Sermon for 4 December 2005, 1^st Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois

 

THE  EVOLVING  IDEA  OF  GOD

Ronald J. Glossop

 

I.  Introduction

    A.  Let me begin by noting that my use of the singular word "God" does not mean that I want to exclude the idea of many "gods" from the discussion.

    B.  In fact, that is exactly where I want to begin our discussion of this issue.  It seems that the earliest notion of "gods" assumed that there are other beings something like ourselves who cause things to occur just as we are able to do.  If a rock comes unexpectedly tumbling down a mountain and hits me, isn't that very much like someone throwing a rock at me in order to injure me?  And on other occasions something very unexpected can help me, like a wave in the river throwing me up on shore as I was struggling to keep from drowning.  Didn't "someone" give me some help?  Since primitive people had virtually no understanding of why things happen, it was easy to suppose that there must be other conscious beings somewhat like ourselves causing these events to happen.

    C.  At first, it would be unusual events that were particularly hurtful or helpful that would be viewed as the results of the activities of "the gods," but eventually everyday happenings which were not understood would also be viewed that way.  Why does the sun come up each morning and go down each evening?  Why does the regular changing of the seasons take place?  Why do seeds grow?  Why do some women become pregnant while others do not? When lightning lights up the sky and loud thunder shakes the earth, doesn't that show that "someone" up there is angry?  Any child can see that!  When it doesn't rain for long periods so that the crops don't grow, doesn't that show that "someone" is unhappy with us?  And when the weather is good and the harvest is abundant, doesn't that show that "someone" is bestowing blessings on us?  What is more natural than to feel grateful to that "someone"? 

    D.  What we treat today as impersonal "forces of nature" and purely fortuitous events were viewed by these primitive people as intentional acts of the "gods."  Since our ancestors would not be able to see the bodies of the gods doing these things, it was not difficult to think that the gods were nonmaterial "spirits" or that they were too far away to be seen.

    E.  It doesn't take much imagination on our part to understand how these primitive people would think.  Many people today still think the same way.  If there is much destruction from a hurricane or an earthquake, that must be some kind of punishment from some god or gods.  If some individual is in such a disaster but manges to escapes injury, then that person must have been saved by some god or gods.  Or if our military forces are experiencing victories and conquering territory from the enemy, it must be because god or the gods are on our side.

 

II.  What do these observations tell us about how people, both primitive people and people alive today all over the world, think about the gods or god?

    A.  One could note first how uncredibly egoistical the whole scenario is. The gods who control nature are like us.  They think like us, and their intentions can produce changes in the world just as ours can.  And the gods are very concerned about us, doing things to hurt us or help us both individually and collectively.  In fact, they are like our parents and our rulers trying to get us to behave as they want us to behave.  They can perform miracles to reward us when we obey, and they can cause catastrophes to punish us when we disobey.

     B. But this observation about human egotism is a side point.  With regard to my main thesis about the evolving idea of god, the point is to note is that these gods have power.  They can work through nature on a rather regular or natural basis (in which case they are what we would call personifications of natural forces).  Or they can work on a very irregular or supernatural basis (as when they bring about "miracles" and "inexplicable catastrophes").  But in either case the gods are viewed as beings that can make things happen.  The gods have power.  And any supposed beings or gods that can't make things happen, that don't have power, can't really be gods.

     C.  So why worship or sacrifice to such gods?  Because they have power to help you or hurt you.  They can give you what you want if you please them, and they can punish you if you displease them.  The relationship is the same as to parents and to the earthly rulers.  The chief virtue for the individual is unquestioning obedience, and the motivation for worship or sacrifice is escape punishment and to have more for yourself and those you like.

     D.  Also note what is not important.  It doesn't matter whether these gods themselves are morally good or morally bad.  Think of the gods and goddesses of the Greeks and Romans.  There is no appeal to worship them because of their moral goodness.  What is relevant is their power to help the individual get whatever that person wants.  For example, in this system of religion, if I want some person of the opposite sex to fall in love with me, then I must do all that I can to get Aphrodite or Venus or whatever the goddess of love is called to help me.  I need to give sacrifices to that goddess and pray to her and do whatever the priestesses at her temple ask of me.  If that sounds very much like the religious views of some contemporaries with regard to the gods, don't be surprised.  Of course, now you might need to include not only what you get or don't get in this life but also the even better or even worse things you might get in the after-life if you please or don't please some gods and their priests and religious institutions.  And don't limit your thoughts to Christianity.  This is the nature of much popular religion in all times and places.  The gods get worshipped because they have power to help you get what you want.  It really isn't much different from children wanting to please Santa Claus to get the Christmas presents they want.         

 

III.  One characteristic ascribed to the gods already mentioned, and one which was especially emphasized in ancient India, is that the gods are mental or spiritual beings (as in one respect we humans also are).

    A.  The emphasis on the mental or spiritual aspect of the gods has often been accompanied by a denigrating of the value of the whole physical world, including our own bodies.

