The Case for Gnosticism, Part 10: The Big Questions Religions Ignore

By Scott S. Smith

This is an elaboration of the ideas in my book on Gnosticism (the suppressed early Christian mystical heresy), God Reconsidered: Searching for Truth in the Battle Between Atheism and Religion www.GodReconsidered.com. My prior blogs and interviews can be found on the God Reconsidered Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/God-Reconsidered-388142548691857/).

“Gnosis” (which Gnostics claim as the basis of their philosophy) can be defined as the insight that we have a direct connection to a transcendental divine power and that this world is not our true home. This may come about through mystical experience or esoteric studies and can be so shocking that unless you are completely disillusioned with mainstream religions East and West and very open-minded it is better to stop reading this. As Jesus said (Matthew 11:15), “He who has ears, let him hear.”

Since the book was published in late 2014, I have come to realize how much of a challenge it is to build a case when most audiences have not read it, nor my sources and the prior blogs, and they have not listened to prior interviews to lay a proper philosophical foundation. It’s easy to get lost in the details, so this blog summarizes some fundamental issues that are largely ignored by mainstream religions, metaphysical elephants in the room.

 I believe that it is a serious misunderstanding that a benevolent God or an always-just karmic process of determining rebirth could have put us into this life in order to make spiritual progress. The committed seeker has to smash the idols of conventional religious and secular wisdom and go through a dark night of the soul to reach enlightenment.

My commitment is to follow the evidence to the best of my ability and at the end of this I will explain the background that led me to these conclusions. In my view, the search for ultimate truths needs to start with fully-facing the deepest meaning of the predicament humans find themselves in.

What follows could be termed Neo-Gnostic Shamanism, an understanding of how we can interact with the Greater Reality that is free of ancient superstitions, the brainwashing of traditional religions, and dogmas of out-of-date materialistic science.

 The Implications of Unintelligent Design

I open my book with three chapters on why militant materialism—denying any kind of paranormal dimension or abilities—is irrational in the face of so much contrary evidence.

In Part II, which shifts the focus to the philosophical problems with all mainstream religions, I explore the idea that there is “intelligent design” evident in nature. This is an argument by evangelicals who recognize the problems with a literalist understanding of the Old Testament creation story, but want to emphasize that there must have been a God behind what appears to most biologists to be a self-regulated process of natural selection. But I do lay out the arguments by respected scientists and philosophers who are critical of Neo-Darwinism (the original theory adjusted for later discoveries).

Certainly there are aspects of the laws of nature that are striking in how they work together with mathematical precision. There are also genuine mysteries about issues such as how matter made the jump to life and why there is consciousness at all. Leading thinkers past and present, including Albert Einstein and the godfather of modern atheism, Anthony Flew, came to the conclusion there was some kind of grand intelligence behind the existence of the universe. This is not, however, an argument for a personal God.

Whatever position one takes, there are major problems with viewing evolution and history as guided, whether by a personal God, a cosmic intelligence who created us for some positive purpose, or extraterrestrials. Just a few examples:

°Why would evolution from multi-cellular life to humans take 600 million years?

°Why would it take 183 million years to realize the dinosaurs were not going to evolve into a part of some grand plan, so that an asteroid had to be brought in to start over?

°How much smart design is evidenced by the fact that 99% of all species which ever lived are now extinct?

°Aliens would supposedly be able to travel across the universe in spacetime, yet they design a human eye that is dysfunctional, a woman’s pelvis that doesn’t allow safe birth, and a male urinary tract that runs through the prostate gland, so the latter swells later in life.

°If we are the crown of creation, why did homo sapiens only emerge 300,000 years ago, the first art (a sign of spiritual imagination) only appears after another 225,000 years, and no one knew the principles of agriculture until 9,500 B.C.? A good recounting of human evolution, such as Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, makes clear why so many scientists see no evidence of guidance by a higher power in the process. Some unexpected support for the idea that there is intelligence at the cellular level that could have driven evolution can be found in Breath by James Nestor and Younger Next Year by Henry Lodge MD and Chris Crowley.

