Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 16 Number 3, December 2015
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The third way. An alternative notion of god.
An essay
by
Monash University
Few words conjure up so much controversy, so strident an antipathy and so strong an adherence as the term 'god'. The notion of a god continues to be the focus of contestation internationally, and the name is certainly the source of both unity and division within belief communities and between governments and religions. God is the source of life and hope for some and the cause of world conflict and human misery for others. Private belief and public secular discourse are seen as almost antithetical by some and inseparable by others. Beliefs systems, theisms and rituals all point to a god of some sort who exists...actually where does he (she or it) exist?
Explaining the idea of god is deeply problematic. Is god something out there or something in here? Is god transcendent or imminent? Or both? Does god have presence in the world (and thus acts in the world) or is god distant and aloof, not interested in the affairs of humankind, as the deists believed? What is the origin of all that we know and how does god solve the problem of origins? If god is outside the universe, and thus is not of the substance of the universe, then of what substance is god? I cannot hope to answer questions of metaphysics and ontology that have absorbed the attention of philosophers, theologians and scientists for thousands of years. What I can do is examine how god functions for humans in consciousness as both a unifying and divisive essence.
Whatever god is or is not, the force of this little word has not diminished since it dawned in the spiritual yearnings, fears, dreams and curiosities of our ancestors tens of thousands of years ago, as attested by cave drawings and the artefacts that suggest worship and adherence to some inaffable entity.
However one defines or understands god, the fact of the influence of god-thinking is incontrovertible. The international and inter-cultural prominence of the Catholic Church, Islam and fundamentalist Christianity readily come to mind as potent and political examples of god-thinking, or a self-enclosed discourse of belief. This thinking is deeply embedded in world politics, tribal conflicts, diplomatic endeavours, moral dilemmas and even economic relations. To dismiss god as somehow being a less significant part of the human condition in the Twenty-First Century is tantamount to ignorance of the power of god-language in shaping human history and contemporary human thought. God is a frame through which the majority of the world's population see the texture of life. God serves as the symbol for the profound yearning for significance in a universe that may not, in fact, offer such significance.
Explanations about the nature of this god frame tend to fall into two discrete categories. The first category is that of theism, and includes active human faith responses or what could be called believers as the embodiment of this stance. Theists suggest that god is some type of being, force or presence that caused the universe and the world to come into existence and created humans as the epitome of this wilful creation. Theists thus create a god-centred discusive frame for interpreting the world.
For religious fundamentalists and literalists this creation was an ex nihilo act or event, but for more liberal theists creation is generally conceived as a process of intelligent formation, in line with the theory of evolution. This coming-into-being is encoded in sets of creation narratives and mythologies held close by faith communities and redacted as part of a larger theology that constitutes a pervasive world view. Creation is thus conceived as being more than just about what was but imminent in what is now, and, importantly, what will be. This narrative of the future, or eschatology, shapes or forges a discrete and pervasive way of conceiving the place of human beings in the universe and in the disposition of the planet to come. It even shapes how believers in this eschatology behave in the temporality of their day-to-day existence and in their volitional acts in the present.
Because god apparently exists for believers (and may be active in the here-and-now) there are concrete expectations that emerge for those who adhere to the demands and communications of this primordial being or force or entity (the labels get more problematic as you persue them). In most cases these expectations are codified in texts and sacred writings, which embody creation accounts, histories of god's dealings with humans, sayings, wisdom, and ethical mandates. There is often some notion of human fragility and frailty in the face of this god and organised attempts to satisfy or mollify this god to account for this human condition. God embodies a perfection that the human strives to reach. God thus comes to represents the Good, as opposed to, in many traditions, the personification of the Evil, in a dark and treacherous being who comes to represent all the deep frailties of humankind.
As a result of the satisfaction of the demands of god, there is the promise of something beyond: a utopia or heaven to which believers have access beyond death and in which there is an extinction of suffering, evil and calamity. In sum, according to this explanation, god has created and shaped humankind, and the indelible influence of god is woven into the centre of the human psyche and in corporate expressions of meaning (sometimes called worship) in such a way that there is a yearning for god or a desire to expiate this god. There is also a desire to move beyond death to eternal states of being that involve the presence of this god in a realm that is conceived as being other than what we as humans have ever known. Mortality is thus a central concern in the rewards and the punishments that are associated with god. Perhaps mortality is the existential core in why humans desire that which is beyond, however that is designated in any particular religious tradition.
The second explanation, one given by atheists (including the recent crop of so-called god-denying scientists), philosophers and liberal theologians, is that god is a creation of human culture with a genesis in the evolutionary history of human civilisations, stretching back tens of thousands of years. With the evolving hominid brain came a desire to understand the ground of what is and to find an explanation about how the universe and humans came to be, as well as a yearning to know what death means. Natural processes in the universe became interpreted as supra-natural interventions in which gods became part of the logic of cause and effect: divine interventions are the result of human actions and human responses ensued from divine interventions. This interdependence between the divine god figure and human societies is a central structure in the discourse of god-thinking that seems to have evolved in human history.
This longing for explanation of origins, for mythology, and the apparent two-way cause-and-effect dialectic between god and human, evolved into elaborate systems of belief based on gods that were no more than an amplification of or a projection from the best and worst of humanity, or the dark and the light in human reflexivity about world. With the advent of modern science in the Renaissance, and the development of the scientific method from Descartes onwards, spurred in part by a redefining of the earth by Galileo as not being the centre of the universe, came a recognition that explanations of origins did not necessarily need a divine being or what might be called a god-cause. What is needed, in the modern sensibility, is a plausible basis for understanding the universe and humanity, based on the empirical and grounded in the scientific method. Certainly, the work of Charles Darwin and his theory of natural selection and the evolution of astronomy as a science have led to a paradigmatic shift in thinking about the place of humans in the universe.