    B.  The resulting "idealistic" or "mentalistic" outlook claims that the physical world is only a product of the mind, that is, that the physical world is a dream-like or illusory thing which depends for its existence on mind or spirit and consequently that mental reality (ideas and thoughts) is a  more basic kind of reality than the physical reality known through our senses.

    C.  This emphasis on the mental has been applied not only to the relation between the gods and nature but also to the relation between mind or spirit and the physical body within the individual human.  Instead of the modern scientific view that our bodies have physical brains which produce the mental world, the Hindu philosophers advanced the view that each person is really an immaterial somewhat god-like enduring mind or SOUL that gets "incorporated" into a series of physical bodies.  This idea of the reality of an enduring mind or soul has also been advanced by others who have rejected the reincarnation doctrine of the Hindus. 

    D.  Since the mental or spiritual is more real and enduring than the physical both with regard to the relation between gods and nature and with regard to the relation between the individual soul and its body, it was concluded not only by the Hindus but also by many others that the mental or spiritual aspect of reality is good while the physical aspect of reality is bad.  Consequently, the goal of individual humans should be to escape from the down-grading influence of their physical bodies in order to become purely spiritual. The Hindus developed the view that when individual souls no longer desire to have a body, then they will be able to escape from the cycle of continual rebirths and will no longer be differentiated from god or the ultimate mind or spirit.  They will have reached nirvana.

 

IV.  Another feature that came to be associated with divinity is concern for moral goodness.  Why worship gods if they are not concerned about promoting what is good?  The shift from an interest in the power of the gods to provide assistance to us individually or collectively to a concern about moral goodness was at least tangentially related to the shift from polytheism to monotheism.

    A. As nearly as we can discover, the idea of monotheism was first put forth in ancient Egypt by Akhenaten in the 14th century BCE.  He apparently believed that the sun is God.  If you are going to worship some object in the natural world, the sun is not a bad choice.  Think of how dependent on the sun all aspects of life on Earth are.  It seems possible that this focus on the sun as god represented not only a turn from polytheism to monotheism but also a shift from supernaturalism to a kind of naturalism.  But the revolutionary reforms of Akhenaton lasted only 30 years before a new dynasty in Egypt reestablished the old polytheistic religion.

    B.  We tend to associate monotheism with Judaism, and there is little doubt that the Jews did eventually make a great point of their belief that there is only one God, Yahweh.  But also there is little doubt that the Jews were not originally monotheists.  They, like others at that time, believed that there were many gods.  Yahweh was just the god who protected them.

    C.  There was a general assumption that when groups won wars against other groups, it was because the god of the winning side was more powerful than the gods of the defeated groups.  What counted was whose god was more powerful.

    D.  Rather typically, Jews expected that Yahweh would help them in their struggles against other peoples.  But they also had some rather unusual ideas, namely that Yahweh expected their exclusive devotion (no worshipping of or sacrificing to other gods) and also moral behavior within the group (no killing, no adultery, no stealing, no bearing of false witness, no coveting of what others had).  Here we see a connection starting to develop between being religious on the one hand and acting morally on the other, a connection which would have seemed somewhat ridiculous to most worshippers of gods in polytheistic systems.

    E.  Then came a most revolutionary development in the history of religion.  In 722 BCE the enemy Assyrians conquered the southern part of the territory controlled by the Jews, and in 586 BCE the enemy Babylonians conquered the northern part.  The victors carried off many of the Jews into captivity in Babylon.  But instead of concluding that the gods of the Assyrians and Babylonians were more powerful than their own god Yahweh as one might have expected, the Jewish prophets told them that Yahweh has deliberately allowed them to be defeated because they had not carried out their side of their convenant with Yahweh.  They had begun to sacrifice to other gods and had failed to live morally within their community.  They departed from the idea that the power of the gods in their struggles with one another was the only thing that mattered.  They adopted the new view that the important thing was "righteousness," that is, doing the right thing.  In fact, some of their prophets even said that being morally good was more pleasing to Yahweh than offering sacrifices at the temple.

 

V.  The next step in the evolution of the idea of god was that god was concerned with moral behavior not only within the Jewish or national community but also with moral conduct toward all other humans.

    A.  This shift to a universal moral concern on the part of God is usually associated with the development of Christianity where the religious community came to include all believers, not just Jews, regardless of their ethnicity or the national community from which they came or how rich or poor they were.  In fact, moral conduct was required even with respect to non-believers, to those outside the community.

    B.  This shift to a universal moral concern can also be seen in Greek philosophy where Socrates declares that he is a citizen not just of Athens or Greece but of the whole world as well as in Stoic philosophy where it was maintained that there is a trace of divinity within every human being, a doctrine which led the Stoics to be the first to condemn slavery.

    C.  It seems that the universalistic moral concern in Christianity may have been influenced by Paul's familiarity with Stoic philosophy since the book of Acts (17:28) reports that Paul quoted a Stoic poet ("in God we live and move and have our being") in his preaching.

    D.  But the idea of God's power was continued, for the theistic Christians in the possibility of miracles to help believers and for the pantheistic Stoics in the order found in nature.

