How old is the basis for my belief about my Creator?
My experience is like a lot of yours if you are Christian. I know about God because of the testimony of Felt Board Jesus brought to colorful life on Sunday mornings.
The historical Jesus lived about 2000 years ago. About 2000 years before our common understanding of the human microbiome that consists of countless species of microbes of all sorts in every nook and cranny of our body. Some 1600 years before Galileo Galilei perfected the first device known as a microscope.
2000 years ago people were living in a world where they could NOT see the microbial life all throughout their bodies but they could feel and sometimes see the effects. Like the wind, they could not see the wind but they could see and feel the effects of it.
To them this was part and parcel with what they called the supernatural or the unseen realm. However in the passage of time that which was supernatural or divine slowly began to be organized into kingdom, division, class, order, family, genus, and species of different microbial life. That which was once demonic and Legion is now better understood as disease process remedied by the removal of unclean things.
So what if that still small voice, that thing that motivates you towards good will and compassion were simply a result of the universe of things that call us home communicating? Every time we get a craving for something we are experiencing this very thing. If we are doing something that is expanding and promoting life we are sent pleasure messages. If we are behaving in a way that is subtracting from life we are sent pain messages.
So what other messages are there? Have you ever tried to record and categorize them? We all know our favorites. Drink that beer, eat that Snickers, drink that Pepsi, etc.
Kind of makes us look like deaf and blind cavemen when you consider how many billions of different species are able to communicate within us at any given time.
I don’t believe in a literal creation week less than 10,000 years ago by any means. I’m as much of an evolutionary biologist as can be when it comes to my understanding of how we got here.
I don’t know where the first act of creation started and I don’t know that creating will ever end, but I am pretty sure that we are here by the will of the things that fill our innermost being with their life; their essence. And the best part is when I run my life through this framework it just seems to fit.
I assume that my body is not my own. That I am the least of all my brethren. I make up only 1% of the DNA and only 10% of the cells are human. That my body is the Garden of Eatin for all those little microbial lives that find me the host with the most.
What if our body itself is their food and it is our job to keep serving up the banquet?
In 460 BC Hippocrates identified phtisis (the Greek word meaning “consumption”) as the most widespread disease of his day and observed that it was almost always fatal. YIKES!!!
Kind of ironic that a disease called consumption would be the result of a lack of proper nourishment hindered by faulty consumption.
All that to say I no longer eat for myself. I do put food in my body but it is food that I know my gut microbes want first and foremost. I don’t ever want them looking around for snacks.
Life is much easier when I am a good steward of the body(gift) I have been given.