What's your God (if any) like?

This was originally writtein March of 2007.

What can we know as to whether God exists, and what properties God might have?

1. Not just feelings

Part of religious experience is feelings, dreams, and other aspects of our mental life. They can be profoundly important to us. But there is no need for any of these things to even makes ense, let alone be something that different people agree upon. What I want to discuss below is the part of religion that people believe has a reality that goes beyond their own feelings, a reality that exists outside of our dreams and applies to all people. It does not require that we expect people to agree with us.

If the distinction is unclear, consider the case of whether Jesus during his time on earth ever visited India. Suppose I say he did, and you say he didn't. We might each respect the other's position, and know that the other might be right, but no one would say we might both actually be right -- that is, that he both did and did not.

On the other hand, consider the question of whether strawberries taste better than blueberries. We might disagree, but we can certainly both be right. How good a fruit tastes is a reality that is particular to an individual. So for the time being I want to set aside matters which can be different for everyone and focus on areas where a single reality applies to all of us, however uncertain we may be about it.

2. Getting off the ground

One view of the world is that there is nothing but the physical. Human beings are a product of evolutionary biology. Any ideas we have about right or wrong, the beautiful, the awe-inspiring, or anything else beyond the mundane are just by-products of how we have evolved. Such ideas might be adaptive from an evolutionary perspective, but they can have no inherent truth to them. They are at best convenient fictions. The scientific method can in principlebe brought to bear on and explain everything there is. This view is consistent and logical. I think many non-religious people in the West would agree with it.

I believe the strongest evidence for something beyond the merely physical is consciousness. This term can mean various things, but the meaning I am interested inhere is that life has a "seemingness" to it. You actually see the computer monitor, and hear sounds, and feel the pressure of the chair on your body. Science can study and might eventually predict exactly when and why you might have various experiences, but it seems permanently silent on why reality has this extra dimension of consciousness. It can explain how humans can be astonishingly complex information processing systems, and how the various aspects of the world that "seem"to us have precise correlates in our brains -- but not why there should be any "seemingness" at all. I believe this is vital to our sense of morality. Can suffering or pain exist without consciousness? If science makes a robot that is to all appearances a perfect replica of a dog, we have no sense of outrage if someone kicks this dog-robot, however much it whimpers.

Consciousness as "seemingness" should give pause to those who believe there is nothing but the physical world, but we can hope for more. Consider the simple belief that killing is wrong, all else being equal. We all believe that. Now, if you mean it as a shorthand for the idea that it is in your nature as a person to believe that killing is wrong, then that is consistent with a belief in nothing beyond the physical world. But if you believe that killing actually IS wrong, I think you must believe in something more, something that the scientific method cannot address. For as powerful as science is, it has never had anything to say about right or wrong. Science is amoral. It only speaks about what is, not what should be.

3. Just barely above the ground

So what is there to say about the realm of belief that is just above "science only"? First, from a historical perspective any system of beliefs that makes unequivocal claims about how things work in the physical world has gotten badly beaten up by progress guided by the scientific method. Early theologies said the earth was the center of the universe. Oops! God created all the species of living things in the beginning, and none has arisen since. Oops! Human beings are totally different from the animals. Oops! My sense is that when religions in the past have said the world is configured a certain way, they have meant that it is true in an absolute sense and that the truth of it is in some sense guaranteed by God. When we later discover that some such claim about the world is false, we conclude that the religion has some rethinking to do. If it happens repeatedly, all other claims the religion makes become suspect, including knowing anything about the nature of God. In considering a religion today, you could believe that its leaders have finally solved the problem and that although there were errors in the past, they have been corrected and now what the leaders say is immutable truth. If you take that step, consider how you might feel if and when science reveals that that too is no longer true.

