Sermon for 20 June 2010, 1st Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois

 

THINKING ABOUT WHAT GOD IS NOT, AND SOME IMPLICATIONS

Ronald J. Glossop

 

I.   Introduction

       A.  In this church and in this denomination, there are many different views about what God is like and what God is not like and whether one should even use that word in our services.

       B.  An important tradition in our Unitarian-Universalist churches is the ideal of freedom of the pulpit.  All speakers are free to give their own personal views but with the understanding that no one is obliged to accept the validity or worth of what the speaker says.

       C.  Today I am going to express some very personal ideas, ideas with which you may or may not agree.  My views are the result of a lifetime of thinking about these issues.  In fact, I even attended a Lutheran Seminary for a year before becoming sure that I didn’t want to be a Lutheran minister, or even a Lutheran or a Christian.  As a professor of philosophy I have taught many university philosophy courses, including courses in philosophy of religion.    

       D.  At the same time, I am conscious of the fact that many of you have done a lot of thinking about these issues for many years and may have very different views from mine.

 

II.  I want to begin by focusing on what God is not.

      A.  I once heard a story about two Catholic priests that provides a good starting place.  These two priests, Dan and Tim, had been good friends for a very long time and often shared their thoughts on theological issues. One day Dan says to Tim, “Last night I had the most amazing experience.  I had a vision of God.”  Tim becomes very excited.  “No kidding?” he asks in disbelief.  “No kidding,” Dan responds.  “So you really saw God!  Then you must tell me, What is God like?”  But Dan tries to avoid giving an answer.  Tim says, “Come on.  You’ve got to tell me. What is God like?” Dan again tries to avoid answering the question, but Tim becomes more and more insistent.  “How can you not share such important knowledge?  You have no right to keep me ignorant about it.  Come on.  What is God like?”  Finally Dan reluctantly responds, “O.K. if you really must know, she’s black.”    

      B.  Think about that exchange.  Dan’s statement, “She’s black” is profound not just because of what it claims that God is, but even more because of what it claims God is not.  God is not male, and God is not white.  A widely accepted uncritical view of the nature of God has been undermined, and that means that new thinking can take place.  That is a good lesson for us.

      C.  Another widely accepted view of the nature of God, especially in the Western religions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, is that God is all-powerful (that is, omnipotent), all-knowing (that is, omniscient), and totally benevolent.  “God is great, God is good, and God knows everything (including the future).”  But that view of God means that the believer is immediately confronted by “the problem of evil.”  If God controls everything and is perfectly good, why is there any evil in the world?  If God is the all-powerful creator of everything, God should be able to create a perfect world with no evil in it.  And wouldn’t a perfectly good God want to create a perfect world?   Philosophers such as Leibniz have tried to deal with this problem by saying that this world is in fact perfect, “the best of all possible worlds” as he expressed it.  The evils we observe all exist for the sake of some greater good.  But Voltaire in his classic work Candide showed how ridiculous such a view could be as the philosopher Pangloss keeps affirming that this is the best of all possible worlds in the face of one catastrophe after another.  Not long after that the Scottish philosopher David Hume outlined how the world could be significantly improved with just a few modifications, things which an all-powerful God should be able to do without difficulty.

      D.  Because of the obvious difficulty of the problem of evil, many people have become atheists, that is, they have jumped to the conclusion that there cannot be a God.  But they are not being careful enough about their conclusion.  Rather than concluding that there is no God at all, they should conclude that the problem of evil shows that there can’t be an omnipotent, completely benevolent God, but there could still be a God of limited power.  In fact, that is the conclusion philosophers such as Plato and the American William James have reached.

      E.  William James added another dimension to this matter.  He noted that if God were both omnipotent and all good, that would show that we could be confident that good would win out in the end despite how bad things might appear at this moment.  That is exactly the hope that traditional faith provides. But think further about that kind of faith. If God’s almightiness proves that good must win out in the end no matter what I or anyone else does, then why should I worry about doing what is right or good? Good will win out in the end regardless of what I or others do.  William James argued that any religious view with this consequence is unsatisfactory.  Religion should stimulate people to do good, not just sit idly and watch the world go by .  People should be motivated to work with God to make the world better.

