Theistic Creationism, including Christianity, Judaism, and its various other incarnations, teaches that a powerful and intelligent being created the universe that we live in. For the sake of giving people something to think about, I would like to offer here an alternative explanation to how the Theistic religions could have been formed. Keep in mind that this theory is not one that I believe to be true, but rather one that seems at least as plausible as the idea that "God created" our universe, if not more so.

Consider the possibility that in an alternative hyper-plane of our universe, just out of our reach, there may be life which was advanced far beyond our current state long before Earth had anything on it any closer to being a life form than a virus. Perhaps this alternative life advanced so far in fact that it became aware of our universe. How would beings of this type know that we were in fact as "real" as they were, and not just something that they had created in their own minds? With that in mind, let's explore a reasonable order in which the awareness of our realm might have developed.

In the beginning of their awareness of our realm, the gods (if you could call them that, by our standards) might have become aware of basic things such as matter and energy, or land and space. Perhaps their awareness of our realm came in the form of a sort of telepathic link with the life that was evolving here. Maybe some god-like race on an alternate Earth, or probably more accurately on an alternate slice of the hyper-earth that transects our realm and theirs, had developed communication in such a universal form that it allowed all species on their planet to communicate with each other, and perhaps when life developed on our planet it was naturally connected to the other plane of reality through this advanced form of communication in much the same way that a radio station connects to a radio receiver. It would have been reasonable for the beings in that realm to think that they had simply made this world up, or perhaps even to believe that it was as real as their own realm but had come into existence as a product of their advanced intellect. Perhaps they would have felt that they had simply spoken our world into existence by communicating their thoughts of it to each other.

Keep in mind that if such an awareness had been through a telepathic link with life in our realm, it would likely have been a long and slow process by our standards, but that we have no way of knowing what kind of life-span such god-like creatures might have or how they would have perceived such an immense period of time. Perhaps having an advanced telepathic form of communication would have allowed them to pass of their acquired knowledge and experiences to their offspring in such a way that it would seem to them like their consciousness stretched back through the generations for an inconceivable amount of time. Perhaps they would have felt they had been around quite literally forever, and always would be.

Well, if their awareness of our world came through the awareness that life on this planet had of our world, if would be reasonable for them to think that in the beginning, the Earth was without form since the early life on this planet likely lived in a slurry that from an inside vantage point could only be described as dark, wet, and formless. As life became more complex, developing into living cells, some of it could have survived the transition of being moved from the denser primordial slime to the surrounding pools of liquid water such as ponds, or even rain puddles, which would have seemed immensely deep from their point of view with no senses as we have come to know them save the sense of taste in some crude form and perhaps something akin to a sense of touch allowing them to in such crude way to feel the an event such as the surface of the water being moved by the wind or rain. As simple life forms became able to sense light, the god-like race would have sensed a change from the darkness that had comparatively seemed to permeate deep into everything in our realm that they knew to exist and they would have saw that this change was good because it allowed them to explore or, perhaps from their point of view, to create more of our realm.

As I mentioned earlier, we have no way of knowing what such beings would think of the vast amounts of time involved in all of this. It is, however, reasonable to think that if such beings later communicated their recollection of these events telepathically to one of us, we would have likely understood the slow transition from darkness to light as the dawn of a new day. In this case, the first day perceived by our hypothetical race of theistic beings. These intelligent theoids would likely also have noticed that with the light came warmth. I say this is likely, because it would have been advantageous for early animate life on Earth to be aware of variations in the temperature of their surroundings. Since the sun shining on the surface of the water would have warmed it, some of the early life forms could have taken advantage of that fact as the earth's crust continued to cool and warmth became less abundant. In other words, the Earth as a whole was getting cooler, which would have encouraged the survival of life forms which managed to develop ways of conserving warmth or better yet, moving to where the available warmth was more suitable to their survival.