Next, a great deal of what people believe comes from authority or tradition. They believe it because lots of people have believed it for a long time. This is surely a wise way to proceed in life, since we can't test everything for ourselves. However, we all know that in questions of religion there is great disagreement across the world, so if we "think globally"then we cannot be comfortable with an appeal to authority. Widely-held beliefs do sometimes change, and one step in that process is individuals looking at the evidence and changing their minds.

4. Your turn

At this point I have run out of arguments that are persuasive (even to me) about the nature of anything beyond the physical world, so I will switch to the quintessentially UU mode of asking questions as a guide to advancing your personal beliefs.

What I think of as the classic agnostic dilemma -- does the Christian God exist, or is there nothing at all? -- is far too constrained. Even if you considered the possibilities advanced by all major religions, your thinking would be unwisely limited. I suspect that if my questionnaire falls short, it will be because I didn't pose enough questions, not that I posed too many.

The questionnaire:

We all recognize there is a world of mental life, encompassing thoughts, feelings, dreams, hunches, and so forth. Science presumes that all of this mental life is the result of brain activity, and that any relationship between activity in one brain and anything else in the universe is mediated by measurable physical processes. Do you believe our minds connect to each other or something else in a different way?

Some people are generally regarded as having hallucinations or delusions. Others may believe in the existence of different spirits in individual natural objects, in demons, witchcraft, astrology, phrenology, seances with the dead, or in multiple gods. None of these are popular beliefs today in our culture. Others believe in a single God of varying description. I think it is fair to say that there is no scientific evidence in favor of any of them -- though often no evidence against them if they concern the nonmaterial world. Are all of these beliefs equally valid? If not, what criteria would you use to determine which are valid and which are not?

Does whatever exists beyond the material have coherence? Is it "thing-y" at all? Many things?One thing? To the extent it lacks coherence, what more can you say about it? If there are many things, how do they relate?

Many would be tempted to label a single coherent non-material entity to be God. But it would be wise to put that word on the shelf for the time being and retrieve it later. Words can get in the way of truth. You have heard "God" used in many ways by different people, and it quite possibly has powerful associations from your childhood. I think the best way to clarity is to first understand what you believe, and then worry later about what to call it. Instead of something bureaucratic-sounding like "SCNME" (for"Single Coherent Non-Material Entity"), or clever like "WIMB" (for "Whatever It Might Be") I will call it simply "X".

Are the properties of X knowable by us humans?

Did X have a beginning? If so, what created it?

Is X alive? Does it grow?

Does X have power? Unlimited power? Is the power something used in the past? Present? To be used in the future?

Could X have arranged reality so that two plus two did not equal four? Did X create the universe?

Does X have knowledge? Unlimited knowledge?

Does X know about earth? (If this question seems strange, note that there are 70,000 million million million stars in the known universe).

Does X have preferences? If so, to what extent are its preferences commensurate with ours?Does it have feelings?

Does X have a moral component, or is it amoral?Immoral?

Does X exhibit such qualities as love or compassion? Does X care about human beingsas a group? As individuals?

If X has great power, it surely makes sense to fear it, and to do what will keep it from harming you. But to worship it would require a sense that it is good. How can you tell if it is good? Is your sense of what is good something that comes from within you, or X? If it comes from within you, note in passing that X is not needed for morality to exist. If X put it there, then can you trust that your sense of "goodness" that X gave you really is good? Roughly speaking, how can you tell a God from a Devil?

If X has great power and knowledge it could make it plain to all of us with great precision anything it wanted, perhaps by engraving text in stone, or spelling words with clouds, or having each of us hear a voice with an identical message. Why does it not do this? If there is an X that wants us to honor and obey it even though it has not givenus any clear or consistent evidence of its existence or properties? If so, can we understand why?

Traditional religions like Christianity teach the existence of something like X, and they call it God. It has these properties (I think; I was raised as a lapsed Unitarian): You should love God, and God loves you. God is all-knowing, and all-powerful, and all-good. You may not understand God's purposes, but you should have faith that they are for the best. God listens to your prayers. God can answer prayers, and is more likely to do so the more that you do as God would like you to do. God will forgive your sins if you are truly repentant. But this situation will change. More will be revealed later.

