“The universe?” From where did it come? How? When? By what energies did what we see only in tiny glimpses come into being?—the universe containing infinities of organized, living worlds, earths, suns, galaxies—cells, organic life, atmosphere— purpose, directions, and lawful order, fundamental forces at work everywhere and in everything—all of which emerged out of what? By what greater mind? By what intelligence did it all appear, an intelligence that embraces even the automatisms of Darwinian evolution on the ground of which everything from a mosquito to a Buddha appears on this earth? In such a case, self-knowledge and experience would not be a passive recording for manipulation of impressions from without, but a seminal generation of realities within realities—just as in any organism the telos or purpose of the whole generates the elements and organs and instrumentalities that maintain the inner world of the organism. And man? Of all creatures we know of on Earth, the intelligent self-regulating and self-creating force would have the added attribute that completes the structure of the universe we know—and that added attribute is conscious intelligence, consciousness as a force of nature, a universal energy. Who, looking at the “starry sky above and the moral law within” can really maintain that it all “just happened”?”

from What is God by philosopher Jacob Needlemen

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