By Moristotle[Originally published on September 27, 2009.]
A walk in the gentle woods of Hillsborough, North Carolina yesterday prompted me to revisit what it is about “God” that I don’t believe. Not the walk, actually, but the conversation with my good friend Ralph, with whom I walked and talked. Ralph said two things that gave me pause. The first was that he finds it impossible to deny that God exists. While he is as clear as I am that “the Christian God,” as he puts it, does not exist, he says that God as the animating spirit of the universe, its first cause, does necessarily exist.
Should I be reluctant to try to think about these concepts logically? For Ralph also said, commenting on my reading of John Allen Paulos’s Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up, “God is beyond argument. We can’t get our minds or our logic around God.” Perhaps I should be reluctant, but here goes anyway.
What evidence is there that the universe has an “animating spirit”? The only “animated spirits” that we have any experience of are ourselves and other natural organisms. I see animated spirit every day in the birds and butterflies and rabbits and fuzzy worms that visit (or live in) our yard. I saw yesterday the toad that jumped out of my mower’s way, and I was happy that the little fellow managed it, for I hadn’t seen him. But I’m learning from my layman’s study of evolutionary biology and neurology that our natural, earthly spirits evolved from the physical materials that lay on our planet’s1 surface and floated in its atmosphere. The jump to an overriding spirit for the universe is a very big jump indeed. My mind balks at the concept. I’m more comfortable in my empathy and sympathy for the fragile spirits around me.
First cause? I was surprised to hear that phrase from Ralph, the “argument from first cause” has been so soundly disposed of by philosophers – and mathematicians, for it happens to be the first of the arguments for God that Paulos discusses in his little book.
If everything has a cause, then God does, too, and there is no first cause. And if something doesn’t have a cause, it may as well be the physical world as God or a tortoise. [p. 4]And yet, Ralph is sure about the universe’s having been caused by an animating spirit. As I put it in the first of my “New Ten Commandments”:
Imagine that “God” exists if doing so somehow comforts or inspires you....I am glad for Ralph that he finds something like comfort or inspiration in his notion of a universal animating spirit (however far beyond his mind and logic).
That first new commandment of mine has a concluding clause, which is actually relevant to the second thing that Ralph said that gave me pause. Ralph says that the Muslim concept of God is superior to the Christian, by virtue of its being less anthropomorphic. He lauds the “peasant women of the Near East” for surrendering themselves to such a God. The very terms Islam and Muslim indicate that surrender. The concluding clause of my new first commandment expresses my contempt for this:
Imagine that “God” exists if doing so somehow comforts or inspires you, but don’t fall down and worship it.I don’t think that “Allah” is any more palatable than Yahweh or God the Father. On p. 1 of Thomas Cleary’s New Translation of the Qur’an, I find:
[Certain persons] try to deceive God and those who believe, but they only deceive themselves, without being aware. In their hearts is sickness, and God has made them sicker; and in store for them is painful torture, because they have been lying...God mocks them...God took their light and left them in darkness, unseeing; deaf, dumb, and blind, and not returning....Allah is as personal to Muslims as God the Father is to Christians. And, in my view, Allah, too, is absent.
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1. I don’t mean by “our planet” any proprietary ownership, for, as my daughter’s Chief Seattle bumper sticker says, “The Earth does not belong to us; we belong to the Earth.” (I inherited the bumper sticker with the car.)
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