We haven’t yet tackled the large question of whether God exists––though we will. First, though, I want to say that one of my really big reasons for writing about God is that it’s been clear to me for a long time that, if God exists, no single religion, or even any combination, could have the whole truth about God. God is infinite. If you don’t yet believe in God’s existence, take this as a statement about our conception of God. You don’t believe in Santa Claus’s existence either, I assume, but you’ll agree that when we talk about Santa Claus, we’re talking about someone who gives presents to children around the world at Christmas. And when we talk about God, we’re talking about a being who is infinite.
If there is such a being, then by definition, no matter how much we know about it, there is more to know. Even if everything we know about this being is true, which is itself questionable, as I’ll show in a moment, and even if we know a lot, we also know that what we know is an infinitely small amount of what there is to know. Think of the series of positive whole numbers, starting with 1, 2, 3, 4, .... This is an infinite series. No matter how high we count, we will never get to the highest number, because there’s always a number higher than that. In fact, there is an infinity of numbers higher than the biggest number we can come up with––the one after it, and the one after that, and the one after that....
So even if God revealed God’s self to a prophet or series of prophets who got the message with complete accuracy, and even if the revelation continued over years and generations, it would still be incomplete. That might not matter if the revelation/s imparted just the stuff we need to know about God. We’re finite beings, after all, and the stuff about God that’s relevant to us is overwhelmingly likely to be finite as well. So it’s possible that a finite revelation could be both true, and, in practical terms, complete. Or is it?
I don’t think so. Here’s why. Any revelation to human beings has to come through a human being––a human being with a certain physiology, heredity, temperament, language, culture, and experience. The revelation has to be filtered through all those, because there’s no other way to do it. Think about it. Let’s say God bypasses language altogether by putting an experience of what God wants to convey directly into a prophet’s mind. There are two problems here. First, the prophet’s mind is limited/finite because she’s human. So only so much, within a range of what’s experienceable, can be conveyed. I can’t have an experience I’m not capable of having, and neither can she. Let’s take care of that for now by deciding that what God wants to transmit can fit inside that range. But now comes the second problem. The prophet has to convey that experience to others. And that’s full of pitfalls.
First, she has to reduce it to language. Any language has only so much it can do to convey experience. Some languages have lots of words for love, some have only one. Some have a huge vocabulary for emotions, some don’t. Some can express delicate shades of moral goodness and its opposite, some are pretty crude in that area. Our prophet is stuck with the language she speaks, both in the sense that she’s limited in how to convey the message, and also that she’s limited in how she understands the message, because our language shapes our perceptions. People who speak languages with few color distinctions, or snow distinctions, actually don’t see the differences that people with richer vocabularies do. It’s not that their eyes are different from people’s with bigger vocabularies, but the differences their eyes see don’t register as “making a difference” with their minds, and so they ignore them.
So our prophet is bound to filter her non–verbal, direct revelation of God’s truth through her language. She can’t help it; there’s no other way to do it. In addition, she has associations with words that she’s acquired through her life, and that aren’t identical with other people’s, who have their own associations with, and understandings of words and language. So her choice of language may not convey the same meaning to a hearer or reader as it does to her. Anyone who has ever been a reader or a writer knows this problem. What seems crystal clear to the writer is murky to the reader––or clear to most readers, but not to all.
And the level of individual words is only the beginning of her troubles. She has an insight, direct from God, about God’s nature. She thinks of a metaphor to explain it: God loves us as a father loves his children. That may be a great metaphor, but it already filters the insight and thus, to at least some extent, distorts it. Another metaphor––say, God loves us as a lover loves his beloved––might have been just as accurate but different. And the accuracy of both depends on the culture––how fathers and lovers express love.
Even if God chooses to bypass these problems by dictation, as the intermediary Gabriel is said to have dictated the Koran to Mohammed, they can’t be avoided. God is stuck with the language the prophet speaks. And when the message is translated, or taken to an audience significantly different from the original one, or is several centuries old, and the language and culture have changed in the meanwhile––well, you see the problems.
And we haven’t mentioned an even bigger problem: religions are not the revelations of prophets. They are those revelations as understood by interpreters, codifiers, institutions, and hierarchies. Christianity is not Jesus. It’s the Gospels, Paul, and twenty centuries of church history. Etc., etc. Here, I don’t even think I need to argue that an error or two may creep in.