All of the evidence is that if there was a Creator, he was incompetent and callous at best, which is exactly what some the ancient Gnostics asserted about the Demiurge, who was said to have created humans to worship him. He was usually identified with the Old Testament Jehovah, regarded by Christian Gnostics as a lower deity than the Transcendent God, but who knows nothing of higher realms. Richard Smoley provides persuasive documentation in How God Became God that Yahweh was originally just the tribal god of Israel, who only became seen as the God of the universe much later in its history. Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, in When God Had a Wife, date the beginning of the reimagination of the Hebrew religion to 621 B.C. Proponents of this new version dubiously claimed to have found the Book of the Law written by Moses during the rebuilding of the Temple of Solomon, resulting in the writing of what became Deuteronomy.

Modern Gnostics might take Jehovah at his word as the Creator. Or regard the Demiurge as an entity pretending to be responsible for evolution (a shamanistic view which fits with reports of ghosts, dead saints appearing before large crowds, and near-death experiences). Or it could be an impersonal force driving incarnation of consciousness, perhaps due to the desire of the latter for physical experience. Or a metaphor for the many causes of psychological and emotional suffering. Or a Jungian archetype, the dark projection of the collective unconscious of humanity (see blog 8 on my book’s Facebook page). Bishop Hoeller would say the Demiurge could be all of these, since every theorist is only describing parts of the metaphysical elephant, with the overall picture leaving unanswered questions and paradoxes. And we need to remember that however the first humans came to be, embodiment is still playing out, so any answers about our origins and must still be relevant.

As I argue in chapter 3, blog 4, and the AeonByte interview “A Gnostic View of Death, Afterlife, and Embodiment,” the fashionable secular argument that we have no souls fails when the evidence is examined by any fair-minded seeker (among other things, skeptics are misinformed about the strength of the case for near-death experiences). But the religious and New Age positions, both from Eastern and Western traditions, as to why they our spirits incarnate also make little sense.

All this is also consistent with the Gnostic myth of the fall of the angelic figure Sophia, sometimes attributed to a desire for forbidden knowledge, leading to a cosmic accident that resulted in her offspring, the Demiurge. Perhaps it was an experiment with creating life in a material dimension that spirits find difficult to enter which went awry (more about this later).

Although there are different versions and interpretations of the myth, the idea that this world was the result of an accident would fit with the startling scientific evidence that we are likely the only inhabited planet. In Lucky Planet: Why Earth is Exceptional—and What That Means for Life in the Universe, astrobiologist Donald Waltham provides many reasons to believe that our conditions could not have been duplicated elsewhere because of the billions of years needed to make the entire process sustain each of the links in the chain for millions of years. The opportunities are actually not infinite.

The Implications of Unjustified Suffering

Attempts by some Gnostics ancient and contemporary to provide justification for creation are understandable, as are the excuses provided by mainstream religions which are uncritically accepted by believers. It is hard for most people to embrace the idea of an accident for our existence and the concept of a God who is not all-powerful in this dimension, yet still find meaning in life (we will discuss alternative ways to view this).

But all of these efforts to make incarnation intentional and a good thing rest on a wide range of arguments that cannot be reconciled with the mass suffering of the innocent, which is far beyond anyone’s true comprehension:

*“We learn valuable things from adversity” (when we lose a family member, we love them more than ever)

*“It’s deserved because of karma” (somewhere in the chain of previous lives we made a mistake that can only be rectified by getting cancer and you will be preserved from other diseases and accidents so that you can pay off that debt).

*God gave us free will unhindered by any influences, so that makes us responsible for whatever befalls us (when you took that first drink, though you were unaware that you are part of the 10% with a genetic disposition to alcoholism, you have to pay the price for driving drunk and killing that child).

