March 16 – So, With All This, Who or What is God? – Part 1
Today’s Post
Last week we recapped how, using the methods of science, we have identified a God which can be understood in a ‘secular sense’, requiring no adherence to religious precepts, but is yet as close to us as we are to ourselves. Such a God satisfies the requirements of science as expressed by the eminent atheist thinker, Professor Richard Dawkins as:
“The first cause … which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence.”
without recourse to
“all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers”.
This week we will begin the final phase of this blog, ‘Reinterpreting Religion’, by addressing how traditional Christian concepts of God can be reinterpreted in the light of such a secular approach.
God as the Ground of Being
Conventional Western religion, expressed in the form of Christianity, has evolved the concept of God from Jewish expression to that most explicitly framed in the Western Scholastic tradition. Thomas Aquinas is most associated with this theology in his association of Greek thinking with traditional Church teaching. His ‘Summa Theologica” developed a ‘metaphysics’ which explained reality as an association between the divine (God) and his creation, blending scripture, Greek reasoning and faith.
As discussed in the ten posts beginning in September, 2015 (http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?m=201509), Western religious thought has always reflected what Jonathan Sacks refers to as ‘dualism’. Dualism sees all the major expressions of religious thought as having evolved along two parallel paths. On one path, creation is ‘good’, creation (including humans) is destined for ‘one-ness’ with its creator, humans are reflections of the divine (‘in His image’), and God is ‘father’. On the other, creation is flawed, separated from its creator (requiring divine sacrifice to reconnect), humans are sinful at their core, and God is vengeful. This dualism, evident in the Basic Jewish texts (the Christian ‘Old Testament’) spills over into Christianity, with its tension between such concepts as ‘love’ and ‘justice’, ‘damnation’ and ‘salvation’, ‘natural’ and ’supernatural’, ‘this life’ and ‘the next’.
Once Rome capitalized on Christianity’s universal nature as a tool for social unity as Rome became an increasingly diverse empire, Christianity quickly became more legalistic than fraternal. Its dogmatic statements and rules for attaining salvation increasingly replaced Jesus’ teaching of ‘the law of love’. The pastoral ‘Jesus’ of the synoptic gospels was supplanted by the ‘universal Christ’ of John.
Sacks sees the dualism that could be found in Jewish beliefs becoming more pronounced in Christianity, as this universal expression began to incorporate elements of Greek philosophy. As he sees it, “Christendom drew its philosophy, science and art from Greece, its religion from Israel”, thus exacerbating the dualism that had its roots in Jewish teachings.
Our concept of the ‘secular’ God is quite obviously quite different from this conventional and traditional view. Here are three examples:
God is not ‘a person’. In Teilhard’s view, God is the basis for person since he is the sum total of all the universal forces by which the universe evolves from a formless block of energy to the highly articulated multifaceted reality that we see around us, including ourselves. As science has showed us, evolution ‘ramifies’: the products of evolution branch out at each step of the universe as it rises from its initial cloud of energy through a few granules of matter which become several subatomic particles which become hundreds of atoms, then tens of thousands of molecules then an uncounted myriad of cells. One of the threads of this tens of billions of years of becoming is that which eventually leads to ‘the person’. Since that evolution produced the entity that we refer to as ‘the person’, person therefore is seen as one of many evolved characteristics. As Blondel sees it
“God is not a super-person, not even three super-persons. That God is person reveals that man is related to the deepest dimension of his life in a personal and never-to-be reified way.”
Our secular perspective, therefore, reinterprets God from being ‘a person’ to the much more profound understanding of God as the personal facet of the ground of being.
God is not ‘supernatural’, if the term refers to something that exists outside, above and apart from nature. In Teilhard’s view, the action of God (the agent of complexity) is so woven into the action of evolution as to be ‘co-substantial’ with it. As Blondel says, there is no position that we can take which sees God as ‘there’ and we as ‘here’, since we require the evolutive action of God within us to be able to make the statement. As we have seen over the last several weeks, our very growth as persons requires us to find that spark of ‘person’ that exists in us all, that we did not create, and which is given to us ‘gratuiously’, unearned, and finding this spark is the first step to finding God.
Finding God is the simple realization that what differentiates us from any other product of evolution is that humans have to become aware of what it is that got us where we are, and how to cooperate with it, if we are to progress further.
God is, in a very real, tangible and unsentimental way, ‘love’. Once love is shorn of its emotional and sentimental aspect, it can be seen as the play of universal, integrative energy as it has manifested itself in the human person. Just as entities at every stage of evolution have capitalized on integrative energy to unite in such a way as to effect a more complex entity, so can humans capitalize the energy of love in the same way to increase their individual complexity, to grow.
Such a God as we have come to in our search thus far, while being understood so differently in many ways from our legacy Western beliefs, is not necessarily antithetical to the beliefs themselves. As we shall see in the remaining posts of this blog, they can be reviewed for their relevance to human life and as such ‘reinterpreted’.
The Next Post
Next week we will continue this process of reinterpretation by taking a look at some of Western religious teachings on God in the light of our secular approach.