This discussion has been theoretical. In the world of real religions, it seems pretty clear that each has valuable insights, and each has parts that seem at least questionable. Christianity on love, Judaism on ethics, Buddhism on the problem of suffering, Taoism on non–action, to take just a few examples, strike most readers as conveying insights that are both true and important. And wouldn’t this make sense? If an infinite God does want to communicate with humans, or, put another way, if humans catch glimpses of God and of our place and purpose in the universe, doesn’t it seem plausible that these glimpses would occur through time and across space, that each would be different, and that each would be part of the truth but also contain distortions or important omissions? The Hindu story of the blind men and the elephant is probably the best parable about this, and is worth keeping in mind in any exploration of God.
Friday, August 7, 2009
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Why There's More Good Than Evil in the Universe
I have a colleague and friend who teaches math, and is a wonderful and dedicated teacher. Years ago, wanting to do something for the cause of world peace, she started finding out about nuclear weapons, and now she’s one of the experts in the state, and has given nationally funded summer seminars on the subject to international groups. Since this topic scares me so much that I’ve only gone to one of her lectures out of the desire to support a friend, I am grateful and admiring beyond words that she does this.
She’s a sincere Christian, and, like many I’ve met and taught over the years, sees the world as a battleground between good and evil, and told me she had always thought of it, not only as a battle, but as one whose outcome was in doubt, so it was important to get as many people as possible on the right side. I told her I disagreed, and why. My response was new to her, and she found it helpful and told me to write it down. She’s been an unfailing supporter of my desire to write, and of the value of what I have to say, so this seems like a good first topic.
The point of view she shares with many other Christians, that the world is a battleground between good and evil, in the persons of God and the Devil and their respective followers, comes historically from Zoroaster or Zarathustra, a Persian who lived about 500B.C.E. Zoroaster answered the question of why there is evil in the world (by the way, “evil” in this context means “bad stuff”, not just bad stuff due to human malice), by saying that there are two forces responsible for the universe: a benevolent deity named Ahura Mazda, and a malevolent one named Ahriman. They are engaged in a struggle for control that will continue through all time, and end in a final battle in which Ahura Mazda will triumph. After that, there will be a last judgement, for which all humans who have ever lived will be resurrected. Each will be judged as to whether s/he was on the side of good or evil. If good, an eternity of delight will be her/his reward, but if evil, then an eternity of punishment. So each of us should live our lives so as to be on the side of good, and reap the reward of eternal joy.
Does any of this sound familiar? It should, because Zoroastrianism is where Judaism, Christianity, and Islam got the idea of the resurrection of the body, which was still highly controversial in Judaism at the time of Jesus. (We can see this in the story the Sadducee tells about the woman who married a man who died, and then in turn married each of his brothers to fulfill the obligation to give her first husband an heir. The question, “Who will she be married to in heaven?” is meant to show that the idea of the resurrection of the dead is ridiculous, since it leads to problems like this one.) Christianity and Islam also adopted the final battle, last judgement, and eternity of heaven and hell from Zoroastrianism, so it’s had a lot of influence, despite the fact that only a few thousand Zoroastrians survive today, in India, where they are called Parsees, because they came from Persia a long time ago.
There are two problems with the “world as battle between good and evil” idea that I’d like to look at now. One is a local one, so to speak: It conflicts with Christian doctrine. If you’re not a Christian, this may not matter much, but I’d like to look at this briefly, anyway. So here’s the conflict: Christianity is monotheistic. It believes there is one God, “maker of heaven and earth, and of all things, visible and invisible,” as the Nicene Creed says. That means that everything, including any evil force, was made by God, in some form, and is subordinate to God. The real attraction of the battle–between–good–and–evil view is that it avoids having to explain how a good God can have created all the evil we see in the world. Monotheism, by contrast, absolutely has to deal with this problem. In the Apocrypha (books written during the time between when the Hebrew Bible/ a.k..a. Old Testament’s content was finalized and the time the New Testament was written––the Intertestamentary Period), the book of Enoch tells the story of Lucifer, God’s favorite angel, who rebelled and was thrown out of heaven. (The book of Enoch was very popular, got translated into lots of languages, and this part of it is the basis for Milton’s poem, Paradise Lost. Because of all this, lots of people think the story of Lucifer is in the Bible. It’s not.) The Lucifer story is an attempt to deal with the problem of evil without giving up monotheism. It has problems of its own, but that’s for another time.
