A computer coder creates a virtual world which replicates our ‘real’ world, and the characters have a form of artificial intelligence. Characters in this world have the ability to sense their environment, and assume what they experience is real. In this scenario, the computer coder is a kind of God. He can make and fashion all manner of things and intervene whenever he chooses to change, alter or improve his simulated world.

Our own world however, is not a simulation. Things have evolved over time. They have changed, adapted, become extinct, or born anew. There isn’t a ‘grand coder’ modelling new life forms and placing them ready-made into the world, or one who prevents poor unfortunates from leaping from a bridge. 

Everything has come from a universe-making seed. A super dense singularity that inflated in stages to create the stars from which all matter was formed. Just as a foetus, and eventually a complex organism, emerges from a microscopic, fertilised egg, so the universe grew from minute beginnings. The universe we find ourselves in displays evidence of agency and action throughout its almost unimaginably vast size. Whole galaxies ebb and flow along arterial routes, matter is created and annihilated, planets pulse with chemical concoctions, some of which spawn life as we know it. The universe is alive, and underpinning all of it, is a vast, vibrating energy field. This field is entangled across its entire dimensions, so that one particle can communicate with another instantly, wherever it is. The quantum field permeates the entire universe and everything in it. The quantum field creates matter. The quantum field is the instigator of everything we know. The quantum field breathes life into all of us. The quantum field moulds our destinies. For many, the quantum field is God. 

This idea is not new. It isn’t me inventing this from my own, primitive imagination. It is an idea spoken by the Vedic people for 3,500 years. They believe there is a universal force that permeates all things and its name is Brahman. Brahman is the life force from which all existence proceeds and to which everything returns. It is the primordial reality that creates, sustains and ultimately ends the universe. Brahman is the origin and cause of all that exists. It is the highest universal principle. The ultimate reality. Through knowledge and understanding of the Brahman comes spiritual liberation of the self. 

What God is then, is not a personified higher being who acts like a benevolent grand computer coder; but a universal force that implements a set of laws, principles, actions and behaviours that govern everything we are and everything we do. Science reveals the how, when, what and where of those laws. Sacred texts lead us to the why of it all. There isn’t a grand coder magicking things into existence, because that’s not how the world works, however much we want it to. But we can work with the forces we have, we can learn them, know them and understand them, because science is the revelation of the divine hand. The hand of Brahman. The universal field. The hand of god.