 

VI.  The idea that God is both powerful and concerned about goodness ran into the difficult Problem of Evil when both of these characteristics were pushed to the extreme.  If God is all-powerful and is really concerned about goodness, why is there any evil in the world?  If there really is an omnipotent God, why isn't the world perfect?

    A.  Various efforts have been made to address this Problem of Evil such as (1) claiming that God deliberately limits His own power so that humans can have free will (but this seems to leave some evils like earthquakes still unexplained) or (2) pointing out how the various imperfections are needed for the good of the whole (but Voltaire seems to have sufficiently ridiculed Leibniz's view that this is the best of all possible worlds) or (3) maintaining that one must take account of the realm of the afterlife as well as what one can see in this world (but this seems to be just a vain effort to save one speculative and unverifiable supposition by resting it on top of another one just as speculative and unverifiable).

    B.  Others addressing this issue have concluded that either (1) God's power is limited (in which case God seems to need our help) or that (2) God's goodness is limited (in which case it is questionable whether God is worthy of being worshipped) or that (3) there isn't any God.

 

VII.  An important step in the evolution of the idea of God took place when the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) addressed the issue of whether one can construct a rational argument to support belief in an omnipotent all-good God.

    A.  The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) had already marshalled a rather persuasive collection of arguments against the rationality of believing in the Christian God.

    B.  Unlike Hume, Kant was not interested in undermining traditional religious belief.  Nevertheless he cogently showed that the traditional arguments advanced to prove that God exists all fail.  This includes the ontological argument to the effect that the very meaning of the word "God" requires His existence, the cosmological argument based on the notion that there must be a supernatural cause to explain the existence of the world, and the teleological argument that the apparent design in the world requires an intelligent designer.

    C.  Kant claimed that there was no way of proving the existence of an omnipotent, good God, but that humans had to face the fact that they had to choose between believing in God and taking morality seriously on the one hand or not believing in God and having no good reason to be moral on the other.  He claimed that it would not be rational to take morality seriously in a universe which was totally amoral and indifferent to human values.  If there is no God and the universe itself is totally indifferent to morality and other human values, if there is no guarantee that good will win out in the end (which is what belief in an ominipotent God boils down to), it would make no sense for people to deny themselves something in order to follow moral principles in those situations when these principles could be ignored at no cost.  In a world without God it might make sense to appear to be a moral person and get the rewards that come with that, but it would make no sense whatever to do what is right when it really hurts to do so (which is what Kant means by moral behavior).

    D.  Because of the arguments of Hume and Kant, atheistic existentialist Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) could announce to the intellectual world that "God is dead" and that it was time for humans to see themselves as they are, just one more kind of being on the earth struggling to survive in a universe totally indifferent to their fate now or in the long run.

 

VIII.  It had become evident that the notion of "God" involved a combination of both power and goodness and that there was no reason to believe that the universe was governed by such an unlimited power that good would prevail in the end.

    A.  Given this situation, some religious humanists argued that humans have to do what is morally right just because it is morally right and not because there is some other force in the universe which guarantees that good will prevail in the end or that righteous individuals will in some way be rewarded for their righteousness.

     B.  If one uses the term "God" to refer to that which unites power and goodness and we look at the world to see where there actually is power working for goodness, it seems that one such place is in the human beings who work to promote peace and justice and respect for human rights and long-term improvement of human society and of the world in general.

     C.  Furthermore, if one looks at reality objectively, there doesn't seem to be any force working for good anywhere else.  The traditional idea of "God" must be replaced by a new view of God as the "spirit" or "force" working for good in some humans on some occasions.

 

VIII.  A more recent naturalistic understanding of God has been put forward by Unitarian philosopher and theologian Henry Nelson Wieman (1884-1975).

    A.  Wieman starts with the supposition that "God" must refer to "The Source of Human Good" (the title of one of his books) as well as something that can be the object of "Man's Ultimate Commitment" (the title of another of his books).

    B.  Wieman argues that instead of just speculating about this matter we must empirically investigate to determine what does in fact serve as the source of human good.  His conclusion is that the source of human good is not something found within particular humans as the humanists claim but rather a process that takes place in the world as a whole but especially in human society.  In opposition to the humanist view, Weiman notes that individuals devoted to doing good things can make disastrous mistakes when they are not interacting with others.

    C.  This source of human good which can serve as man's ultimate commitment is "the process of creative interchange."  That process is present when people with different points of view exchange ideas with open minds and seek creative solutions to mutual problems.  It is the kind of process which is at work in a truly democratic community.  He thinks that it is also at work in nature in the evolutionary process of chance variation and natural selection.

    D.  Wieman has no compunction about using the word "God" to describe this process because that word "God" is the word that has traditionally been used to refer to the source of human good and to the object of people's ultimate commitment.  He readily admits that people have had traditonal ideas about god being a personal supernatural being, but he thinks that it is time for people to move on to a more empirically appropiate view of god (1) which takes account of what really works for good in the world, (2) which appropriately identifies what we can commit ourselves to in worship, and (3) which supports our social practices.    

 

IX.  As my title indicates, our views of God are still evolving and will continue to evolve.  The last word has not been said.  I hope that this presentation will help the evolution to continue.