The theists would likely have found, as life here became more equipped to get from place to place, that there were vast expanses of land and air separating one body or water from another. Perhaps they would have felt that this firmament was created by their own minds. Of course, if their minds were linked telepathically in much the same way that language links our minds, then any attempt to make us aware of such a concept would likely have been perceived by one of us humans as speaking it into existence. The lofty arch of firmament separating the waters from the waters in fact described in Theistic religions as being dual in nature, which is generally interpreted by theistic scholars as meaning the atmosphere and what lies beyond it, but could just as easily have meant the land and the air above it. From the viewpoint of aquatic life forms after all, the land that separated the shore of one body of water from another would have been aloft as the heavens above them, even though from our point of view it's simply the ground below us and the air around us.

Keeping in mind that in this scenario the theoids would have likely seen changes in the way life on Earth perceived the world around them as actual changes in our realm, it would appear by the theistic account that as time went on, aquatic life made the move from puddles and ponds with wet land all around them to lakes and oceans surrounded by dry land. This would have started a competition for survival that had never been known on our planet before, but would also have allowed life more room to grow and much more territory to explore, and the theoids would likely have saw this as good for much the same reasons that they saw the light as good.

As the early animate life forms moved from their muddy past into deeper waters, inanimate life would have remained behind due to its lack of ability to do otherwise. Such life would have been necessarily equipped to draw food from its surroundings without locomotion and would therefore have been most suited for survival if it managed to develop ways of using the abundant sunlight available to convert simpler chemicals into the ones that were needed for survival. Such plant life would have finally had the chance to flourish and evolve. The theoids would had likely communicated this to each other in their usual way, and felt themselves to have spoken such things as grass and trees into existence, and observed that although variety was abundant, each life form produced offspring quite similar to itself. Again, this would have likely been seen as a good thing, from the theoids' point of view. It likely gave them new things to discuss, or in other words to share thoughts about, which I would venture to guess would be hard to come by in a society of strongly telepathic beings.

Land animals would have eventually emerged, simply because the food on land couldn't get away and therefore those who could get at it had an easy meal waiting for them. It's also likely that the ability to move between water and the firmament above had been retained or evolved by some due to the fact that it would have allowed those living in smaller bodies of water to move from one lake or pond to another when the water got too shallow or the food supply ran too low.

Eventually, competition for food on land would have developed. Land animals who could eat other land animals would have had the distinct advantage of having a food source that contains the things that their body needs without the need for chemical conversion. Predatory life forms were therefore inevitable, and parasitic life forms would already have been around in various forms since the earliest life on this planet likely evolved surrounded by food and would therefore have been opportunistic and parasitic in nature. Land animals that developed the ability to use the air to their advantage would also have been more likely to survive. Breathing air of course is one obvious way that land animals could take advantage of it. This would ensure that they could stay on land for longer periods of time than life forms that had the ability to climb out of the water but not the ability to breathe the air and use it to sustain their biology.

As time went on, the ability of animate life to sense light would likely have evolved into something closer to what we now know as sight, and the fact that they used that sense in their process of deciding which way to move at any given time would likely have encouraged the survival of creatures with the ability to make more sensible decisions, which would in turn have encouraged the evolution of intelligence. As vision developed, eventually these primitively intelligent creatures would probably have come to realize that there were periods of time with abundant light from a single source, and periods of time when that source of light was not available to them. Those who could take advantage of the smaller amounts of light available during such times would have had a distinct advantage at night, and so would have likely become largely nocturnal in nature.

