hey, I love this idea of so and so from Buddhism. I don't do the whole thing where I like, you know, circumambulate and hit a, you know, hit a meditation chime or whatever, whatever. I don't need that. But like, here's some things I love in Buddhism. Great. So that's them taking like this little splice of DNA and then mixing it in with how they live their lives. And similarly, you know, I see people do this with all different types of things Whether it is religion or things that they've learned from people that they admire, so on and so forth, there actually ultimately is no difference. We just add this type of. This kind of austerity and reverence on top of religion, because that's just like how we've been doing it. It's kind of like, kind of hold over stylistically to how we feel about those thoughts.

And so it's interesting because if you look at certain religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, even elements of Christianity, they've been adopted across multiple world cultures. There are other religions, I'm thinking maybe Mormonism, the Jewish faith, Islam, even Scientology, if you call that a religion, which seems to have more black and white parameters, and they seem to have really remarkably good propagation vehicles. Do you see that in the next couple of decades or so that those religions might face a disruption?

I think the disruption is already happening, which is exactly the fight right now between. It is the fight of fundamentalism versus modernism of all stripes. You know, it's not just Islam, it's also fundamentalist Christianity denying that there's any change in the climate, you know, or saying, well, we're the stewards of the earth anyway, so we get to do this to the earth, right? So I think now it's really easy to go demonize one of these things and say, look, these radical Islam folks, they're all screwed up. Or these fundamental Christians, they're all screwed up. But I look at this and like, really any human being, there's some element, and really any system of thought, there's some element of it where there's real value there. Otherwise people wouldn't adhere to it for so long. And I think the message of the fundamentalists. And so imagine the kind of tension between the modernists and the fundamentalists. The modernists are like, hey, guys, it's a totally new world. Get with the program. Like, all these things are new. Like, you know, just keep on with the new, otherwise we're going to leave you behind. I mean, that's like the feel of it. And I actually think that there's a. There's a thing that I call the myth of modernism, maximization of wisdom. The maximization of wisdom is, hey, there's modern wisdom, which is phenomenal. There's ancient wisdom, which is phenomenal. There's some wisdom in between. That was phenomenal. And if somebody wanted to maximize wisdom in life, they would kind of serve. Now, the good in what the fundamentalists are fighting for is they're saying there's a kernel of value in ancient wisdom. They don't know how to say it in a very productive way. You know, they'll strap some bombs on their chest or they'll shoot doctors in an abortion clinic. This is not a very enlightened way to get that message out there. But the seed that they have inside of there is actually true. There's an element of ancient wisdom which is really critical for us to be able to move forward. We just don't have many eloquent speakers that represent the fundamentalists in a way that gets their message through. There's almost just a type of residual anger and powerlessness and rage that they're expressing. And the general tenor of the fundamentalists in the modern society is that of rage. And rage is an emotion that always propagates out from an extended sense of powerlessness. So what's happened with these people is a couple generations where they felt powerless against the myth of modernism. The only thing that they have left is rage. Now, it doesn't mean that they weren't standing for something or they don't stand for something. At some point, deep level, that still matters to us. It's just that they can't express it in a way that is productive anymore. So, man, there's a lot to say. Like, things are being disrupted, of course, but modernism itself also needs to be disrupted by what there is inside of ancient wisdom that can propel us forward. Thank you.

That's a really interesting answer. So this was a major deviation from what we were meant to talk about, but it was really, really, really enlightening. I think people are really going to love this. I might use this as a separate track on the same recording, but thank you, Tom. That was really profound. Now, let's get started with the. With the main thing we were going to talk about.

So.