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What really gives us life?

Getting to know God, divine Spirit, as our entirely good creator frees us from physical limitations, as a man experienced when faced with deteriorating eyesight.

  • By Mark Swinney

Christian Science Perspective audio edition
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The rise of AI technology, along with discussions of how this tech could potentially be applied in robots, has gotten me thinking more deeply about the nature of life, including considering what has the potential to create something that is alive.

What would it mean to look to God for answers?

When it comes to getting a better sense of what God is, I’ve gained much from Christian Science. Through the textbooks of Christian Science – the Bible and Mary Baker Eddy’s primary work, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” – I have learned that God is not a physical being of any sort. Rather, as Science and Health sets forth, “Spirit, Life, Truth, Love, combine as one, – and are the Scriptural names for God” (p. 275).

Right at the beginning, the Bible makes a leading point about the creative nature of God: “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). God – Spirit, Life, Truth, Love – creating only good? That strikes me as a refreshing concept.

In order to create us in this way, God could not be employing matter at all, since matter is vulnerable and in no way permanent. The infinite, divine Spirit couldn’t include or create anything material, and so God’s creation – which includes each of us and expresses God’s own nature – must be entirely spiritual. The countless facets of spiritual goodness are God’s building blocks.

It follows, then, that authentic life isn’t really about, or in, matter at all. As Jesus said, “That which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6).

Seeing just a hint of this fact of God’s all-spiritual, good creation can be invigorating, even freeing.

More than three decades ago, I found that I wasn’t seeing clearly. It seemed as if I was a victim of heredity, as generations of family members on both my mother’s and my father’s sides had worn glasses.

I decided to pray about this. As I did, it dawned on me that I am – everyone is – not a creation of two mortals. Our true genesis is in God alone and entirely spiritual. As God’s creation, before we even met our parents, we had already been formed – formed of the spiritual substance that makes up God’s thought. “All things are created spiritually. Mind, not matter, is the creator. Love, the divine Principle, is the Father and Mother of the universe, including man,” states Science and Health (p. 256).

Our whole existence, then, is maintained by God and reflects nothing less than Spirit’s goodness and wholeness. Spirit, divine Love itself, could never be so cruel as to encase its creation in vulnerable physicality.

Over a period of months, I continued to be consistently grateful for this wonderful spiritual truth. Then I realized that I was seeing more clearly than ever – in fact, I could see perfectly clearly. My sight remains just as perfect today.

God, divine Spirit, is our genuine creator. He is Life itself, and “God creates neither erring thought, mortal life, mutable truth, nor variable love,” as Science and Health explains (p. 503). Making space in thought for embracing this powerful truth and living out from the basis of God as divine Life is healing prayer.

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