      F.  But that in turn raises another question.  Do people need to be assured that in the end good will prevail?  The German philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that that was the case.  To paraphrase him, “If the universe itself is totally amoral, if, as Shakespeare’s MacBeth put it, it is a “tale told by an idiot signifying nothing,” why should anyone strain and sacrifice to do what is right, especially if doing what is right requires some pain or personal unhappiness?  Why should people strive to be moral if the universe itself is amoral? Why sacrifice for anything if nothing really matters?

      G.  Kant himself points the way to a good answer to that question.  He denigrates Christians and others who behave morally only to get into Heaven or obtain something for themselves.  He argues, rightly I think, that if people do what is right or good only to get something, some reward, for themselves, that is not moral behavior at all but merely enlightened self-interest.  Moral behavior is when someone does something right or good regardless of the cost just because it is right or good.  But if that is the case, why can’t people do what is right or good just because it is right or good, regardless of whether the universe itself is moral or amoral?  And when we start to think that way, we are transitioning to the moral outlook of some of the ancient Greeks who took Prometheus as their hero, that mythological figure who defied Zeus to give fire, the symbol of Reason, to humans, but who as a consequence suffered forever.  Prometheus did what was good for humanity despite the cost to himself.  (We might note that in the Jewish-Christian tradition, Adam similarly defied God by questioning, by trying to think for himself about what is good rather than just doing whatever the supreme authority commanded. But Jews and Christians view the skeptical Adam as the great sinner while the Greeks viewed Prometheus as the great hero.  Is it at all surprising that critical philosophy and the beginnings of science flourished in ancient Greece but not among the Jews and the early Christians?)

      H.  So, does humanity need the concept of an omnipotent God guaranteeing that everything will be O.K. in the end? That injustices will be corrected?  That vice will be punished?  That the virtuous will be forever happy?  I don’t think so.  I think that it is more important to be committed to doing what is right and what promotes good and justice regardless of whether the right and good and justice will win out in the end or not.

      I.  Another view about the nature of God which I want to challenge requires us to go back to priest Dan’s statement, “She’s black.”  That statement succeeds in undermining the notion that God is male and God is white, but it does not succeed in undermining the view that God is in some way like humans, a view called “anthropomorphism.”  This notion is basically the other side of the Biblical idea that man is made in the image of God.  It reverses that and says that God is made in the image of man.  It has been noted that the characterstics attributed to God such as omnipotence and omniscience can readily be seen as characteristics that humans themselves would like to have.  The idea of God seems to be merely the projection of the ideal of a perfect human being.  The polytheism of the ancient Greeks and Romans as well as of other cultures viewed the gods and goddesses as deified humans with many of the shortcomings of humans but with much more power.  In various religions we see references to the heavenly Father in the sky above us and Mother Earth beneath our feet.  Many religious thinkers, including several Jews and Christians, have sought to remove at least some of the anthropomorphism found in polytheism, especially with regard to physical characteristics.  In many advanced religions God is conceived of as a mind without a physical body.  God is neither male nor female.  God does not look like a particular gender or race and does not have a body locatable somewhere in the space-time universe, even in Heaven (a word which in most languages just means “sky”).  God is conceived as omnipresent, that is, as not at any particular place but everywhere at once.  At the same time, God is conceived as being aware, as having ideas and a will, that is, as wanting some things to happen and not wanting other things to happen.  In this view God seems to be able to influence which events occur, but does so in a supernatural nonphysical way.  But could there be such a thing as a mind without a brain?  How could such a thing even be possible?  We all are aware that the evidence is becoming overwhelming that changes in the physical brain cause changes in the mind.  Consider Alzheimer’s disease.  It is also evident that when soldiers or others suffer brain damage, such damage causes mental disabilities.  We all assume that when there is empirical evidence that there is no longer any nuerological activity in the brain, then there is no longer a functioning mind. The mind seems to be totally dependent on the brain, so how could there be a mind without a brain, whether we are thinking in terms of the personal survival of a person after physical death or the existence of God? I’m not denying that some people continue to believe that there can be a mind or soul without a brain.  I’m just saying that I don’t see how anyone can have such a belief given what we now know about the way that the mind depends so completely on the brain.  This reality of the dependence of the mind on the brain seems to me to undermine any belief in personal life-after-death as well as the notion that somehow there exists a God which is a mind with no physical brain on which its existence depends. That seems completely impossible.

