Alternative Concepts of God

Craig Beam (c) 1999 (February 2007)

"I'm not religious," people sometimes claim. "Then tell me about your experience," I say in return. We may not be conventionally pious, but we all experience life, and there are religious dimensions to explore within that experience.

I make the same point to those who tell me, "I don't believe in God." "Tell me about the God that you don't believe in," I often reply. "The chances are that I don't believe in 'Him' either."

A thought-provoking response. For everyone in our culture has some concept of God, whether they believe in such a being or not. And the God that one rejects can be as emotionally alive to the atheist as it is to any believer. For 15 years I defined myself as an atheist, and my views remain non-theistic. Yet all this time a certain concept of God has remained with me, a concept which in all essentials has its origin in my childhood. So, to begin with this morning, I will take up Buehrens' challenge and tell you about the God I don't believe in.

There are many ways to imagine God. One person may relate to a visual image (an old man with a white beard sitting on a throne); another might relate to a symbol (like the Taoist yin-yang circle), or conceptualize deity in terms of various metaphysical attributes. Christian philosophers and theologians have traditionally described God as a perfect being, who is all-powerful, all-knowing, eternal, transcendent, etc. All this is rather abstract. For many ordinary believers - and certainly for me as a child - God is related to mainly as a personality with certain ethical traits. God's character and personality are revealed through his acts in biblical history, or they can be inferred from what we are taught about him and how he is worshipped in church.

The God I don't believe in should be given a name. I will call him Jehovah, both in honour of the role of the Bible in shaping my image of him, and because calling him by a name (as his Witnesses' do) reminds us that he is only one god-concept among many. Jehovah is, for me, an authoritarian Lord - not a loving god. Looking back on my childhood, I do not remember ever feeling that Jehovah loved me - or, for that matter, that he really loved human beings or his creation. Consider some of his characteristics:

1. Jehovah is an ill-tempered god, easily offended, easily angered. These traits reveal psychological weakness and insecurity.

2. Jehovah is the ultimate Lawgiver, Judge, and Punisher. He can be tough and vindictive, especially towards those who disobey his laws or question his authority.

3. He is obsessed with regulating our sexuality, to a degree that borders on the pathological.

4. He has absolutely no sense of humour, he is not playful, and he takes himself very seriously.

5. He demands weekly worship; he likes it when his servants flatter him with praise, kneel down before him, and beg for favours.

6. He is jealous of other gods, and even jealous of the interest that we take in the material world.

7. He says he loves us and demands to be loved, but he is a harsh and distant figure. It is not for nothing that his devotees are referred to as "God-fearing," not "God-loving" people.

8. Because he claims to be a perfect being, he can never admit mistakes; thus before him we are always in the wrong; before him we are always to blame. This is the meaning of original sin.

9. Such a God is, in the end, a bit like Big Brother in 1984. He is forever watching and scrutinizing us. He requires that we practice doublethink so that we may believe all the theologically correct doctrines and creeds. And as our Cosmic Overlord he demands, not merely an outward show of obedience, but inward love, faith, and worship. He does not seem to realize that such things cannot be commanded without violating our spirit to the core.

10. My feelings about Jehovah are expressed in the following poem by William Blake, entitled To Nobodaddy (nobody's daddy):
    

This is the God I don't believe in. In describing him, I have attempted to sum up the things that troubled me most about the God of my childhood, and the things that I most wanted to reject when I called myself an atheist. If you were raised in a creed that you have now outgrown, you too have a God that you don't believe in. Perhaps he was a more benign and loving God than mine. Perhaps you find my account alien to your experience, or suspect that I have been unfair to the God of biblical religion. If so, I ask only that you not dismiss my experience of Jehovah. For my background was not bizarrely fundamentalist - I was raised United Church. My father may not have been perfect, but he was nothing like the Patriarchal Godfather that I have been describing. And the more I have read about religion, the more I have discovered that I am not alone, that my experience of Jehovah was not unique, and that it has been shared by any number of sensitive and intelligent people. Indeed, when in leading "Building Your Own Theology" I asked the group to a draw the God of their childhood, one person drew a picture of himself with a big, dark cloud hanging over his head. And despite the best efforts of liberal Christians to re-interpret the tradition, the archetype of Jehovah continues to cast a long shadow over the religious imagination of our culture.

When I ceased believing in God at age 14, I did not experience any feeling of loss. More like a liberation. In this way I differ from the sort of atheist who has warm feelings about God and the church, but is driven to doubt, and ultimately to abandon, their faith because it does not fit with modern science. An example of this is the philosopher Santayana, a materialist who had such a love for the Catholic tradition that one of his critics jokingly accused him of believing "that there is no God, but the Virgin Mary is his mother." Others are driven to atheism by the problem of evil, because they are unable to reconcile belief in a loving, personal God with the reality of suffering in the world. This problem never arose for me at a gut level, because deep down I never felt that Jehovah was a loving god. Of course, I eagerly embraced such arguments because they gave me reason not to believe. For similar reasons, I embraced the world-view of science, in which everything has a natural, physical, rational explanation. Science became for me, as it is for many humanists, the great liberator of the human mind from superstition and darkness. In one rebellious teenage phase, I even used to refer to my parents' church as "the house of superstition."

Metaphysics has been defined as "the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct." A cynical remark, but applicable to many efforts to prove the tenets of traditional theism. However, in the same way, I first approached the subject in order to find good reasons for what I reject on instinct. I rejected the very idea of a God with vehemence because I equated God with Jehovah, and I did not want to believe in any such being. And because I equated religion with Jehovah-worship, I had no use for it either.