*“It must all be just and right because the Bible says God is benevolent and wise, we just don’t understand why things happen now” (the supposedly terrible things that scripture, written by his worshippers, claim God did will eventually be explained to our satisfaction)

*“God will punish the evil-doers in the hereafter” (the 20-100 million who died in the Taiping Rebellion of China 1851-64 should be happy that its perpetrators will be eternally tortured)

*“God must need the experience through us that he otherwise could not have” (without the Holocaust, how could he feel empathy?)

*“This so-called reality is an illusion” (no one has ever been actually burned to death from wildfires, so ignore the screams).

The ability to buy into these desperate attempts at justification is enabled by human beings’ remarkable homeostasis, the ability to recover from trauma (studies have shown that on average people regain some balance after events like divorce, the death of a family member, or loss of job). We are also driven to see meaning in what happens, despite the evidence, in order to avoid cognitive dissonance with the philosophy that underlies our lives. And we have an impressive ability to compartmentalize what isn’t immediately impacting us.

Most people also know very little about what life was like for most people before the 20th century, but even modern medicine has not been able to eliminate vast amounts of suffering:

°About a quarter of the 108 billion who have been born died in childbirth or early childhood (80% of fatal childhood illnesses today can be attributed to contaminated water).

°About one-third of Europeans died in the 14the century from the ghastly bubonic plague, while the global number was upwards of 200 million. Another 40 to 100 million deaths from what was also called the Black Death occurred in the 6th century.

°Diseases spread by Europeans probably killed 95% of the native population of the Western Hemisphere (estimated at 30-100 million), according to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel.

°Smallpox occurred as early as 12,000 years ago and in the 20th century alone it killed 300-500 million (causing one-third of all blindness).

°The worldwide Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-20 caused the deaths of 75 million.

Would not a benevolent Creator have revealed to humanity the existence of germs before Louis Pasteur’s discoveries in the 1860s? Could he not then have revealed how to most fight them, rather than leaving it to humans to figure it out over a long period? Do we seriously believe that every person who has died of some hideous disease, such as cancer (9.5 million worldwide in 2018 and rising), deserved it because of karma?

And could God at least have made doctors aware of better forms of anesthesia much earlier, or do we think minimizing pain would interfere with the lessons that can teach us?

Should the Creator not be held responsible for giving humans 7,000 genetic diseases and 400 mental-emotional disorders?

*Do we really think that his giving us free will could override biochemical challenges like depression and anxiety that can cause damaging behavior to ourselves and others?

*Is it fair to thrust human beings into environments that result in everything from inferiority complexes to an inability to get an education and qualify for a good job?

*Should the God of this world not be held accountable for the 3-5% of births worldwide that result in deformities?

*Is it part of some kind of divine plan when autism occurs in one out of 88 births, inflicting the patents with $67,000-$72,000 in annual costs for therapy?

*How should advocates of God as benevolent (or karma as meting out justice for past misdeeds) explain the 50 million current sufferers of dementia worldwide (60-70% classed as Alzheimer’s), a number growing at 10 million per year?

*Are we fated by God’s genetics, as well as the family that shaped our diet choices, to struggle with being obese, perhaps without easy access to objective information on healthier options? Was this so important for us to experience, including making it hard to work or attract the type of mate we wanted, while most others did not need these same lessons?

Why did the Creator make virtually everyone subject to the programming of the subconscious by the family and social environment in the first year of life, as documented by Harville Hendix in Getting the Love You Want? Consider the grief from divorce or a miserable relationship because both partners acted out of childhood issues about which they were almost completely unaware. Is the impact fair and part of a master plan for the children?

And we might ask ourselves: why are our first decades of life so full of ignorance for even those of us born into relatively privileged circumstances? Does this seem like the plan of a wise creator or of extraterrestrials who want us to develop our full potential?

Then there are natural disasters. The greatest famine in history due to agricultural failure occurred in China in 1907, causing the deaths of 24 million. The worst flood also happened in China, killing four million in 1931, while the deadliest earthquake occurred there in 1556, with 830,000 victims. Were these Chinese less worthy than those born elsewhere in later times? Or was everyone killed because they had the same karmic fate?