 

III.  So what can we say that God is?

      A.  The manner in which the existence of evil in the world is in such obvious opposition to the concept of God suggests that we need to review the situation.  We concluded that the existence of evil in the world contradicts the view that God is omnipotent but does not prove that there is no God at all.  But if there is a God, God must have some power.  A God that has no power at all, that cannot do anything, is a nonentity, and might as well not exist.  At the same time, if there is a God, God must have some goodness.  A power with no goodness seems not to warrant the name “God,” even though a few people seem ready to worship pure power. For me, a powerful force that is not in some way advancing that which is good, no matter how powerful, doesn’t deserve to be honored or worshipped. It seems to me that the notion of God necessarily includes both power and goodness.

      B.  Our previous discussion of what God is not has demonstrated that we should avoid any kind of anthropomorphism.  Humans are just one recent form of life on one planet in a vast universe.  It is a fundamental mistake to believe that humans are made in the image of God or that God is in some way like humans.  

     C.  So I conclude that a good way of conceiving of God is as “some kind of force or power working for goodness.”

     D.  If asked, “Where is God?” we need to look at our universe to see if we can find some kind of force or power working for goodness.  I think that we can, in humans working for justice, helping others who need help, and seeking to overcome evils such as disease and war.  It is as we read in the Biblical statements “God is love” and “Blessed are the merciful” and “Love your enemies” and “Blessed are the peacemakers.”  That view that God exists in people who are earnestly seeking to improve the well-being of all humanity is also known as Humanism.

      E.   An interesting question can be raised at this point.  “Is there any force in the universe working for good other than that which we can observe in humans?”  On that question I am an agnostic.  Maybe there is a force in the universe not within humans that is working for good.  I don’t know.  Maybe the evolution of life forms on Earth is not the result just of chance variation and natural selection. Or maybe the intricate mechanism of chance variation and natural selection is itself the result of some force in Nature working for good.  Could there be some such force in the universe?  Maybe or maybe not. We just don’t know, especially because we don’t know what will happen in the future.

      F.  Some people see God (a force working for good) in the beauty we observe in Nature.  When asked, “Where is there evidence of God?”, pointing to the beauty in Nature seems to be a plausible answer.  But for me personally the beauty in Nature does not possess the moral quality I have in mind when I say that God is a force working for good. The beauty we see in Nature is good, but it is not morally good. For me, God is necessarily linked to moral goodness.   That seems to me a critical aspect not only of our Judeo-Christian heritage but also of most other religions.  Almost all of them emphasize moral living as something related to God regardless of their other differences about the nature of God or the gods.

      G.  If we look at our natural world, there is something quite familiar to all of us that seems to be a good candidate for a force working for good but not in humans, something which in fact has been worshipped as God from time to time.  That something is the sun.  We and most if not all living things depend on it for our existence.  We celebrate just after the winter solstice at Christmas time because we realize that we are not doomed to live in a cold world in which the days will be ever shorter and shorter and where the sun may no longer sustain us.  If we are going to identify some object in the physical world as God, it seems that the sun is a good choice.  The sun is good, just like the beauty we observe in Nature, but the sun likewise lacks the moral goodness which I believe is crucial to our idea of God.  

      H.  I don’t feel that I need to have an answer to that difficult question I have mentioned about whether there is some force working for moral good outside of humans.  It is enough for me  to know that when I am doing what I can to make the world a better place, I am working with God or, if you like, God is working through me.  That is enough religion for me, and it does not depend in any way on faith that good must prevail in the end or on the existence of a supernatural mind that knows what is happening or on the belief that those who seek to improve the welfare of humanity will receive some kind of reward.  What matters is doing what I can to promote the welfare of humanity.  When I do that, I know that I am cooperating with the force working for moral good and that the force working for moral good is using me.  I am with God, and God is with me.