I'm no expert; I am guessing that many religions start with an illustration. The person who becomes the founder sees something in the world around him, something that makes sense in physical and spiritual ways. An illustration of how the physical world is comparable to the spiritual world or vise-a-versa. After some time a group of illustrations are stitched together into a system of thought.
There are illustrations I would like to start with.
Imagine a forest after a fire. Everything is scorched. Yet it does not stay dead. As soon as possible new life springs forth. Imagine a rocky outcropping. See how trees and other plants grow in strange ways, hard ways; any way they can to establish a foothold of life. Think how tenaciously life grows between the cracks in cement or asphalt. And not just in hard places, life grows in extreme places. Life grows around hot vents in the ocean floor. Life grows in boundaries between hot and cold, fresh water and sea water. Why would life need to develop special organisms just to live in the boundary between fresh water and sea water? Why can’t life just leave some places devoid of life? Why does it try so hard to live everywhere it possibly can?
If the world was created by a God primarily interested in the afterlife of human souls, why would God want or even need life to be so diverse and grow in places man might never even see? Why waste the time and energy designing life to grow in all these strange places? All you would really need is the minimum ecosystem to sustain human activity. If the only thing being salvaged from this world is human souls. Why invest more than is necessary in anything else?
The old saying would be that everything exists for the Glory of God. Yet not all life speaks of Glory. A good bit of it speaks of desperation, desperate to survive and grow. If the purpose of all life is Glory, why is survival and growth more important that Glory?
Now if the simplest explanation is most likely the right answer, then we should look for a simple answer to this mystery. Why is survival and growth under any and all circumstances so important? because that which is beyond needs all the life it can get.
What if that which was beyond us, that supernatural force we tend to call God, what if it gained something from all life, not just human souls. What if it gained something it needed and it needed as much as it could get.
If that were the case, then would not we expect to find life trying to fill every nook and crany? I would venture to say this is the case. There is a life force beyond us that needs as much life as possible. To me this is the simplest and most straight forward answer to the question.
Now why would such a force need as much life as possible? Not just human souls, but life in any and all kinds. What if that which was beyond was not a perfect, self-contained, all-powerful divinity. What if it was a living being that needed energy to sustain itself, to grow itself?
What if there was a force or forces that were sustained by the living bio-energy in the universe. Such a force would seek to promote any and all life for its own self-survival. This is especially so if such a force could not sustain itself completely without living bio-energy to support it.
Such a force could be well familiar with basic building blocks of life, from cells up through body systems. It would have some ideas of what it could combine to produce life that would survive and grow under various conditions. Such a force or forces would be motivated to generate a wide range of diverse living organisms. It would be sustained by the living and dying of the bio-mass. It would be interested in generating balanced systems that sustained long term bio-mass stability. Without perfect knowledge or absolute power, such a force would have successes and failures. These would include families of living things that were dead ends as well as families that made it for various lengths of time.
Would not such a system of a life-needing force fit well with the natural world we see around us?
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