Introduction

What sets human beings apart from the animal realm may come down to a single obsession: the borders of the cosmos. In all other respects, we are merely one vehicle of life among others—as vulnerable as a bacterium, as stubborn as a fern splitting asphalt.

Consider the basic unit of the living: the gene. It knows nothing of walking, desire, or fear. Yet it produces an organism that walks, desires, and trembles. It creates what it cannot conceive, and this vehicle—ourselves or any living being—opens it access to underground, aquatic, and aerial worlds. The gene is imprisoned by its own success: it has engendered an entity that absolutely exceeds it, and yet only that entity can propel it further into reality.

We humans reproduce the same movement. Without fully understanding them, we engender systems that function and surpass us—languages, mathematics, myths, economies—vehicles that allow us to navigate the order of the world. Just as the gene blindly produces the organism, the organism blindly produces symbolic systems.

In the same way that, across millions of years of transformation, the feather ended up accidentally lifting the bird into the air—opening the skies to life—the evolution of the human brain opened a passage toward a new dimension: the conceptual cosmos. This is neither the fruit of a method nor of an intention, but a side effect—an evolutionary leap that bursts the simple frame of adaptation. Human cortex, calibrated to navigate the immediate, accidentally discovered the capacity to unfold abstraction.

Like the gene, life has neither consciousness nor design. It does, however, possess self-organizing properties so powerful that they give the illusion of a plan. These properties have forged the most tenacious of our cognitive tools: God.

Not God as a supreme being, but God as an autopoietic system—an emergent structure that maintains, organizes, and reproduces itself through us. God is as much an illusion as a real technology, as real as language or mathematics. He does not exist "up there," but does exist as a pattern of organization, as cognitive software enabling us to interpret the cosmos and the laws of existence.

The irony is dizzying: life—multiform, blind, mortal—has engendered in us the very idea of its opposite: a unique, luminous, omniscient, eternal being. This is not an opposition but a line of flight. A projection that is neither truth nor lie, but a function: man is the derivative function of life—this operator of transformation that emerges from the biological while acquiring its own laws—and God is the tangent, that ideal line which, touching the human, launches toward the infinity of the possible. The derivative transforms the local into the global, the instant into a trend; the tangent transforms the finite into a longing for eternity.

What we call God is not an answer that descends from above, but the echo of a thrust that rises from below. We seek God less than God—understood as life's potential for self-transcendence—seeks itself in us.

Transcendence is not a beyond: it is the immanent biological excess that, by pushing too hard, cracks the real open. Humanity is the unexpected fault line between the earth and the stars. We are not drawn to elsewhere; we are propelled into it by an overflow of vitality. We are not chasing a mirage; we are running—and this race toward the void, the nothing, the impossible, traces the face of what did not exist before us: the face of the divine, not a celestial halo of desire before us, but a muddy footprint left on the ground behind us.

God is in progress.

From gene to human, from the primordial broth of the depths to the farthest cosmos, every level of existence is at once dependent on and blind to what it engenders; and it is precisely this groping blindness that makes emergence possible.

Between life and God there are not only beliefs and prayers. There is the emergence of systems that overarch humanity: art, music, science, and literature brush against human experience to sketch further.

Life through humanity—defined as a breach between the real and the conceptual—fertilizes the infinite, and God is the name we give to this gestation.