What's Religion Spencer Palmer, Professor of Comparative Religionat BYU was invited to teach a class in World Religionsat the Minorities University in Beijing during school year 1993. The purpose of the class, from thestandpoint of the Government of the Peoples Republicof China, was to inoculate future Communist cadres against the force of religion, while making them sensitive to the varying belief systems of the ethnic minorities who populate the frontiers of China with its land neighbors and over whom they would in future rule. Some of Professor Palmer's students, all of whom have been reared in a land where religion is actively taught against, if marginally tolerated among minority groups, asked him what religion is, what purpose it serves, and how people can believe in God? Dr. Palmer invited me to jot down my thinking on these issues to be shared with his students. Religion has taken almost every form humankind has found it possible to invent or contrive. Thus to try to define religion in terms of form is hopeless. Reduced to its essentials, religion is the sense of awe at the greatness of the Universe, combined with a yearning for a source of help beyond oneself as one realizes one's individual weakness, one's ineffectuality in confronting the power of nature and the infinity of star-filled space. When this sense of awe, loneliness, and isolation in the universe fell upon Moses, a great prophet of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, instilling in him this sense of religious awe, Moses said, "Now for this cause I know that man is nothing, which thing I had never supposed." Plato identified man as "a political animal", i.e. he recognized that man cannot live in isolation: he depends on the group for survival. Condorcet and Novalis similarlyidentified man as also being "a religious animal", i.e . that men are not complete without a philosophy which relates them to the creative force of nature and to their place in the universe. Man has from the beginning sought answers to three great questions: Who am I? Why am I here (on this earth and at this time)? And is there anything beyond the phenomenal world which can succor me in my weakness? Most religions find the answers in God. God created this earth and put man on it. And man (as teach most religions) may return to God at the end of life, compensating for the grief and disappointments of this world, with happiness in the hereafter. To not a few, this seems an anodyne attempt to escape reality, looking for "pie in the sky, by and by". Marx called religion the "opium of the masses." And at best this simple "God answer", if it goes no further, itself leaves a substantial list of other important questions: What is this God like? Has Man a role beyond preparing to return to God? And what will be man's purpose in the after-life, if any? Marxism, the most materialistic of all religions (interestingly enough, one of the few -- though, historically, there have been others -- which elevates the Supreme Political Leader to the role of earthly God), in attempting to supply answers to who man is and his purpose in life, insists that he is nothing more than the product of the blind forces of spinning atoms and evolution. His sole purpose is to achieve material subsistence, if not satisfaction. At best all man can expect is a few short years on this smallish satellite of a medium-sized star, before returning to the chaotic, milling atoms of the universe. A well-known Western philosopher of this ilk, Thomas Hobbes, saw man's existence (at least before Hobbes introduces his notion of the "earthly god" -- the State) as "nasty, brutish, and short" -- a not terribly elevated view of man, nor much upon which to base a life of intense effort to master music, art, mathematics, or science -- or to devote much care and attention towards bringing children into the world and preparing them for a useful life. Not surprisingly, even the most dedicated communists, after seventy years of rigorously enforced anti-religious programs, have found Marx's answer unacceptable. Boris Yeltsin called upon the religious authorities of the Orthodox Christianity he had never accepted during his years as a top Soviet official, to comfort him and his family when his mother died a short time ago and Nikita Krushchev is buried in the churchyard of one of the historic monasteries of Moscow. HOW CAN ONE BELIEVE IN GOD -- AND WHAT MAY GOD BE LIKE Presuming the existence of an All-wise God, such Deity must surely realize that without a fairly concrete notion of what He is like, man can never understand his relationship to Him and the purpose of existence. It is equally logical to think that a wise God wouldn't want to subject us to the risk of having to built up our concept of His qualities and nature based solely on our imagination of what He might be like, because the error and distortion in understanding arising from such an invented concept would not result in the clear understanding, just mentioned, essential to motivating man to pursue a lifestyle appropriate to his true nature and his place in the universe. In consequence, God has, from the beginning of the world, from time to time appeared to and spoken to man to promote such correct knowledge -- or more frequentely sent his agents to do so for him. The legends, traditions, myths, and histories of all nations tell us in remarkably consistent fashion what He is like, what He has to tell us about the purpose of life, how we should behave to optimize our purpose in being here, and what awaits us after death. Regrettably, for a variety of reasons, man's concept of God has departed from the early image common to almost all mankind -- that of glorified, immortal, divine Beings (of both sexes) in whose image man was originally created. The notion of a God of flesh and bone, not unlike us in appearance, was common to early Greek, Roman, Shinto, Taoist, Hindu, Christian, and Amerind tradition. But as mankind became more and more sophisticated, learned philosophers decided that this concept of god just didn't meet their standards of elegance. So most of the world has today settled on the notion that God must be an ethereal ideal, an infinitely diffuse spirit both everywhere and nowhere present, infinite in wisdom and power, the sum of all idealistic perfections, exercising its influence in some indeterminate and inexplicable manner. So, despite repeated dispensations of knowledge regarding His nature, character, and physical appearance vouchsafed to spiritual leaders among virtually all peoples down through the ages, man has insisted on inventing God anyway -- in terms of what we think He should be, not what He is. And certainly in form unlike anything He has shown or said Himself to be whenever He has appeared among mankind. Without having a true idea of what God is, it is not surprising that man has a very distorted notion of his relationship to Him, what his own purpose on earth is, and what his post-earth future may be. SOME TRADITIONAL ARGUMENTS FOR GOD -- PLUS A NEW ONE The traditional arguments for the existence of God are ontological, cosmological, and teleological. Perhaps the greatest of the ontological, or a priori , arguments was presented by Thomas Aquinas, i.e. that since existence is a perfection, and as God is conceived to be the most perfect being, it follows that God must exist. Among more recent attempts at logical