And let’s not forget other living things. Five major natural extinctions occurred between 440 million and 65 million years ago, eliminating 20-90% of all life.

Then there are the innocent victims of wars and manmade disasters, with 40-70 million deaths occurring in World War II. The Mongol conquests of Asia in the 13th century exceeded all others in the elimination of a percentage of world population, upwards of 17%. Mao Zedong killed 45 million through famine in his campaign to force peasants to modernize agriculture.

Today there are 12 million slaves—are we going to insist that they deserve this and that their God-given free will can still be exercised?

If a couple is infertile, is this because the power that created them wanted them to be this way or should they try to change this? What about those born before this was possible?

Do we believe that God or a perfectly just karma intentionally destined so many to be born into poverty in undeveloped countries at a time when there was no understanding about how an economy can thrive?

Yet, despite all this, once God had created the world, he declared it “very good” and rested, according to Genesis.

As the atheist Richard Dawkins wrote of the God of the Old Testament, as his own worshippers portrayed him: “God is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, blood-thirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

And that was the view of the ancient Gnostics, who parted ideologically from other Christians in rejecting Jehovah as the Transcendental God.

 The Implications of Cosmic Chaos

We all now know that the chair we are sitting on and the desk we work at are mostly empty space full of particles in constant motion. We have learned to live with the seeming paradox of our daily life in a Newtonian world of large objects, while quantum uncertainty is at the root of the known universe.  

To understand the relevance of this material chaos to our lives, we need to add into this mix all we have discussed about the accidents embedded into every aspect of reality. Every event can be linked to a seemingly endless chain of preceding causes.

Each decision of every human being is the result of a long and unfathomably complex chain of causation and each action bumps against those by other people.

°A nation goes to war, which leads to the disruption of millions of lives around the world, something that overrides each affected person’s plans, including whether they become disabled or how and when they die. 

°In 1932-33, Stalin engineered a famine to force Ukrainian peasants into agricultural collectives, resulting in an estimated 3.5 million deaths, known as the Holodomor. Was this an act of God or karmic destiny that fit into some overall scheme? It certainly took away the free will of those who died and impacted the survivors in ways that reverberate today. 

°According to Charles Mann in 1493, the spread of slavery in the New World was dependent on who could survive the mosquitoes. Was this part of the divine plans for these individuals?

°An individual’s choice not to follow a healthy diet is likely to burden the healthcare system for a long time….unless genetics makes him or her lucky, God’s gift to him, but very selective for the total population.

°If a state decides to implement early childhood education, this could have a profoundly positive income for those who benefit. And vice versa.

But even if there were pure individual free will, unimpaired by genetics and early family life, how does that offset being a cog in a gigantic social machine that largely determines whether you have a job or who wins an election? What does free will have to do with whether you get malaria?

 All of these types of things are just the tiniest tip of the iceberg that show that predicting what will happen in this world beyond the next moment is impossible and that uncertainty has major metaphysical consequences:

*It is claimed by traditional monotheists that God is omniscient, but his foreknowledge does not interfere with the free will that he gave us, so the outcome is our responsibility. This ignores believers’ own assertions that he created nature, our bodies, and souls. Logically, he should also bear some responsibility for the outcome of putting us into family and social circumstances. Mainstream Western religions insist that he is also all-powerful; if so, he could have stopped the outcome when it became apparent that a quarter of children would die. If one argues that he is only masterminding the macro process, that does not mean he can wash his hands of the consequences, since he let evolution and universal chaos take their course. It would be like the Roman emperor building the stadium, capturing the prisoners and the wild animals, turning them loose on each other, but then blaming them for the outcome.

It should be apparent that God could not have complete foreknowledge because from the quantum to the star level, everything is subject to chaos. The only way to make 100% accurate predictions would be in full control of everything that happens, which would not only make him the greatest sadist imaginable, but make all of life and history a game he controls, knowing the outcome.

