whig's Journal: A Brief Ontology

From whence does our consciousness originate, and to what does it aspire? If "I" have consciousness, is it a contingent outcome of merely mechanical operations, or does it derive from a necessary property of that which I am composed of? All that is said to live exhibits some element of will, even if not entirely free of constraint. The actions of the least microorganism cannot be deterministically predicted, and each and every neuron, cell and mitochondria of my physical being demonstrates a like property. Self-awareness may not be a consequence to all living matter, but is not a necessary precondition of consciousness. Rather, awareness of environment may increase at higher orders of complexity to include some realization of one's being, and yet even man's awareness of himself remains limited, for neither our senses nor our instruments give us full comprehension of how our bodies and minds work. For all our scientific accomplishment, we cannot create even a virus out of inanimate matter. Life is created only from life, all life is offspring of life.

Life is not merely the generative force of life, it is what life consumes to sustain itself. No diet of inorganic chemicals could sustain life for very long, thus life must interact continuously with other life. It is in the process of this interaction that higher orders of complexity form, strands of nucleotides cooperate to form RNA and DNA, these to establish energy producing chloroplasts and mitochondria, which power cells that specialize as neurons and parts of organs necessary to sustain an organism.

From a self-awareness point of view, we often stop here, for if we are each part of something greater than ourselves we may be no more aware of that fact than our cells "know" they are part of "us." There is no reason the process should arbitrarily stop with the individual organism, the single man or woman. Nor does it make sense to do so, for it is clear that by joining our individual consciousnesses we form cultures, having language and government and ever higher forms of complexity.

Why then do we doubt the existence of God, that which all life and consciousness together comprises and which is comprised of all that exists? Surely it is conceit to suppose that our individual minds are the highest and greatest intelligence of the universe. How can we imagine that all of this taken together is an inanimate mechanism? To say this is to say that life derives from nothing and aspires to nothing. Just to say it is to realize the absurdity of such a position.

As we are all a part of God, God is that which we are all a part of. While our limited consciousness cannot encompass God, our consciousnesses are all encompassed.