The Names of God

The Silver Toad

Imagine a man sitting on a park bench. You go up to him, and he tells you that your ideas about the world’s nature and the part you play in it are entirely wrong. He explains that what you see and experience is like the reflected image you see in a mirror. There’s the real person, and then there’s the reflection of that person in the mirror. The reflection has no choice, no agency, and not even real existence. You are that reflection. You are the mirror image of what happens on the other side — the real world.

Lucky for you, the man explains, a Silver Toad visited your world to offer salvation. True believers can pass through a mirror and become real. That’s it. All you need to do is believe you are a mirror image. You will likely feel a reinforced steel shutter closing around your mind, protecting you from this weird idea.

Silver Toads are one thing, but the same steel shutters tend to come down whenever someone asks you to change your deepest beliefs. Most people don’t even want to listen to what the other person has to say. If you get as far as listening to their argument, you will likely do so with enough scepticism to freeze a star into an ice cube. You know the truth, so trying to convince you of an alternative is pointless. Up will always be up, no matter how often someone tries to convince you it’s down.

However, what if, by some very bizarre twist of reality, the mirror world and this Silver Toad exist? What if this toad really is the only way to become real? Just try to imagine that for a moment. All your life, the forces of ignorance, fear, and misplaced faith have been pulling the wool over your eyes. Your experiences have constantly twisted reality into an illusion, leaving you blissfully unaware of the truth. What would this stranger have to do to break through this impenetrable wall of cynicism?

What is certain is that walking up to you in the street and blurting out something about a Silver Toad will not pull it off. The shutters will come down, and that will be the end of it. If our stranger hopes to convince you about the Silver Toad, he must find a better way.

One option would be to first talk about the nature of beliefs. We have a very colourful history of sincerely held beliefs that had power over life and death. These beliefs are now nothing but myths and cartoons in children’s storybooks. Remember Zeus? He used to be pretty important to the ancient Greeks. You didn’t want him or any of his cronies getting upset with you. Or what about Ra? According to the ancient Egyptians, he created the world. Creating a world is no small matter. In those days, Ra was real. And then there is Ometecuhtli — and no, it’s not something you can order in a foreign restaurant. He was a significant Aztec god, paired with his counterpart, Omecihuatl. They were once the leading players in life and everything… they were obviously, indisputably real—or so people sincerely believed.

What was the truth—“a fact”—at different points in history has evaporated into mythological story. Each of these gods was once a matter of life and death, an incontestable truth, and now they are self-evidently not real. This pattern has been repeated throughout human history. There is no logical reason to believe your current religious or non-religious beliefs are any different. What makes something real is belief in its truth.

Is there a God? We don’t know. That’s the truth. And the unknown is like an empty space waiting to be filled. The brain doesn’t like such empty spaces in its understanding. This is especially true for the profound. It wants — needs — to fill that space with something, anything. And because we don’t know, there is a risk that we fill that empty space with whatever fulfils the need that space promises to fulfil.

Is there a god? We don’t know. So we place what we believe to be the most likely candidate for need fulfilment into that empty space: Thor, Odin, Yahweh, spirits, energies, fairies, or ourselves. What we put there is not the truth — because we don’t know what it is — but what fulfils our needs. That’s why it requires faith.

When Belief Fails Reality

The issue arises when we fill the void of comprehension with inaccurate information. While such a solution might serve our needs occasionally, it is likely to fail frequently. The shortcomings stem from the fact that the answers produced are only partially aligned with reality.

By failure, I mean every instance when things do not occur as you anticipated or believed they would. This includes unanswered prayers, moments when your faith falls short, and each occasion when you attribute the failure to personal flaws, insufficient faith, a lack of understanding, the devil, or anything else. This scenario can push you towards dishonesty and self-deception as you struggle to justify maintaining the belief to avoid losing the needs it satisfies. After all, possessing something to fill that void, however imperfect, is perceived as better than having nothing at all.

At one point, Zeus, Ra, and Odin were better than nothing. But they were not, after all, real. And because they were not real, they often failed to deliver on expectations. Eventually, those beliefs were undermined and discredited by ideas that were a little better at fulfilling people’s needs.

We need to fill the space of understanding with something real — or as real as we can manage with our current understanding. Something that will fulfil our need for profound meaningfulness while simultaneously delivering on expectation because it is based on observable, verifiable facts. We can do that now.

Imagine a force that gives the whole universe its structure. It is the truth. Everything that is exists because of this force. All the stars, planets, moons, and rocks in the galaxy, all the light and the forces of nature are its doing. Our biosphere, the creatures of Earth, and you yourself exist because this force exists. Every feeling and emotion you’ve ever felt — love, joy, fear, pain, hope — emerged from its presence. It gives you your thoughts, hopes, and dreams and writes your life story on the pages of time. It binds us together and is the author of compassion, goodness, self-knowledge, faithfulness, hope, mercy, and beauty. It is all things and, therefore, also that which brings hatred, fear, envy, anger, resentment, jealousy, and malevolence into the world. It is the source of the arrow of time, the progress we’ve made from an organic molecule to all the marvels of our modern civilisation, and whatever lies in our future beyond our imaginings.

If this sounds like the workings of the causal flow — the flow of cause and effect we have known, in some form, since we became conscious — it is because that’s precisely what it is.

Now, I get it. Whether you are a believer or not, you might not be all that keen to replace the idea of God with something as non-sentient as the causal flow (let’s call it the All-Flow). Even if that force of nature gives us hope, faith, and love, it does not do so because it wants to, but because it simply is what it is.

Sure, the All-Flow gives you the structure of reality. It built the structures that make your life, thoughts, and experiences possible. It shaped your consciousness, needs, and emotions in a way that makes people, things, and events meaningful. But it is still not sentient and, therefore, not a person. It is not an entity with consciousness and emotions capable of an empathetic relationship.

But that may be the wrong way to look at the All-Flow. It is not the causal flow itself, but what emerges from it that must fill the space in understanding — the space of profound meaningfulness. The All-Flow itself might not be sentient, but all sentience emerges from it. At the highest level is the emergence of the universe. At the level that matters to you is the emergence of you. And within you is the emergence of faith, hope, and love. So the All-Flow’s consciousness, emotions, and empathy reside in you and others like you: emergent sentient beings.

And here is the key to what the All-Flow means in terms of profound meaningfulness: not what it is, not what we are, but what we are to become.