Another way that air could be taken advantage of is the ability to leap or climb above the surface of the ground, and by extension the ability to leap from high places and glide safely or even to fly, so some life forms would likely have survived to pass on their genetic traits in part because some of those traits allowed them to do such things a little better than the average for their kind. Such animals would have had a distinct advantage in the dim lighting of night, in open areas of land, and in areas populated by large plants on which they could sit patiently and watch for food while themselves remaining out of the reach of most other predators. Over time it is inevitable that some land animals would have evolved to be better suited for such things. The genetics for something resembling flight had by long before this time been developed in aquatic animals, since swimming and flying aren't all that different, so the vestigial genetic traits which were no longer needed for swimming were free to mutate over time into forms that would generate traits which were more suited to walking, crawling, or flying. The senses of the various land animals would have also adapted over many generations to their lifestyles. The theistic account clearly speaks of the waters teaming with animate life and "bringing forth" such life, including that which may fly in the open firmament above the solid ground or firm land of Earth. This account may be nothing more than a story made up by parents with no answers, but it also may be something more than that. What seems likely to me is that it was passed down first in a crude and probably very inaccurate for as instinctual knowledge that helped some of the early animate life on this planet to survive by better understanding the world in which they lived, and later as legends and folklore passed down first through the non-verbal communication that many animals use to teach their young, and later through the verbal or semi-verbal communications of animals that managed to evolve such abilities. Of course, it is also possible that the information was given to us somehow by an outside observer such as a god, an intelligent race from another planet, or perhaps even our hypothetical theoids. In fact, although I would consider it unlikely, it's even possible that one of the reasons we managed to develop language was because of a semi-conscious awareness of such life forms attempting to communicate with us. Perhaps the theoids were in fact attempting to create us in their own image by giving us what they had and from their perspective we entirely or almost entirely lacked: The ability to communicate thoughts amongst each other.

Over time, the more intelligent among the animals on this planet may have become aware of the many smaller light sources available at night and eventually those smart enough and dexterous enough to cultivate plant life as a food source would likely have even grown to recognize consistent groupings or patterns among such lights, leading a select few of them to inevitably notice that changes in what they saw each night in the sky corresponded to a large degree with which plants were ready to be harvested. Awareness of such things as when it would be best to plant a certain type of seeds would have allowed such agricultural primates an advantage that no other life forms before them had possessed, and developing ways of passing on such knowledge to future generations would further have helped their chances for survival, encouraging specifically the survival of those who were more equipped to develop language skills. Such traits being passed on in the surviving generations of agricultural primates are probably what led to the development of brains with complex language centers for learning and processing linguistic information. In other words whether our hypothetical theoids exist or not, it is likely that we exist in our present form mainly because of the tendency of our ancestors to be more likely to pass on their genetics if their parents had been able to pass on their knowledge.

I've noticed that the generally accepted theistic view treats humans as if they were created separately from other life forms, and were only given the ability to produce offspring after they had displeased their god through disobedience. It's interesting to note that if the gods were in fact telepathic life forms that evolved in a real both parallel to our own and near enough to allow them to sense us, they would likely have felt that they were totally in control of our world since they would have shared a single and consistent view of this world gained through their awareness of the thoughts and senses of the life on our planet. When humans developed the ability to communicate symbolically, they would have found eventually that such symbolic language and the underlying symbolic thought processes can lead to such inventions as imagination and deception. Our hypothetical race of god-like creatures would likely have been found this confusing since their own method of communication made no such allowances, and they may have begun to realize for the first time that our world was not generated by their minds, and was perhaps as real as their own. Given this situation, and their awareness of the competitive nature of much of the life on our planet, they may have become afraid of what might happen if we learn to much from them, and wanted to shut us out of their collective mind except to the extent necessary to keep us under control, not realizing that we would eventually reach a population size large enough to dilute their telepathic communication with us to the point where they could no longer control us at all, or for that matter even communicate with us. It would be like trying to tune in a one weak radio station among many. Difficult at best, our ability to communicate telepathically would probably be all but non-existent in part due to the influences of such an outside telepathic source interfering with our own development and in part because our own communication skills evolved along different lines so that such telepathy wasn't needed for our survival. What ever the reasons for our current form and what ever the history of life on this planet may be, one thing is clear. We don't have all of the answers, but we at least know how to pose some interesting questions.

Donald A. Kronos, PhD.

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