*Notions that “everything is meant to be” and “there are no accidents” rest on this same flawed idea that a benevolent divine power is somehow controlling what seems to be chaos with disastrous outcomes, yet it’s “all good.”

*Interpretations of time according to a New Age Eastern religious viewpoint are equally nonsensical. Deepak Chopra’s Ageless Body, Timeless Mind argues: “Quantum physics reveals…that two particles can move backward in time as easily as forward; things that happened in the past can be altered by energy events in the future…In the complex geometrics of quantum space, where multidimensional strings and loops carry time in all directions…Our entire universe is just one incident springing forth out of a larger reality…It is up to you, the perceiver, to cut up the timeless any way you like; your awareness creates the time you experience. ”

Actually, no one we know of has ever traveled back or forth through time. Even if someone were to somehow travel the speed of light, when they returned they would not be visiting us from our future, as is commonly asserted, they would simply have aged more slowly. Furthermore, Stephen Hawking and the eminent physicist Lee Smolin confirmed that as far as we can tell, time only flows forward in this universe. The notion that there is an infinite multiverse where all possibilities are playing out is a convenient theory, but we only can prove that we live in this one. And the idea that the only physical reality out there is personal, shaped by our perceptions, ignores the recordings from radio telescopes that the universe is 13.8 billion years old and expanding (see my blog 2). 

*What about the ability of prophets and psychics to tell the future? Doesn’t that prove that despite the chaos, there is enough control that some things can be known well in advance? In fact, many Bible “prophecies” did not come true, as Smoley has documented. I have known some of the best psychics and while they can sometimes foretell things accurately, they overestimate their abilities, as I discovered on close analysis. But the divine or demonic powers or even the dead could reveal things to select individuals that most mortals cannot foresee.

Within this understanding of the greater reality, there is a thread of light: there can be no predestination while there is the opportunity for everything to change. While we cannot prove we have a full capacity for free will and we are limited by all the influences and the nature of the world, studies have shown that if we ponder our decisions, we make better choices. What we do really does matter here and now and may influence our life hereafter.

We do not have to have all the answers to the big questions to realize that and prudently live according to our deepest sense of inspired ethics. We have the example of our Gnostic forebears, who took their light out from under their bushel baskets to show how to live as true Christians, despite rejection and persecution by the powers of this world and the dark forces beyond it.

 The Implications of the Irrelevance of Daily Life

If creating our souls and putting us into bodies was such a good idea—ignoring all the disastrous consequences documented above—why is it that very little about our lives is even relevant to the alleged purpose of personal growth and obedience to God’s laws? Even if we adopt a narrow, 21st century view living in a developed country, how is our daily life relevant to graduating into another realm?

One third of our daily lives is consumed with working.

*Do we really think that a Ph.D. in electrical engineering or oral surgery is going to be useful in another dimension?

*Did our cosmic designers think it would be an efficient use of our time to have us sleep for another third?

*A final third is consumed by commuting, shopping, preparing and eating meals, maintaining a household and yard, taking care of children and pets, exercising, repairing cars, going to the beach, watching sports or TV, reading novels or fashion magazines, listening to popular music of questionable talent, spending hours each day on social media, and so forth. Once in a while, we might even participate in some kind of spiritually uplifting experience.

 But most of the 100 billion who came before us spent their lives just trying to survive. Does any of this sound like an imperative by a Creator—a personal God or transcendent force—for our personal progress, especially as the basis for our fate in an afterlife? As I have frequently argued, the evidence for reincarnation is remarkably weak (I’ve closely examined the claims), but it makes no sense if one understands why even one incarnation has no rational basis for the supposed goals for us that all religions assert.

