fullspate

God: where is he?

It would be a gross understatement to say that God is a controversial figure. So much blood has been shed in the name of God. Apart from the terrible loss of life, the sad thing for some of us is that in all that bloodshedding so few people have taken the trouble to think a little about what they actually believe in. Does it make sense? One problem with our monotheistic religions is the prevalence of some pretty dubious ideas about God.

Does God exist?
With big issues like God it is important to ask the right questions in the right order. The question above is certainly not the one to begin with. It presupposes we know what God is. But do we?

What is God?
A common idea is that God is the creator of everything. Pointing to a little transistor radio on the table in front of him, a monk in a half-ruined monastery on mount Olympus said, "Look at this radio. It only exists because someone made it. And in the same way, the world only exists because God made it." I made no objections. The guy was old; he seemed perfectly happy in the monastery, and who was I to try to unsettle the foundations of his tidily constructed universe? Nevertheless, I was not persuaded. The monk's point of view begs the question: Is the world like a little transistor radio?

Another problem with this idea of God as a creator is that you have to imagine him existing before everything else. God is there in the midst of nothingness doing absolutely nothing. More importantly, there is the assumption that while he floats there in the pitch black void he somehow knows that he is God (if he is God, he must at the very least know that he is God, mustn't he?).

All of religious thinking involves beginning with some very human thoughts (like that of the radio) and then extending them in some very dubious ways. Instead of beginning with things like radios why don't we begin with what we know about self-consciousness and that might help us see if that idea of God out there in the primordial nullity makes sense?

Our understanding of ourselves is only achieved in retrospect, i.e. by looking back at what we have done. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary it makes some sense to assume that this may well be true of all intelligent life, including God. If this is true, then God could not have known who he was and what he could do or should do before he started doing it. Only after making a few things like time and space and a few galaxies and maybe the dinosaurs would he realise what he was capable of. And by looking back at his mistakes he would be able to realise what he should try to do a little better in the future. Creation would then be, at least in the beginning, an impulsive and messy business, without a lucid and benevolent plan.

If God must know who he is, and if there are good reasons to believe that God floating in nothingness before the event of creation could not know who he was then some people come to the conclusion that it would be better to drop the idea of God as a creator (which also entails dropping the whole idea of creation). Some of those who have thought like this and have wanted to keep their faith have tried to develop an idea of God that makes a bit more sense. One such idea is that of God as immanent, i.e. not an external agency that creates or observes and intervenes from time to time, but an agency that is life itself. The beetle on the floor on its back struggling to get back on its feet again is God - or rather a little bit of God, just as we are who so ruthlessly stamp the heel of our boot into the face of the hapless insect.

That's not what it says in the Old Testament.
So? Isn't the bible a very human attempt to make sense of God? As a human artefact, isn't it fallible? All bibles are in utterly human languages and how could such crude instruments hope to capture the full truth about something that is supposed to be beyond all that?

By the way, the problem of language also gives us another reason for being doubtful about the traditional idea of God as an external agency. God out there in the void has an intelligent life - not just any old intelligent life, but the most intelligent life. From what we know so far, forms of intelligence which are greater than that of the donkey that learned to count are impossible without language. To make another dubious extension of this very human thought, we would have to assume that God out there in the void had a language. The question then arises: Could God in the void understand what he was thinking or saying (if he was talking to himself)? Our old friend Ludwig Wittgenstein came up with some good arguments as to why a private language - a unique language that someone might claim to have on their own - just would not work. For God this would mean that if he couldn't speak to other Gods and thereby see what makes sense and what doesn't, how could he know he was making sense when thinking to himself in the void?

Is that something like what that groovy German guy Hegel was on about?
Absolutely. To get his critique of traditional theology going he came up with a fairly neat little argument. It goes like this:

For a few thousand years or so now people have thought that God is infinite, and they think this means that he is not a discrete thing limited in time and space. More primitive religions like that of the Druids thought certain things like particular trees were holy, as if they were gods. Our monotheistic religions draw a clear distinction between particular things, like trees, and God, who is not limited in time and space. Our idea of heaven as a place beyond the realm in which things are born and die assumes just this antithesis between the finite and the infinite.

