The following is an extract from a small book I am writing for myself tentatively called, Searching for What I Actually Believe. It follows chapters on existence, truth, beauty, goodness, faith, hope, and love. More chapters are to come, including some engagement with who God is.
I do not believe in God as idea. Theologies may point to God, as poetry points to quintessence, but they do not frame God. We may have an image in our heads of One to whom to pray; we may even hear in our heads responses to our prayers; but none of this is God, not in a primary sense, anyway. If God exists, God exists apart from and regardless of our ideas.
I do not believe in God as symbol or abstraction or generalization.
God is not image of any kind -- not a mental image, not a material image, not a representation of something else. God is radically not this.
I do not believe in an anthropomorphic God, that is, a God in human image. This is not to dismiss anthropomorphisms regarding God, nor is it to dismiss every way in which human beings might be in God's image, nor is it to dismiss the possibility of incarnation. But I do not think of God as, for instance, "the big man up there."
I do not believe in a God who is identified with either nature or being. Such a God would be subject to manipulation, therefore unworthy and not God.
I do not believe in the God of the gaps, the God who is the supposed explanation of things we do not (yet) understand.
I don't believe in God as unmoved mover, this for several reasons:
I don't believe in God as the necessary explanation of existence. With regard to the question of why there is something rather than nothing, what difference does it make whether one believes in the self-existence of the cosmos or the self-existence of a God who gives the cosmos existence? I have to contend with the existence of the cosmos. The existence of God is extraneous, a merely interesting postulation. This is not to exclude the possibility of creation, whether primeval or on-going. Nor is it to subject God to Occam's razor, for the self-generation of the cosmos is just as much a matter of faith.
I don't believe in God as necessary explanation of that life-force which disappears at death.
I don't believe in God as a physical force of the universe. God is not a legitimate component of physical theory. God is not to be discovered through physics, except, perhaps, insofar as the cosmos points to something else.
I do not believe in God as a personification of powers beyond human control.
I do not believe in the God of the tiered universe -- for instance: earth, firmament, heaven. Such a model I regard as a mere metaphor of a deeper mystery.
I don't believe in God as superior being to which the universe has given rise, that is as some creature more capable than human beings and thus able to awe some of us. There may be such beings, but they are not God; nor are they worthy of worship, all the less so if they demand worship or even accept it, in which case they become monstrous. This says something about the human soul -- that it exists at the very edge of being.
I do not believe in God as the sole source of the numinous experience -- the sensation of either awe or dread.
I do not believe in the God of taboos. We need not placate an angry God for offenses unknown or supposed or inscrutable to the ways of love. Perhaps the awareness of such a possibility can lead us deeper into the mystery of being. But our troubles in this life are due to choices and fundamental conflicts and randomness, not to an angry God.
I do not believe in a God of magic or superstition, whereby if we say the correct words and perform the correct rituals or if we have a special person do so for us, our purposes will be astonishingly achieved.
I do not believe in the God of make-believe. To some the very definition of religion entails postulation of elements out of character with reality. I don't discount the possibility of divine intervention in the natural order (although I try to think in ways that eliminate such a dichotomy, a dichotomy wherein God is pitted against the ways of nature). However, for me authentic religion is much closer to the stripping away of the artificial and the incredulous while yet retaining the sense of the sacred -- the sacredness at the core of being, the sacredness of the special, the sacredness of life, the sacredness of sentience, the sacredness of our humanity, and the sacredness of the ultimate.
I do not believe in a bloodthirsty God, a God who justifies wars or requires expiation by the blood of babies or virgins or wives or soldiers or strangers or societies. This is not to exclude the possibility of substitutionary atonement, which is the very negation of bloodthirst.
I cannot believe in an official God, one established by law or dogma. This places an insurmountable barrier between me and conviction, between me and the effusion of faith. Certainly there is much I can learn from dogma, but it must not be imposed. Rather the insights and thoughts of the past should fall like gentle refreshing rain upon the delicate blossoms of the present. The God of officialdom is an alien God, by definition. As E. M. Cioran wrote, "Any official god is a god alone, abandoned, soured."(1)
I do not believe in a God conceived of as either transcendent unifying principle, or the source thereof, necessary in order to save human beings from freedom, which in turn is conceived of as self-destructive. Such a God is merely an artificial fulcrum of political rhetoric rooted in the fear of our own humanity.
I do not believe in the God of supposed deductive necessity. I am referring to philosophical arguments for the existence of God, none of which I find compelling.
I do not believe in the God of practical necessity, that is, for the sake of either social or personal morality. I can see the usefulness of a God-postulation for morality, so long as no deception is involved, no illusion. But morality does not make God necessary, nor does God make morality necessary.
I do not believe in a God of psychological necessity, that is, for the heart to find its rest or in order to fill a "God-shaped hole." Yes the heart seeks its rest, yes the heart may sometimes have a vacancy that can be filled only by the divine or some illusion thereof. But a psychological need for God does not either prove or define God.
I do not believe in the God who is part of this sentence: "It was God's will that he should die now." My mind recalls the inscription on the Secher grave in Georgetown, Massachusetts:
The implacable, inscrutable God whose will it is useless to resist, thus schooling us to impassive yielding, is at best a fraction of an indivisible God. True sublime contentment can come only from a whole God.
I don't believe in the God of selective care at the expense of the unfortunate, as in, "Thank God who spared me from the tornado though a hundred around me perished." Rather, it is the egotism with which I will have no truck. May God specially bless those who perished!
I don't believe in the God of one side in a competition. "Oh God, help us beat them!" "We give praise to God, for we have bested our opponents!" If there is a God worthy of worship, God is the God of all sides, except that of evil.
I don't believe in God as crutch, whether for self-identity or other forms of self-valuing, with this possible exception: God as breaking the nihilistic loop -- humankind resting its value on itself. But that is a philosophical, not a psychological point.
I don't believe in the God of any subculture. Either God is God of the cosmos or of nothing. Anybody who harbors a God as defined by a subculture sets up an us-them mentality, with which I feel no moral affinity. This is not to deny the possibility of different types of engagement with God by different groups of people. Nor is it to deny the possibility of special revelation or of chosenness. But it is to deny a mindset which consistently lessens God and diminishes one's fellow human beings.
I don't believe in a God that is God of less than the whole -- I mean the whole of space and time, the totality of universes and dimensions, both objectivity and subjectivity, both macro and micro, both old creation and new. Nothing less than a full synthesis will do to point to the true God.
God is not the word God, and rarely does the word God function to represent the true God, assuming God exists at all. Even when it does so function, it is a word of utter quandary: Are we truly speaking of God now?
1 "Joseph de Maistre: An Essay on Reactionary Thought." -- p. [22]-78, specifically p. 64, in: Anathemas and Admirations, by E. M. Cioran; translated from the French by Richard Howard (New York: Arcade Publishing, c1991), in series: The Arcade Cioran.
Written July 17-August 2, 2000; posted August 2, 2000; new url, January 28, 2004; last modified, January 28, 2004
Copyright ©2000-2004 by Norman Elliott Anderson
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