There's about five and a half billion adult humans alive right now, and any two of them would be more powerful than you if they cooperated and your gang wasn't around, and they kind of do all cooperate, mostly subconsciously, and we call it God.
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| Geese flying in formation: a simple swarm intelligence phenomenon |
In a
fast-moving malware landscape, commonly used programs often need quick patches
(code snippets) to close newly discovered vulnerabilities and keep them
useable.
Let us suppose that humans are like that. Let us suppose the existence of something real behind belief in God: a human swarm intelligence that is slow-moving and poorly accessible to consciousness. This swarm intelligence would be a product of natural selection and [the rest of this paragraph is conjecture] talks to us in a language of emotions. It tracks slow changes in the environment while the conscious mind tracks the fast ones. The two environment trackers communicate via a frequency band centered on one reciprocal week. This is also the dividing line between the bands processed by the two trackers.
The week does not correspond to any astrophysical cycle; it is an invention (discovery?) of religion.
What were you doing last weekend? Don’t remember,
huh? You don’t need to; God will calculate.
Arguably,
the slow swarm intelligence will occasionally fall behind in tracking
especially rapid environmental change (e.g., global warming), show evidence of a
weak spot in its frequency response, and, pardon the blasphemy, need to be
patched. At least until natural selection catches up. Logically, this same
natural selection should by now have come up with a solution: A proclivity of
humans to self-organize into some patch-applying sub-process. This would be
organized religion, of course.
The last
patch applied to human nature seems to have been a package of five patches: the
Pillars of Islam. Before that, we received two big patches at once: Jesus’ "Love God” and “Love thy neighbor.”
However, we
now live in a world that would have been inconceivable to the 12 disciples and
the early followers of Mohammed, and collectively we are facing unprecedented
existential threats. Is it time for another patch?
I say yes, two in fact, and I suggest that the needed patches will be something very like this:
“Love Thy
Planet,”
and
“Do Not
Divide the People.”
The first
of these precepts is already addressed by a recently-added fifth Mark of
Mission of the Anglican church and a sixth Mark of Mission that speaks to the second patch was accepted on principle, then folded into the fourth Mark of Mission. The proposed patches are also echoed in the Anglican Baptism Covenant. Many other people have
obviously been thinking along the same lines as myself. The new “commandments”
will have to be presented and received as the voice of God to be effective, and
I will not here tell organized religion how to do its job.
However,
does organized religion itself need a patch? It seems to suffer from a
worrisome lack of flexibility, leading to hand-wringing schisms. Perhaps a
further needed patch is the definition of a new kind of commandment from God
that could be called a “manifest commandment,” as opposed to a
prophet-channeled commandment. This would be God talking to the entire human
race at once.
Since there
is little time, we cannot wait millennia to accumulate enough testing of new
precepts in the crucible of life to confidently promote them to commandments
from God. For example, the two I just mentioned. Thus, we must aggregate such human experience across space instead of time,
using the Internet. Luckily, there are now about 5.5 billion of us able to participate, which
should ensure a very high-powered study. Since this would essentially be an
experiment on humans, the internet could also be used to collect the
ethically required written, informed consents.
The above reasoning argues against atheism but not for the status quo. Is panreligionism the only way to ensure that you have all the latest patches? Oligoreligionism may be more practical. I now have an app on my phone that notifies me of the Islamic prayer times, even the ones after dark. I don’t say the prayers but meditate instead. I wake up in the morning feeling like I have been watched over all night.
However, the ideal human swarm intelligence will be a function of the details of the problems of existence we face, and these details will be a function of geographical variables like latitude, altitude, and distance from the ocean. Even with the same details, different populations will need different patches because of historical factors, such as the amount of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA they have.
Photo by Nancy Hughes on Unsplash