argument for God, were the writings of Le Compte De Nouy who three decades ago argued that it was as logically impossible to conceive of the genetic code having arrived by chance in such perfect order as to result in the birth of an intelligent creature, as it would be to resegregate a test tube filled half with black sand and half white sand, once the sand was mixed, simply by shaking it for howsoever long a period of time. Consequently, God must be behind the order of the DNA strand. Neither the ontological or logical arguments have proved universally persuasive -- though the teleological argument, or argument of ultimate ends, as presented by the noted French priest/polymath Pierre Tielhard de Chardin, has been widely persuasive in contemporary times. From whence comes man's sense of right and wrong, of justice and injustice, if such concepts have no basis in the structure of the universe? The renowned American astronomer Carl Sagan has recently introduced another, and perhaps the strongest argument for God -- the argument of mathematical probability upon which, ultimately, all modern science depends. Sagan points out that there are several billion stars of about the same magnitude as our sun in our spiral of the local galaxy. By extrapolation, says Sagan, this means there are several trillion stars having equal likelihood of possessing planets not unlike the earth in the local galaxy -- not to mention the likelihood of planets in many of the billions of other galaxies observable in the visible universe. He calculates that it is thus probable that there are at least one million earths of similar or, likely, substantially greater age than ours in our wing of the local galaxy alone. Taking into account the enormous intellectual and scientific progress of the human race during the last brief four thousand years, and with thousands, if not millions, of older races probabilistically not too many light years from us, it is altogether likely that at least some of them have solved the problems of immortality and hyper-rapid space travel before us. To be sure, to protect his scientific credibility, Sagan then turns from his mathematics which establish the probability of the existence of Beings so advanced that they can only be called "gods", to say that since we have not yet successfully established contact with any such worlds (dismissing traditional accounts of contact over the centuries with such "angelic beings" by peoples of virtually all races and cultures, and refusing to countenance contemporary accounts of UFOs and ETs), we'll have to be satisfied with being alone in the universe. What he apparently cannot accept as scientist, however, Sagan puts forward in the form of a novel Contact , in which a group of Russian, Japanese, German, and American scientists receive a message from outer space instructing them how to build a space capsule. They enter the capsule and in quark time find themselves on the shores of a beautiful lake where they meet the physical bodies of departed friends, relatives, and associates, visit at leisure, and then return (after what seemed hours of real time) to find themselves back on the departure platform only nanoseconds after takeoff. All artifacts they'd brought with them as proof of their experience have mysteriously disappeared. So their story depends entirely on the testimony of the six participants. The Sagan novel brings to mind the testimony, unsupported by physical evidence, of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus Christ -- who saw him risen from the dead, physically ate with him, heard with their ears the several more sermons he preached to them, some of them actually handling his body and feeling the wounds in his hands and his side. It also recalls the testimony of the nine witnesses to the gold plates from which the Book of Mormon was translated, some of whom physically handled the plates and others of whom heard an angel from another dimension command them to bear witness to the reality of what they were seeing and handling. There is also the earlier testimony of three of Jesus' apostles who during his life met with him on the Mount the long-dead Old Testament Prophets Moses and Elias in their transfigured forms. So we are not lacking witnesses of God or of His angelic messengers from other worlds -- it is just that for reasons of His own, we are, while in this life, expected to accept His existence largely on faith, unsupported by physical evidence. When one understands the fullness of the philosophy of the heavens, this is no longer a problem to one's understanding the existence and nature of God. Man is on earth as participant in an infinitely wisely designed test of his morals and integrity, under which there can be no possible cheating or depending on another's help. Those who prove to be, wise and decent by nature, and who learn to behave in an undeviatingly beneficent manner towards others, pass the test and will themselves become partakers of the "divine nature" and future co-creators with God, bringing into existence and peopling new worlds with their own offspring, because "man is that he might have joy" and the purpose of God is to maximize such joy. To conclude our argument in favor of God, the odds are overwhelming that other peopled worlds exist. That on some of them dwell persons who have attained immortality. That these Beings have created this world so their children can experience joy, while undergoing a perfectly designed test to see which of them are worthy to assist with this work in a future generation of creation, the less worthy serving under the direction of the new generation of gods in furtherance of this labor. This work of creation, in fact, reflects the nature of the universe and constitutes the purpose of existence. In his seminal book Temples & Cosmos , the renowned scholar Hugh Nibley reports how dozens of documents written by Jesus' apostles about his teachings during the forty days he spent with them following the resurrection, and carefully buried to preserve them for a future time, have been discovered over the past twenty years or so, confirming early Christian understanding that there are innumerable worlds beyond our own, peopled by other intelligent creations of God. There was never a beginning to the universe . Even author of the Big Bang/Black Hole Theory, Stephen Hawkings, has rethought his own concept and now no longer is satisfied that the universe started as a "singularity" in time or that it is destined to disappear into the nothingness of a Black Hole. With another influential contemporary astronomer/philosopher Fred Hoyle of Oxford University, Hawking now seems to accept that the universe just is and that matter, as we know it, is constantly coming into being from an infinitely more refined "background material" (quarks?) -- an important first step towards accepting the notion that the God(s) are men who've been around for a few tens of millions (hundreds of billions? uncounted trillions?) of years longer than us, and who've attained all the attributes customarily attributed to Deity. In short, they are Deities. The story of God, Man, and the Universe, as summed up by one latter-day scholar/philosopher is succinctly stated in thirteen words: "As Man is, God once was; and as God is, Man may become". That's one man's best answer to what religion is and why one should reasonably believe that God exists.