Updated April 3, 2012: Fixed some grammar typos.
This is part of multi-part series of blog posts on the nature of faith and religion. (you can read the previous installments by following these links: Part 1 (June 2010) and Part 2 (October 2010)).
I have long intended to continue my previous discussion on what it is that I believe about God and about faith itself, but life got in the way of that. And it has been an interesting trip over the 18 months… I ended up reconnecting with a long-lost friend, and ended up marrying her. I also became a father (to a really cool step-son). My church situation changed in some interesting ways (my situation at my Mennonite church improved, while due to life circumstances I haven’t been as involved that much these days with the local Quaker Meeting) and finally my career has been turned upside down.
So obviously this has all factored into how I’ve come to work through issues of faith.
In many ways I have fresh new reasons to believe in a kind of God who is present and active in the world (or at least in my own life), and yet I’ve also come to see 18 more months of evidence to the contrary. The world has continued to become more brutal and cuthroat all around us. War, starvation, disease, these are things continue to ravage the world. For me, I can’t wrap my head around that. There is simply no way that the traditional Christian understanding is true, that God is truly all-good, all-knowing and all-powerful, all at the same time. It just doesn’t make sense to me. A recent example was of the school shootings in France. One report told how the gunman approached a young elementary school aged girl, pointed a gun at her head and then fired. The girl was only a few years older than my son. Surely her parents loved her just as much as my son is loved by his parents? Yet, God let this happen.
So, to me we are left with a few possibilities…
Possibility #1 – God is all-powerful and all-knowing. God sometimes steps into human history and changes things (i.e. miraculous events), but often does not. My response – So this makes God an arbitary monster, who uses humans for amusement. (the book of Job would seem to back this idea for what its worth).
Possibility #2 – God is not all-powerful and all-knowing, and does not step into human history at all. God might have created the world, but we humans are pretty much left to our own devises now. My response – Again, it seems like God is only using us for his/her amusement. We were created for some purpose but then are left on our our own to figure it out.
Possibility #3 – God does not exist. The world is random and meaningless. Humans created the idea of “God” or “Gods” to satisfy our deep longing for meaning. My response – There are days that this theory is compelling, but that there are other days that something in my heart tells me that this theory is not the truth, that there is something of the divine that is real, even if the ideas we often hold about the divine are hogwash.
Possibility #4 – Humans intuit that God exists, because God is present. But God is not a “man in the sky” but rather is force, a presence, that is all around us and in us. God doesn’t interfere with the laws of nature, but God does speak to the hearts and consciences of human beings. Good happens all around us, because God is present. Incredible good happens when human beings act in solidarity with each other and that of God at work inside them. There have been many prophets and enlightened people throughout human history, but they are simply men and women who have best connected with the divinity that is in us all. My response: Today the fourth possibility seems to be the most accurate way of understanding God, and yet, it seems incomplete too.
It feels cold and incomplete. It lacks the power of the story of the Christian scriptures, in which we see God evolve alongside the children of Israel (and later the early Christian community) to be more loving, more just and more inclusive, as time goes by. And this fourth possibility seems to demote Jesus from being God incarnate (Emanuel) to being simply, at best, another enlightened person who has connected with “that of God” in us all. Maybe this is ok, but as someone who has spent much of his life connecting with the life and story of Jesus, this somehow feels inadequate.
So that is why most days I say I have a something of a Quaker theology (or more precisely a liberal/universalist Quaker theology) but something of a Mennonite faith practice. The Quakers teach me how to connect to God and how to see God at work in the world, but the Mennonites teach me how to live like Jesus taught and lived. Neither tradition has the whole truth (at least as I understand it), but I do feel like I can encounter a lot of the truth by engaging with both traditions.
Well that is enough for tonight. There is a lot more I want to talk about but it is bed time…
Matt,
I don’t have enough time to write a proper response to your post. I will express one brief thought, although I’ll not even be able even to give it complete justice here and now.
Your possibilities presuppose a lot. If I could bold and underline “a lot” I would. Your possibilities presuppose that you know what is good and evil. And I am using the terms good and evil here to mean what is ultimately good and ultimately evil. I mean what is eternally good and evil, eternally positive or negative, etc. Your possibilities are founded in human experience which is based entirely in this time and space and not necessarily with the whole view of existence in mind. Existence is eternal and indescribably complicated. I agree that from the human perspective many of your points are very valid and require great thought, but the only point I want to make here is that you are presupposing with your possibilities that you know that purposes of God in creating and sustaining the universe.