With that as preamble, do you believe in such an X? These properties are also typical of how an adult might fondly remember what they believed as a child. Try rereading that paragraph with "parent" substituted for "God". Is the similarity accidental? Did X arrange it that way? If there were competing religious ideas in a culture, would this one be particularly appealing?

5. My personal answers

I will unabashedly say that I cannot find an X that I believe in. In considering the questions above, I can't get to the "coherent" part where X enters stage left.

I understand that one common part of believing in God is to have faith. It is a different way of knowing, I am told. A person believes because they choose to believe.

It is in part the bewildering variety of questions to ask about the nonmaterial world, as posed above, that makes that unappealing to me. How can I choose what to have faith in and what not, if there is no evidence to go on? I could just go with the flow and pick a local and venerable religious tradition. But knowing that were I in India I would adopt incompatible beliefs makes that idea profoundly unsatisfying.

But I do have a faith, and a hope. My faith is that a basic belief like "killing is wrong" is true and that killing really is wrong and not just some convention or fluke of my human nature. Like many who have a more ambitious faith, mine sometimes wavers. My hope is that there really is more purpose behind our existence here than reason alone would suggest.

6. When it matters

I don't believe that a person can know much of anything with confidence about the non-material aspects of existence. Is it important to spread the word? I can think of a very good reason to persuade fundamentalist Christians or Muslims to abandon virulent intolerance. To the extent that certainty of religious belief is behind the intolerance, the message of uncertainty is one I would like them to understand. How one might actually go about bringing more humility to a fundamentalist is an entirely different question. (Appearing with a flaming question mark and intoning "Doubt, doubt!"doesn't sound very promising.)

7. When it doesn't?

At the very beginning I wanted to set aside religious feelings that did not pertain to a reality that applies to all of us. Now I want to consider them again.

[Note to blog readers: The following discussion concerns the social dynamics of our particular FUSN congregation, and should be understood in that light.]

I think that many who come to FUSN have a feeling that there is something wonderful and amazing in the universe beyond what the popular culture would suggest, and that there is hope and meaning. They want to be in a place with other people who have those same basic feelings, and where Sunday services have such presuppositions. Like me, such people might feel a spiritual joy in hymns and sermons, in our glorious sanctuary, in meditation, in small group ministry or the new ideas offered in adult education.

None of that requires that we agree on an underlying religious reality. At the level of emotional experience, all is well.

On the other hand, many of us would not happily agree if told that their religious beliefs were all in their heads and in the same category as whether we are inspired by Mahler's music, or whether strawberries taste good.

But I have a hunch that most of us haven't considered in detail their beliefs about the nature of a shared religious reality and really don't want to. Since our culture views the main choice as between atheism or belief in God, they describe themselves as believing in God, or pick an intermediate value on a dial which goes from zero to God.

Should they feel they need to answer my questionnaire or something of that general nature?Should they be comparing their answers to the questionnaire with others? Some of us might be eager to do so, but others might not.

Why should those who are uninterested explore the roots of their religious feelings with a sharper instrument? I can't think of a very good reason.

Consider that science (psychology, in this case) has determined that believing in God is good for your health. Some people might find it upsetting to discover just how different other people's views are. Or they might find it upsetting to discover inconsistencies, contradictions or uncomfortable holes in their own views.

As part of a sermon last fall Cheryl Lloyd spoke of two friends who had had a deep quarrel but found a way to reconcile years later, not by getting to the bottom of what happened but by forgetting the parts that were difficult. They discovered that "what we sometimes need in order to find forgiveness is not more clarity but more'fuzziness.' " What works for forgiveness surely works even better for avoiding conflict in the first place.

But for me, at least, it helps to note that I am choosing to be fuzzy. We can still share a great deal on the level of religious feelings.