What if gods are something life produces?
TL;DR: Could some beings humans have called gods be products of biology? Living cells sustain a conscious person; perhaps other arrangements of life could support minds whose capacities we would interpret as divine. This thought experiment reverses the familiar creation story: life might produce gods, and we might mistake unfamiliar biology for something supernatural. It offers a possibility to investigate, not proof that such beings exist.What if some of the beings people have called gods were biological?
The biological processes that give rise to human consciousness might also produce other conscious beings, with or without humans among their parts. Their capacities could exceed ours. If we encountered them or received communications from them, we might mistake them for supernatural beings. Some accounts of gods in religious texts may have begun that way.
That is the possibility I want to explore. It places these beings within nature rather than making them all-powerful creators of it. You need no religious faith to follow the argument. Begin with the biology that produced us, then ask what else it might produce.
1. Biology produces abilities its parts do not possess
None of your individual cells can understand this essay. Yet their organised activities sustain someone who can read it, consider its argument, and wonder whether the author has spent too long alone.
Your neurons exchange signals through connections shaped by development and experience. Through their combined activity, you remember, imagine and decide. Those abilities belong to the person they sustain.
We call this emergence: parts working together support abilities they lack separately. The organisation matters. A collection of cells is not automatically a person.
If biological organisation can produce something this extraordinary, could a different arrangement of living things produce another kind of being?
2. Living things can form larger organised wholes
Consider a community whose members live in different places and pass information between them. One group knows where food is available. Another notices changes in the river. Their exchanges allow responses no member could organise alone.
The community can also preserve information as its members change. A flood might be remembered through stories, habits and changes in where people build. What happened to one generation affects the decisions of the next.
Now imagine those relationships forming a more tightly connected system. Its activities keep the connections working and the participants alive. Information from different places shapes how the whole responds.
A human community makes the idea easier to picture, but humans are not essential to it. The same question could apply to relationships among other animals, plants or microbes. Could some arrangement support a being in its own right?
3. Could the whole have an experience of its own?
Here is the central speculative step. Suppose some arrangement of living things supports a consciousness, or something equivalent to a consciousness, of its own.
Passing information around, remembering events, and coordinating responses do not establish that anyone experiences being the whole. The example so far gives us an organised system. It has not given us another mind.
Samuel Alexander explored a related possibility in Space, Time, and Deity, that divinity itself might emerge beyond mind.
For the thought experiment, allow the possibility that some arrangement crosses that gap. There would then be a further conscious being, rather than simply many individuals helping one another.
Its experience might be unlike ours. It need not think in words or divide events into human-sized moments. What mattered to it might be difficult for us even to describe.
We tend to give unfamiliar minds familiar personalities. Perhaps our imagination needs to work harder.
4. We might interpret unfamiliar biology as divine
Return to our imagined community. Its members notice events in different places. If the connections brought that information together for the proposed being, its awareness could reach beyond any individual’s view.
If information survived through successive generations, its memory could outlast the people participating in it. Through their actions, it could affect food supplies, settlements and other conditions of life.
For it to communicate deliberately, we must make a further assumption: that it could form intentions and act on them through the network’s connections. A warning would then have to travel through signals that members could detect, interpret and pass on. Someone might receive it without recognising the larger source.
These capacities would need physical means. Messages must travel. Memories must be retained. Influence must work through actions and changes in the shared environment. Each capacity would need a biological explanation.
But someone encountering the results might not see those connections. Knowledge beyond one person’s reach, a presence lasting across generations and purposeful influence could suggest a god. The being could be real while its supposed supernatural nature was a misunderstanding.
5. Some religious accounts could originate in these encounters
The proposal is that some encounters described in religious texts could have been encounters with real biological consciousnesses, the nature of which people misunderstood.
A communication could be reported as a god speaking. An influence on daily life could be understood as an act of divine will. People would describe what happened using the ideas available to them, and those descriptions could change as they were passed down.
This is a historical hypothesis that requires its own evidence. A resemblance between the imagined being and a religious account would not establish the connection. We would need evidence that such a being existed and played a part in the events described.
6. Life would come before these gods
If this explanation were correct, it would reverse the familiar creator story. Living processes would come first. Through a particular organisation, they would produce a being that could subsequently influence the lives on which it depended.
We might have mistaken something life produced for the power that produced life.
Such a being would need energy, functioning connections and living participants. It might persist as individuals came and went, yet remain vulnerable to changes in the conditions that sustained it.
Nothing in the proposal requires there to be only one. Different arrangements might produce different beings in different places or at different times. Their capacities could exceed ours in some respects while remaining limited in others.
What might we look for?
I call this proposed direction of inquiry the search for higher emergent phenomena, or SHEP. For a particular living network, we would ask what carries information, what preserves it and how its connections produce the abilities attributed to the whole.
The harder task would be distinguishing ordinary collective behaviour from another conscious being. We would need observations that could count against the proposal as well as support it. These are questions for investigation, rather than tests already known to detect a larger mind.
Could gods have biological origins?
Could some gods have biological origins? The route explored here begins with living processes and ends with the possibility of beings we might mistake for supernatural. Their existence would be a biological question, and their role in religious history would require evidence of its own.
This does not establish that nature has produced such beings. It gives us a possibility to investigate: perhaps what seemed to stand outside life arose within it.
I do not know whether life has ever taken that route. I would like to know how we might recognise it if it had.