Around 3,000 BCE people began to look beyond how to survive, and started looking for the ‘why’ and ‘when’ patterns in the natural world. This began with ancient Astronomy, watching the stars and recording their movement with mathematical precision.
Over the centuries, observations evolved into our modern day science, where we have a pretty good understanding of physics and how the physical universe works. We can say with certainty, there are fundamental operating laws in the natural world that govern consistently. As a result we can manipulate the materials we find around us to our advantage. We have engineering, technology, communication systems, energy harnessing, transportation, to name a few.
We humans also have a strong intuitive sense there is a spiritual world, something greater than ourselves, something intangible we cannot touch, but we feel in our hearts.
Humans have likely worshiped higher powers for tens of thousands of years, but the first recorded gods appear only when writing was invented around 3500-3100 BCE.
Throughout history there have been individuals who claim to have received direct communication from a god, or gods to guide humanity.
Among them, Abraham, 2166-1271 BCE, and Moses, 1400-1300 BCE, patriarchs of Judaism.
Zoroaster, somewhere around 1,000-600 BCE, patriarch of Zoroastrianism.
Gautama Buddha, 563-483 BCE, patriarch of Buddhism.
Jesus Christ, 4 BCE-30/33 CE, patriarch of Christianity.
Muhammad, 570-632 CE, patriarch of Islam.
These patriarchs, all fathers of modern day religions, claim contact with an intangible world we can only sense internally.
But this ethereal world is harder to observe. The subtle patterns of the ‘why’ and ‘when’ are obscured by the density of the physical world.
So our knowledge is limited. We rely on the insights of those that have come before. Ones that lived many years ago.
What we know for certain, without a shadow of a doubt, is we are here, living on this planet, with a mind capable of perception, intuition, thought and reason.
When we gain more knowledge of the spiritual world, we may very well find it to be an objective reality with fundamental operating laws that operate as consistently as the laws of physics.