In a nutshell, the problem with this antithesis is as follows:

First we wanted to clarify that the infinite is unlimited so we emphasised its difference from limited things like trees and beetles.

But if we define the infinite negatively as not-finite it ends up looking a bit limited because we have drawn a boundary around the finite and said that the infinite (God and heaven) only exist on the far side of that boundary. We end up with a no-go area for the infinite which makes it less than it was originally supposed to be.

The upshot of this is that whatever the infinite is, it can't be external to the finite. God and heaven, similarly, can't be out there in the far beyond.

About the Druids: there are some dudes who still dig the Druids and dress up in white robes and perform ceremonies out in the hills. What about them?
Even without thinking about the matter philosphically, some people have a gut feeling that there is something not quite right with our monotheisms. They feel we have something to learn from more primitive religions like that of the Druids, especially from the link that they have between the divine and the realm of particular things. However, it is surely a mistake to want to turn the clock back. Let's not forget that the Druids didn't just go to sing and pray around the holy oak tree. There were human sacrifices.

What about ethics? Nietzsche said, "God is dead, everything is permitted". If we get a bit too sceptical about God, aren't ethics, morality and the things that hold society together like table manners and being nice to policemen - aren't they all going to collapse?
The idea that God is the foundation of ethics because he gives laws to people, as he did with the ten commandments, is another example of God as an external agency intervening in human life from somewhere else. Moses had to go up to the top of a mountain to get the tablets of stone (which must have made it difficult to carry them all the way back). The assumption is that without the divine law there would be no ethics and society would just fall apart.

This is another non-starter. If you don't already feel for people and care about them, then someone giving you laws about respecting human life will just seem to be talking rubbish - like someone suddenly coming up to us and claiming that we must respect grass, and that it is a terrible breach of the divine law to cut it. In other words, if a society doesn't already have an ethical life, no quantity of tablets of stone or other divine commands from the tops of mountains is going to create it.

Consequently, if Nietzsche was being serious (which I doubt), he was wrong. If God (as the traditional lawgiver) is not the foundation of ethics then the death of God doesn't mean that ethics collapses and you can just do whatever you want.

Maybe you're the one who's making the big mistake, Dug, with all this philosophical stuff. Isn't it a mistake to think we can understand God? After all, God is God so how can we hope to understand him?
Hey, I'm not the one claiming to understand God. I just hear other people claiming to understand him - like he created everything, he gave us the laws, etc. - and if something sounds like a load of rubbish to me then I'm going to try and find some fairly good reasons for claiming it is indeed a load of rubbish.

As for the claim that God is a mystery, if this is true then let's leave him/her/it/them mysterious. It is what we call having your cake and eating it too to claim that God is a mystery and that we know lots of things about him (like the fact that he's masculine).

Actually, despite having written all this, my tendency is to agree with something our old friend Wittgenstein said at the end of his first big book. Ludwig, who was not an atheist, concluded that all ideas about God were dubious and that the whole issue should be passed over in silence. We can believe, we can kneel and pray, and feel humble and feel called upon to do good deeds, but intellectual integrity demands (for Ludwig) that we stop making claims like God is one (and not many), or male (and not female), or a creator (and not the created), or ying (and not yang).

Maybe that's faith, though. Wasn't it Kierkegaard who talked about the 'leap of faith'? The ideas might seem dubious to others, and you can't argue for them in the way that you can argue that 2+2=4 but still you take that leap of faith and you believe, maybe because something moves you - divine grace maybe.
Look, this could go on and on. If you want to take your leap of faith, take it. It's a free world (or so they say). To be honest, I never got round to reading Kierkegaard or any of the other Scandinavian guys. Maybe there is some truth in it. Hegel was enough for me, and I gave up after that. After ploughing through all 500 pages of his "Phenomenology of Spirit" for the fourth time I was in no position to do any leaping.

Okay. Let's forget Kierkegaard. But what about that French guy Pascal. Didn't he have a point when he said it might all seem to be a bit doubtful but it's still a good idea to believe coz after you die things might well be a lot groovier for believers?
Enough. Enough.

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