The second problem is a more basic one: Evil is inherently parasitic on good, and can’t exist without it. Evil is always a twisting (which is what “perversion” literally means) or corruption or disorder or destruction of good. Think about it. When you get sick, your good and normally well-functioning body is being disordered by the illness. Wars, which are hugely evil, are the destruction of what was functioning and orderly and good. No functioning body, no disease. No countries and societies, no wars. The good thing has to exist in order for the bad to attack and disorder it. At the most basic level, existence is a good, and as soon as something exists, it IS a something––that is, it has a form, structure, qualities of some kind, which are all good. THEN and because of this, it’s possible for all those things to be twisted or damaged or destroyed, or used for evil purposes, and that’s bad. But the good comes first.
So, although evil may be very powerful, and cause huge and overwhelmingly tragic losses at times, it simply can’t be as powerful as good, because it is totally dependent on good for its existence. This doesn’t make evil go away, of course, or make it less awful, but it does mean that we aren’t living in a universe evenly balanced between good and evil. Good comes first, and there is necessarily more good than evil (just as there is necessarily more of a host than its parasite). And this is actually something we can see day–to–day if we stop to think about it. There are more good people than bad (criminals are parasites on the good people), there is more honesty than lieing (lies are parasites on the truth, because if people couldn’t rely on others telling the truth most of time, they wouldn’t believe lies), there’s more kindness than cruelty, etc. A comforting thought to end on for now.
She’s a sincere Christian, and, like many I’ve met and taught over the years, sees the world as a battleground between good and evil, and told me she had always thought of it, not only as a battle, but as one whose outcome was in doubt, so it was important to get as many people as possible on the right side. I told her I disagreed, and why. My response was new to her, and she found it helpful and told me to write it down. She’s been an unfailing supporter of my desire to write, and of the value of what I have to say, so this seems like a good first topic.
The point of view she shares with many other Christians, that the world is a battleground between good and evil, in the persons of God and the Devil and their respective followers, comes historically from Zoroaster or Zarathustra, a Persian who lived about 500B.C.E. Zoroaster answered the question of why there is evil in the world (by the way, “evil” in this context means “bad stuff”, not just bad stuff due to human malice), by saying that there are two forces responsible for the universe: a benevolent deity named Ahura Mazda, and a malevolent one named Ahriman. They are engaged in a struggle for control that will continue through all time, and end in a final battle in which Ahura Mazda will triumph. After that, there will be a last judgement, for which all humans who have ever lived will be resurrected. Each will be judged as to whether s/he was on the side of good or evil. If good, an eternity of delight will be her/his reward, but if evil, then an eternity of punishment. So each of us should live our lives so as to be on the side of good, and reap the reward of eternal joy.
Does any of this sound familiar? It should, because Zoroastrianism is where Judaism, Christianity, and Islam got the idea of the resurrection of the body, which was still highly controversial in Judaism at the time of Jesus. (We can see this in the story the Sadducee tells about the woman who married a man who died, and then in turn married each of his brothers to fulfill the obligation to give her first husband an heir. The question, “Who will she be married to in heaven?” is meant to show that the idea of the resurrection of the dead is ridiculous, since it leads to problems like this one.) Christianity and Islam also adopted the final battle, last judgement, and eternity of heaven and hell from Zoroastrianism, so it’s had a lot of influence, despite the fact that only a few thousand Zoroastrians survive today, in India, where they are called Parsees, because they came from Persia a long time ago.
