Who or what God is and whether God exists at all are age-old questions. They are also questions that divided humans and led to some horrific persecutions, all in the name of one or other belief.

Humans and other social animals practiced some sort of vetting to sort out who’s in and who’s out, for 300,000 years in the case of modern humans and probably millions of years in the case of our mammalian ancestors.

For good reason too, because there’s safety with kin and close relatives and danger, perhaps, with strangers. These days, some version of vetting goes on in schools, workplaces, places of worship and certainly politics.

Vetting is perhaps most obvious in religion. For some Christian communities, queries about whether you’ve been saved, believe in Jesus, the virgin birth and the resurrection, can all be checkboxes on your way to acceptance or rejection depending on your answers.

Similar ethnic, tribal and sectarian checkboxes exist in other religious traditions. In the case of Christianity, divisions began soon after it split from its Jewish origins and spread throughout the Mediterranean, mutating as it spread into differing versions of what it meant to be a Christian in custom and beliefs.

Those divisions within and between religions mark the landscape of most religions and stand in contrast to an almost universal impulse among humans to search for meaning to their lives and, along the way, sometimes create gods.

This impulse is so universal that some neuroscientists and psychologists suggest the brain might be hard-wired for religion.

However, trying to make sense of religion, and especially the many siloed subsets of religious belief systems and worldviews, can be a minefield for those searching for clarity and a more universal belief system.

Our blinkered approach to those of other cultures and beliefs is at odds with those first glimpses of “Earthrise” taken by cameras based on the moon taken in 1968, and the “Pale Blue Dot,” as Carl Sagan famously expressed it, of Earth glimpsed by Voyager from the edge of the solar system, taken Feb. 14, 1990.

To look back at those now iconic pictures, it’s hard to escape the feeling that we are all in this together — and wouldn’t it be better to foster common ground?

With those perspectives in mind, the cultural and religious check boxes with which humans define their tribes seem wrong-headed and hearted.

We need to see the wider picture if we’re going to solve huge challenges such as climate change.

Climate change transcends borders, cultures and beliefs and is insoluble without the willingness and determination of all peoples and countries to work together. N

o one country or group of countries can solve human-created climate change. It’s a case of “all hands on deck” if we’re going to solve climate change in time.

Closely related is the question of whether humans have the moral sense to help those most affected by climate change.

Moral behavior is not limited to modern humans. Our ancestors living many thousands of generations ago left evidence that they, like us and some living primates, provided long-term care for the disabled in their midst.

That doesn’t mean they were saints. Far from it, there is plenty of evidence for violence in ancient times and among chimpanzees today.

But the violation of human rights record for modern humans has been far worse — look no further than Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Ukraine in recent times.

Which raises the question: Where was God in all that misery?

The evidence suggests that the God many of us worship may be much too small and sectarian.

For a God that created the universe, many trillions of stars and planetary bodies, the natural laws, the beginning and evolution of life on this planet and probably countless other life-sustaining planets, would surely be beyond our imagination and the beliefs and creation stories of countless human cultures.

Such a God would have created the very principles that underpin physics, chemistry, biology, genetics and evolution, which humans continue to discover and employ to better understand the cosmos and our place in it.

Looking back at the roadmap to modern humans, the evidence suggests that we are but a way station to other species in the future and as susceptible to extinction as any other hominin before us.

In short, if there is a God, that God lets life play out with little interference, as Albert Einstein repeatedly suggested.

Einstein’s views on God were captured by Corey S. Powell’s contribution to John Brockman’s 2005 book, “My Einstein,” from which the following quote from Powell comes.

“Just as Einstein’s belief in beautiful, orderly, scientific theories mirrored a child’s view of the world, so his belief in God as the ultimate manifestation of that order expressed an idealistic notion that God is so much greater than humankind that he cannot be found in any one faith. He repeatedly described the ‘cosmic religious feeling’ that accompanies great scientific discoveries and declared in New York Times Magazine that ‘in this materialistic age of ours, the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people.'”

For a different take on God, readers might want to listen to New York Times columnist David Brooks’ audio piece from December, in which he chronicled his journey to belief in God, called “I Found Faith in a Crowded Subway Car.” It’s worth listening to.

Dr. William Brown is a professor of neurology at McMaster University and co-founder of the InfoHealth series at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Public Library.