And why would our supposedly wise and benevolent holy masters put us in a situation where the truth about what we should believe seems to be hidden from us? In the third section of God Reconsidered, I lay out the reasons why I rejected all mainstream religions: each has a serious flaw at its root, such as the astonishing number of major contradictions in the New Testament (see my blog 5 as well). Nor does it even provide clear ethical guidance on how to live in a diverse society, such as whether secular gay marriage and all abortion should be outlawed and whether there should be capital punishment or any restriction on firearms.

 As I suggested earlier, everything seems to point to a push of consciousness into the material realm by an impulse that cannot be stopped by cosmic powers. God is evidently not all-powerful in this dimension, but neither are the forces of evil. Gnosticism posits a dualistic universe where there is some balance of power.

This would explain why on the one hand we do have startling supernatural incidences on rare occasions, such as public visions of what purports to be the Virgin Mary (including thousands of skeptical witnesses, according to Scott Rogo’s Miracles; see other examples in Dean Radin’s Real Magic).

At the same time, there are spooky, menacing interventions, such as what are considered alien abductions by those who experience them (I argue in blog 6 for an interpretation that these are the Gnostic archons, who are less dangerous than they seem; some of them have told their victims that they have trouble staying in this dimension, which is why are trying to create human hybrids who can do their work here).

Ultimately, as I discussed elsewhere, the evidence suggests that when we die we enter another realm in which we are with those of similar consciousness (which might be defined as spiritual awareness). Yet we are advised by all spiritual leaders not to take our own lives to get there. We can make a positive contribution now and enjoy our life without being attached to the excessive striving of this world, to be “in the world, but not of it,” in the popular paraphrasing of John 17: 15-16.

The Gnostic seers encouraged us to cultivate our consciousness because it would change us for the better here, improve the lives of others, and may even help the balance of positive power in the multi-dimensional cosmos. In my assessment, Gnosticism is the only philosophy that meets the criteria of Occam’s Razor: the simplest explanation that accounts for all the issues is likely to be right. I can’t say I know anything about contributing to metaphysical good in the universe, but I respect the mystical insights of our seers. What I do know is that discarding lies and myths about religion from all partisans is the first step to inner peace and spiritual practices can bring about a better life here and now (see below).

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For those unfamiliar with my background, this is the experience I bring to the conversation (and I welcome feedback):

°My training as a business journalist has taught me the critical thinking that has helped sort the most plausible answers about metaphysics from the wide range of mainstream and alternative paths.

°I have also written about history and prehistory, focused on disease, which is relevant to understanding how religious doctrines would justify the experiences of all who have been born.

°Another career covering the paranormal from a rational standpoint helped me separate the majority of delusional claims and gullible beliefs from the truly impressive cases.

°As a travel writer, I have also been exposed to a wide variety of global religious cultures, while growing up in a home with unconventional views enabled me to question mainstream dogmas, East and West.

°I have felt guided by lifelong synchronistic encounters with sources of divine wisdom and through my own mystical experiences. These incidences have increased the more I have engaged in practices such as prayer, chanting, rhythmic breathing, meditation, affirmations, visualization, religious ritual, reading scriptures, listening to inspirational lectures, and serving others.

°Above the entrance to the temple of the oracle at Delphi was the inscription “Know Thyself” and becoming more self-aware is central to connecting to the divine within and the truth as it should manifest in one’s life. To make progress in that direction, I went through, among other things, eight years of Jungian dream analysis and personal development programs, including Tony Robbins’ fire walk, the Landmark Forum, 12 Step programs, and a weekend with Michael Murphy and George Leonard of Esalen Institute.

°Finally, I have benefited tremendously from the research of scholars and insights of contemporary Gnostic thinkers (especially those interviewed by Miguel Conner for the AeonByte podcast, some compiled in Voices of Gnosticism and Other Voices of Gnosticism; my mentor Bishop Stephan Hoeller of Ecclesia Gnostica, whose invaluable lectures can be accessed at www.gnosis.org; as well as my son, Christian, who has a degree in philosophy and is working towards ordination as a Gnostic chaplain). But no one should be held accountable for my often-controversial conclusions: there is no dogma about the details among Gnostics.