There are two problems with the “world as battle between good and evil” idea that I’d like to look at now. One is a local one, so to speak: It conflicts with Christian doctrine. If you’re not a Christian, this may not matter much, but I’d like to look at this briefly, anyway. So here’s the conflict: Christianity is monotheistic. It believes there is one God, “maker of heaven and earth, and of all things, visible and invisible,” as the Nicene Creed says. That means that everything, including any evil force, was made by God, in some form, and is subordinate to God. The real attraction of the battle–between–good–and–evil view is that it avoids having to explain how a good God can have created all the evil we see in the world. Monotheism, by contrast, absolutely has to deal with this problem. In the Apocrypha (books written during the time between when the Hebrew Bible/ a.k..a. Old Testament’s content was finalized and the time the New Testament was written––the Intertestamentary Period), the book of Enoch tells the story of Lucifer, God’s favorite angel, who rebelled and was thrown out of heaven. (The book of Enoch was very popular, got translated into lots of languages, and this part of it is the basis for Milton’s poem, Paradise Lost. Because of all this, lots of people think the story of Lucifer is in the Bible. It’s not.) The Lucifer story is an attempt to deal with the problem of evil without giving up monotheism. It has problems of its own, but that’s for another time.
The second problem is a more basic one: Evil is inherently parasitic on good, and can’t exist without it. Evil is always a twisting (which is what “perversion” literally means) or corruption or disorder or destruction of good. Think about it. When you get sick, your good and normally well-functioning body is being disordered by the illness. Wars, which are hugely evil, are the destruction of what was functioning and orderly and good. No functioning body, no disease. No countries and societies, no wars. The good thing has to exist in order for the bad to attack and disorder it. At the most basic level, existence is a good, and as soon as something exists, it IS a something––that is, it has a form, structure, qualities of some kind, which are all good. THEN and because of this, it’s possible for all those things to be twisted or damaged or destroyed, or used for evil purposes, and that’s bad. But the good comes first.
So, although evil may be very powerful, and cause huge and overwhelmingly tragic losses at times, it simply can’t be as powerful as good, because it is totally dependent on good for its existence. This doesn’t make evil go away, of course, or make it less awful, but it does mean that we aren’t living in a universe evenly balanced between good and evil. Good comes first, and there is necessarily more good than evil (just as there is necessarily more of a host than its parasite). And this is actually something we can see day–to–day if we stop to think about it. There are more good people than bad (criminals are parasites on the good people), there is more honesty than lieing (lies are parasites on the truth, because if people couldn’t rely on others telling the truth most of time, they wouldn’t believe lies), there’s more kindness than cruelty, etc. A comforting thought to end on for now.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
What This Blog is About
The topic of God is immensely interesting and important, I've always thought. What could matter more than whether God exists and what God is like? And yet, most people get just enough information on the subject to be immunized against further thinking about it. They go to Sunday School, or maybe listen to friends who do, or perhaps go to church, and get some ideas about God from those experiences. And usually, those ideas last them for the rest of their lives, for good or ill. At whatever age most of us stop learning math, we understand that there's a lot more math where that came from that we'll never get to, and that the math we'll never master ourselves is a genuine area of expertise, and probably quite important. But in the area of theology (thinking about God), most of us are quite convinced that our stock of ideas is pretty much all that's worth considering.
This is also true several levels up. I taught Philosophy of Religion from textbooks whose list of topics and contents made sense only within a Western Christian context, and whose authors seemed oblivious to the fact that there are other religions with other ideas, questions, and answers. I started teaching Comparative Religion to get away from that. Since religion and theology fascinate me, I kept reading in many traditions, and realized that there are many more thinkers and thoughts about God (even in the West) than you could ever guess either from going to church for your whole life, or from reading Philosophy of Religion texts and anthologies.
My own thinking about God changed as a result--I feel for the better, much better--and it continues to evolve. I want to use this blog to record and think through ideas about God that I find helpful, and to critique popular or commonly held ones that I think are wrong. I hope it will help you to think through your own ideas about God, and perhaps give you some new ideas that you may find helpful.
This is also true several levels up. I taught Philosophy of Religion from textbooks whose list of topics and contents made sense only within a Western Christian context, and whose authors seemed oblivious to the fact that there are other religions with other ideas, questions, and answers. I started teaching Comparative Religion to get away from that. Since religion and theology fascinate me, I kept reading in many traditions, and realized that there are many more thinkers and thoughts about God (even in the West) than you could ever guess either from going to church for your whole life, or from reading Philosophy of Religion texts and anthologies.
My own thinking about God changed as a result--I feel for the better, much better--and it continues to evolve. I want to use this blog to record and think through ideas about God that I find helpful, and to critique popular or commonly held ones that I think are wrong. I hope it will help you to think through your own ideas about God, and perhaps give you some new ideas that you may find helpful.
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