ON THE NATURE OF “GOD”

OCTOBER 23, 2021 – Recently, I’ve witnessed fear and suffering—up close and personal.  I’ve also seen hope and kindness that confirm my faith in humanity.

When peering into a matter of life and death, the existence or non-existence of “God” enter one’s thoughts. After the crisis passes, one contemplates the “Great Power” from multiple perspectives and reviews one’s prior conclusions.

I once read A History of God by Karen Armstrong, which is about the “origins” of God as a human construct. I don’t remember many details, but the book was an interesting study of the three major monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. I subsequently plowed through The Evolution of God by Robert Wright, who took God, gods, and religion to another level. These academic works, however, brought me no closer to “God’s embrace” than had years of formal Bible study. I wound up reading books by Richard Dawkins, who, of course, devoted his career to “proving” the non-existence of “God.”

My “journey,” if I may call it that, has made me neither an agnostic nor a militant atheist; nor have my “travels” returned me to “believerdom.” I’m wholly comfortable with this amorphous arrangement.  It’s not a matter of “belief,” “non-belief,” or “not knowing.” It’s a redefinition of “God/god/gods”—an entirely human construct.

As I age, I’m more aware of the paradoxes of life. Paradoxically, I’ve discovered a certain level of comfort living with paradoxes. The bottom lesson of any paradox is that something can hold two opposing properties simultaneously.  For many people, this can’t be . . . without psychological discombobulation. Yet, if you can comfortably embrace the idea that two contradictory conditions can co-exist within the same concept, voila! . . . you’ve achieved equilibrium with the universe . . . or at least your own psychological one!

The perfect paradox applies to “God/god.” God exists at the same time it doesn’t. “God” as a construct of human necessity is, in reality, the sum-total of the cosmos—at once a vacuum and all the elements that eternally float, twirl, expand, within that infinite vacuum. That “God/god” is way bigger than the one occupying the corner church, the theological seminary, or the Friday night, high school football field on which the “Christian Warriors” and the “St. Mark Lions” pray for victory (never a tie). In other words, “God/god” is so big it can’t exist except within such a limited construct as to render it effectively non-existent.

For me, “God/god” is simply the whole of all laws of existence—of physics and chemistry, and on this green-blue orb of ours, biological processes. Does this “whole of things” feel my pain, know my thoughts, inject me with joy, hear my entreaties? “Yes” on a grand, philosophical scale. “No” on a practical one.

As I’ve witnessed lately, the “God/god” of hope and mercy emanates from the human heart—as it has evolved, biologically, socially, culturally. This conclusion transcends debate over the existence or non-existence of “God/god.” It simply underscores life’s simple imperative: to seek and embrace hope and mercy until it’s “lights out.”

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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson