13. Which God?

Do I believe in God? The question is difficult to answer because there are at least three different notions of God.

First, the God of the philosophers. Here God is mostly the ‘prime or unmoved mover’, who created the world. Without God as the designer, how could all the complex forms of life have arisen? Now of course we know from evolutionary theory that they can have evolved on the basis of random trials, selection and transmission of what survives. For Spinoza God was not even a prime mover but simply the whole system of nature.

Second, the God for the people, supplied by Christian, Jewish, and Islamic religion. People desperately need God as a higher power that transcends the sorrow, mortality and fragility of human life on earth. He is provident, has an intention for humanity. He is all-powerful, all-knowing, and benevolent, deals out ultimate justice, and guarantees morality by the threat and promise of a hereafter. For a long time, philosophers also deemed belief in God necessary for morality.

With this God there is the insoluble problem of evil, of the justice of God (theodicy). If God is all-powerful etc., how can he allow the blatant injustice and cruelty of natural and human disasters? The answer is that even those have a hidden purpose, known only to God. No matter how bad the world seems, it is the best of all possible worlds. In this way one can rationalize any evil on the grounds that it could have been worse. 

Third, the God of the mystics. God is not ‘out there’ but ‘in here’, to be found by delving into the self, aided by asceticism and training by spiritual leaders. God cannot be rationalized. Holy texts do not explain but evoke personal religious feeling. We find mysticism in all three world religions: Meister Eckart and Thomas a Kempis, for example, in Christendom, the Jewish Kabala, and Islamic Sufism. They all tended to be persecuted because the clergy could not tolerate the elimination of their role.

So, do I believe in God? The mystic God would be my favorite. But I am an agnostic: If God is what he is to be, then all we can say about Him is there is nothing we can say about Him, not even that He does not exist. He transcends all human understanding. However, mystical delving into the self is unreliable. Introspection may be a surrender to delusion, and we need some external check of that. 

I wish there were a God. Perhaps God exists in that wish, and one can pray to that wishful being. But the only hereafter is what we leave behind after our life, in the life of others. Life is a unique gift, and it can flourish in contributing to that hereafter. Perhaps we can muster the courage to think that is enough.