Over the years, my views have evolved, and in some ways mellowed. I have come to realize (1) that my deepest problem with biblical religion is ethical rather than metaphysical; (2) that there are more plausible and life-affirming concepts of deity beyond Jehovah; and (3) that a person need not believe in God to be a spiritual (or religious) person, any more than one need believe in God to be an ethical person. In other words, I have come to separate three things - biblical faith, the concept of God, and spirituality - from one another.

My topic today is alternative concepts of God. By this I mean, not just alternatives to Jehovah, but alternatives to theism. In a UUA pamphlet, a "theist" is described as someone who believes in a personal God, worthy of adoration, who is active in the world and transcendent (Barbara Merritt, The Faith of a Theist). Generally, theism is understood to mean monotheism - that is, belief that there is only one such god. Of course, if you are willing to think unorthodox thoughts, you could also believe that there are many such gods. Our minister at Waterloo, Anne Treadwell, has a sermon entitled "Confessions of a Polytheist" in which she defends such an idea. I'm inclined to think that - if there can be such an thing as a personal god - it is just as plausible to believe that there are many such entities as to insist that there is only one. Polytheism also seems more in keeping with pluralism and diversity - the fact that there is such a variety of faiths and ideals in the world.

In moving away from theism, one chips away at the attributes of theistic divinity - particularly the idea that God is a personal and transcendent being. Thus, one may deny that God is active in the world, or cares about our destiny, or cares about our religious practices. In denying this, one denies the God of revelation - the God who acts in history, performs miracles, and writes books for our edification. The view one is left with is known as deism, a view popular in the 18th century (e.g. with the American Founders). The deistic god is a creator, who sets the laws of motion in place and then removes himself from the scene. He is distant from our concerns, like the sort of father whose interest in his offspring begins and ends with conception.

Pantheism - the idea that All is God and God is All - departs further from theism. For in identifying God with Nature, or with some principle within the world, pantheism generally involves a denial (1) that God is a person, and (2) that God is transcendent. Pantheism is an umbrella term rather than the name of a particular religion. Taoism can be classed as pantheistic, as can certain kinds of Buddhism, the philosophy of Spinoza and Hegel, and many versions of Goddess and Earth-based spirituality. No doubt, many Unitarians fall within this spectrum of belief - more, I suspect, than would be willing to call themselves "theists" or "atheists."

How pantheism is different from theism is fairly clear. A more difficult question is how, in practice, it differs from atheism. It has been said by the critics of pantheism "that everything God, and no God, are identical positions." (Michael Levine, Pantheism, p.3). If God is identical with the universe, it is merely another name for the universe, so that pantheism and atheism are really the same. When I first encountered this line of argument, I found it convincing. Pantheism seemed like just a peculiar way of keeping god-talk going in the absence of God. But now I am not so sure.

First, we might compare the relation between "God" and "world" in pantheism to the relation between the "mental" and "physical" aspects of a human person. This analogy has been developed in some detail by the pantheist philosopher Grace Jantzen (God's World, God's Body). She suggests, first, that we think of the world as God's body, and second, that we reject mind-body dualism and view God's relation to the world in holistic terms. Our mental life may not be able to exist apart from our body, but that does not imply that "mind" and "body" are merely synonyms. Having a mind or conscious self is made possible by a certain order within the body - respiration, the beating of the heart, and the functioning of the brain and other vital organs. In the absence of these processes, the body is good for little more than compost. In the same way, pantheists tend to think that what makes the natural world divine are certain processes and cycles which enable it to evolve and sustain life. To deny that God transcends the world does not mean that divinity is to be reduced to brute matter, any more than the denial that our mental life is inseparable from its bodily basis need imply that a human person is nothing but a bunch of chemicals.

Second, it has been said that a optimist is a person who sees the glass as half full, while the pessimist sees the glass as half empty. There is a big psychological gap between these perspectives, even though the facts they describe are identical. In the same way, I think it is significant whether we see the world as sacred or profane, enchanted or disenchanted, meaningful or empty of meaning. One of my main quarrels with Jehovah-worship is that it is usually dualistic, bidding us to direct our spiritual attention away from the earth. An image of divinity is upheld which is disembodied and otherworldly. Pantheistic ideas, on the other hand, help us to accept that the earth is our true and only home and to see everyday things as sacred. This may be especially important when it comes to environmental issues. Pantheistic divinity is not an entity that we can look to for salvation. Rather, it is up to us to protect and actualize it - to refrain from destroying the Matrix of Life, and to continue the Process of Evolution towards ever richer and more complex forms of Being.

So in the end, am I a pantheist? At this point I prefer to say that it is a possibility that I entertain, rather than a belief that I hold. Pantheism is, for me, both more plausible and more life-affirming than classical theism. As someone whose spirit revolts against the idea of worshipping a Jehovah-like god, pantheism also helps to make god-language (inescapable in our culture and our UU hymnal) more palatable.

I will finish up with a story. In the fall of 1997, I went for a walk in the woods. As I contemplated the reds and yellows of the leaves, and listened to the buzzing of the last few insects of the season, I become lost in reverie. I begin to think that I too am like the trees and the insects, participating in cycles of birth and death, growth and decay. As a human I may differ from trees and insects, for it is through us that nature has become self-aware, intelligent, and caring. I began to imagine that the cosmos is more than just a bunch of atoms obeying the laws of physics. I began to wonder if nature is in some sense alive. The idea seemed attractive and comforting. Finally, I stepped back and reflected upon the whole train of thought. I realized that perhaps for the first time, I had envisioned a god for which I felt affection.