For example I will make up a story. God is what is. He is the great I am. He “wakes up” (and obviously I am using human concepts where indescribable concepts are required) in a infinity of nothingness and He is all that is. He is the great I am. And within him and form him is the complexity we know as the trinity. It is a society within himself that includes all that sustains and makes his existence perfect and without need.. But from God radiates his goodness and love and He as one and three begins to create. He creates from nothing (Ex Nihilo). At first (putting this into the idea of time, although it does not necessarily apply) his creates are simple and perfect. Maybe they are purely spiritual or conceptual in nature. Maybe they are mere concepts or mathematical equations. I don’t know. Then he creates dimensions, he just comes up with the idea of movement and matter and sound and light and density and space and distance and, etc etc. He creates a universe it is perfect. He puts animals there. Eventually he creates other universes, millions of them. They interact. He creates angels with will, but not free will or maybe free will but with everything slanted one way so that everything is still perfect. His creations know the whole story from beginning to end. There are no secrets about who God is and what existence is. Everything is perfect, and yet there is more good for God to create. Eventually he begins, maybe slowly at first to instill in his creatures more and more power and more and more free will. The idea is that the more free will and the more power his creatures have the more that they will be like Him, the better they will be. But God, just has he is ultimately and infinitely free – could have chosen to be a God just as you suppose He could be artibtrary, evil, etc. so obviously He moves slowly because He knows Himself. If he creates a powerful enough creature with enough free will it may turn against him. Eventually that happens, aka devil, that’s a whole other story.
But eventually, after millions of universes, some better some worse than others, after millions of years of happiness of a heaven whereby the coinhabitants have stretched out to an endless world that only grows with uncountable cultures and varieties, etc etc. Then he creates what is both his most risky business yet and yet the place where the judges of Angels may be born, the place is called earth. In this place more freedom will be given, more power will be given to his creatures than ever before. His purposes remain the same, to create saints to live in heaven forever with everyone else, but in order to do this his creatures must be as like Him as possible and the only way to do that is to risk the unparalleled possibilities of what has indeed happened here in the atrocities like the holocaust, etc. Why does God not step in, because stepping in would mean the purposes – the ones unseen will be sacrificed. The eternal ones. If this life is but a speck of sand on the seashore and we are all in some sort of indescribable way really part of the society of God, from God and yet separate and living forever, I just think that your possibilities honest do not take into account of all that.
For me the complexities of this world, the horrors, the confusions, are all here for God’s purposes of God. Not in the here in now but in the millions of years we shall live after. Does that mean we should not care about the here and now – of course not but that’s a whole other topic and I am already way over the time I had for this. Please don’t take offense, but its just a point I wanted to make. I disagree wholeheartedly with you, but its for what I believe to be yours and mine mutual wellbeing.
I like your perspective a great deal. The telescoping view of eternity itself is good to remember.
That said, the Bible depicts something different. (what you have described to me, is a bit of deistic created order. God has created the world, but he doesn’t interfere with it, because in doing so it would negate the free will of humankind) The book of Job is the best example of this. God at first blesses Job richly. Job knows the blessings are coming from God. Then Satan and God start to argue, and God decides to run an experiment. He lets Satan do lots of evil to Job (interesting that God is not the actor here, yet it is God that withdraws his hedge of protection). Job is tested and he prevails, by never cursing God (even though, he frankly he has rather good reasons to do so). Then God wins his argument, and gives Job back all that he has lost (or at least gives Job back replacement children and replacement riches).
Job has no free will here, really. He gets to chose whether he curses God or not, but he really is just a pawn in God’s hands.
I guess to me this idea of free will being the most important thing, flies in the face of the Biblical picture of a God who frequently does interfere with human destiny. God smites people often, normally people who have it coming, but still God is acting. And yet at other times, the wicked are allowed to prevail.
I’m afraid I have more questions than answers today. Gotta get back to work…
2 things in response. One I disagree entirely with you about the meaning and purpose of Job. I think my view of Job is best writen about here:
http://www.chesterton.org/wordpress/2011/07/introduction-to-the-book-of-job/
From what I can tell from the things I have read it was not written to be read as if it were a true story. It was written by many Hebrews over a long period of time. It should be read as th Proverbs are read or maybe the Psalms or Ecclesiastes. I do not think anyone wrote it to depict the nature of God and his actions in or out of the world.
Also, even if you do think it is literally true, would you prefer an existence where such a man as Job existed and did what he did or one without a Job? I am not positing, as I think you interpreted, that free will is the end all be all, my point is that it is one of many of the possibly unseen, not-understood purposes of God’s purposes. Other purposes could be pointed out such as the idea of love being fulfilled through suffering, etc. The concept of suffering is a very complex thing that can hardly be understood, least by someone observing it form the outside, and only somewhat more so by the one experiencing it.
But actually that gets at what I believe to be one of the true messages of Job. For me, the entire book of Job works up to the last chapter. The one where God shows up. Job is not particularly vindicated, the devil is not particularly destroyed, and the answer that God gives is not an answer at all but more questions, a riddle about where was Job when God created the world. I think if the answers were simple then God would have given Job and use the answers, but the answers are not simple. This existence, this human condition is a very mysterious and complicated thing and its very complexity requires mystery.
Another random thought that you might want to incorporate into your consideration. Would you agree that God can only give you what he has? By that I mean, if you really dwell on what God is, then your realize that He himself may not in human terms be able to describe who He is. Not to sound blasphemous here, but God and the trinity may be a myster even unto Himself. And us, man made in His image find ourselves in a similar condition – one of almost complete mystery. We are asked to be good as God is good, because it is good, not because we are made to be good. Free will is not what is sought, what is sought is goodness, but goodness may only exist in the space to which goodness can stretch. The farther the limits of evil may be stretched likewise stretch the bounds of goodness.
Anyhow, these are some more thoughts for you.
The other thing I’ll add is that you would probably be better off dropping the old testament altogether. The old and new are very different things, and the mixing of the two without caution is dangerous at the very least.
I’ll have to read Chesterton’s thoughts on Job. I would be curious as to what he makes of it.
I do agree though that Job likely is a mythological story. Still even if it isn’t literally true, the theology is central to Jewish thought and was certainly meant to be understood as truthful.
There is a great deal that I like about Job, especially the idea of mystery and the idea that in the end humans can’t know all of the answers. But I also still would argue that to me the story depicts God in a very anthropomorphic and petty kind of way. Human beings are at subject to the whim of God, and that is hard for me to wrap my head around in a positive way.
Although I don’t believe you are doing this in your explanation of the possibilities listed above, I have found that most people seem to get the questions of the existence of God terribly confused with the goodness or God. In other words, someone argues against the existence of God by addressing the philosophical problem of pain. They claim that if God were to exist then he would not allow the world to be so unjust, etc. But there is a logical disconnect there because the unjustness of this world really says nothing about the existence of a god, only about the attributes of a god to whom created this universe. In fact by the mere discussion of the fact that a good god could not have created this universe the person is in many respects only talking about the perceived attributes of the god to whom did create the universe. In other words the person is actually given credit to the idea that a god of some sort could have created the universe, because if one did , then naturally the universe would reflect certain attributes of that god.
Of course I don’t deny that the problem of pain is a very serious and complicated and difficult philosophical problem to get around when considering an imperfect universe created by a perfect and good God, but my point is it really doesn’t make sense for an atheist to use that as a premises whatsoever to prove his point. It would make sense for someone to use this as a point to prove that the God is actually a flawed or bad god.
Now to switch gears. In Orthodoxy Chesterton discuses the poet verses the logician. He says something along the lines of that a poet merely tries to get his mind into the heavens, whereas a logician ties to put the heaven in his mind and thereby his skull cracks from the enormity of it. That’s not a direct quote. He goes onto at some point to discuss the fact that a materialists universes is such a cold chamber and to believe as the materialists do that there is no spiritual life, no god, no anything else but matter, but then to take the human with all of his complexities and his soul and most of all his consciousness, that is within this dead cold chamber of the material-only universe is much like finding something within the universe that is much better than the universe as a whole.
Well, if you go along with the notion that the problem of pain proves that God is not an absolutely good God, he is evil, or maniacal, he is what you claim Job shows him to be – but you as a human sees this difficulty, sees this problem, and recognizes the evil of god, the arbitrary and cold nature of a god who uses us merely as a play thing – and yet you were created by that same god, well to me that is much the same as the dead universe that finds a real live human being inside. It is an impossibility to think that an evil god created a good person who is better and higher and more morally right than the evil god.
To follow the continued advise of my wife when I am talking about these sorts of things, I think we should both read a healthy dose of proverbs and stop thinking that we can fit the heavens in our heads, because doing so, at the very least may lead us down the path of Job.