If god is a human invention or set of constructions, framed in anthropomorphic terms and having evolved as part of the development of human beings as a species, then god should be seen now as no more than a consolation at best and a devise for political and social control at worst, according to this group of sceptical atheistic thinkers, such as Richard Dawkins and his notion of the god delusion.
As the so-called opiate of the people (an oft-quoted notion attributed to Karl Marx), religion and the idea of god have both a suppressive and a surveillance function. God thus functions as an embodiment of power, woven into religious systems. There is an overt sense of moral control that is exerted through god-thinking. It has its own impenetrable logic that humans are born into or buy into.
It is also a mechanism for keeping an eye on what is normative for conduct in adherent communities and gatherings. This normative function has led to extremes in the way those who fail to confirm to religious rules are treated, or provokes behaviours from adherents that appear to defy what is acceptable in a modern civilised society that has the rule of law. In some countries it is even the basis for the legal system itself, such as seen in sharia law where there is a collapsing of public and private life. Even a cursory examination of human history in the last 1000 years points to the excesses and cruelty wrought through this seemingly out-dated notion of a transcendent and all-knowing god. Indeed, one could think of the Crucades or the Inquisition. God-thinking, then, is deeply imbued with ethical constructs that are exercised both by adherents and in society at large.
From a feminist perspective, god has become, and has always been for that matter, a mechanism for the patriarchal control of the female body, and has been, and still is, used to determine female status by defining it through religious constucts based on the verbatim of religious texts as a foundation for patriarchal values. The possibility of repression and subjugation in the name of god is perhaps one of the more compelling arguments for an inclusive secular society, one in which belief statements are not the basis for public morality nor the grounds for the way gender positions are defined.
According to this separationist explanation of the place of god in society, private views about god should not be the basis of public discourses about what constitutes a civil society, including the ethical codes of such a society. In the modern secular state, we need to move beyond supra-natural explanations in favour of rational and scientific explanations, based on naturalistic rather than metaphysical thinking. Some of the more strident atheists have taken this further with an interpretation that god is a dangerous delusion, one that has resulted in untold human suffering and misery. Humanity would be better if this delusion was jettisoned. Human evolution is still moving and in that movement god should be resigned to the trash bin of history, since it reflects an earlier, more simplistic, stage of human consciousness.
These two explanations-god as a beneficent, active and imminent agent in the world and god as a delusion that is dangerous in its scope-are not, I contend, satisfactory ways of understanding the notion of god and how it functions in human consciousness and in the collective awareness of religious communities.
A key problem with theistic and atheistic thinking is that both explanations of god actually distort the functionality of transcendence in human existence. By transcendence I mean that existential sense of being in the world and in the universe that is larger than the fragility of individual human existence or this sense of the divine and the spiritual that is replete with mystery and with the possibilities in serendipity. Transcendence involves looking for larger explanations and seeing the particular and the individual in terms of the whole and the universal. It is conceiving beauty, meaning, unity, connection and purpose beyond the particular but inclusive of it. Transcendence is a deeply felt sense of awe and a connectedness to the all rather than the particular. This notion of transcendence has been part of the human experience for thousands of years and continues to be a core driving force in finding meaning in existence. As the ancients looked to the sky and felt connection to land and place, there was this experience of transcendence, of an implicit order of existence. It is seen in all religious and spiritual traditions, even in modern secular notions of nationality and community identity with their shared values and non-religious rituals.
Theistic explanations of god embody transcendence in an entity that is called 'god', a being of some sort (who no one can ever describe satifactorily) defined in sets of traditions and often encoded in religious texts. This prescribed and delimited embodiment of god effectively directs human experiences of transcendence away from its core in the active existential meaning making in lived experience, to a more rigid notion of the divine as embodied perfection. The rigid, unchanging beingness of this god figure can lead to an unyielding set of moral precepts that effectively encase the possibilities in human existence and in the evolution of consciousness.
Atheistic explanations of god are equally caustic to spirituality and transcendence because such explanations sit in the logic of the either/or. This logic is based on the question, "Does god exist or not exist?" Since there is no empirical evidence for god's existence then, for atheists, this question is answered in the negative. But saying that god does not exist is not really saying anything at all, really. It is a hollow response devoid of content, and it is a response that ignores the genuine felt experiences of god by millions of adherants who practice faith and find consolation in this deep beyondness.
There is a more substantive problem with the atheist position than just it's either/or thinking and its insistence on interpreting meaning only in terms of empiricism. The problem is that the question of the existence of god, one that has occupied the pens of theologians and philosophers for 3000 years, is the wrong question. A better question is this: in what sense (or senses) does god exist? Or, to put it another way, how does god exist for each person or for each community of faith? So, the question of god is not one of being either/or (of existing or not existing) but is constituted in the notion of both/and (in the many manifestations of godness in human shared consciousness). Thus, it is fully inclusive of all the nuances of how human beings come to understand the term functionally. In sum, god is not singular (some supra-natural being) but lives in the plurality of the existential: in the many ways that we find coherent meaning in our experiences and in our consciousness and in the shared meanings that we find in community.
If we see god as entity, alongside other entities, as substance contingent to other substances, then the issue of the existence of god as being is problematic and becomes the playful toy of gleeful atheists who laugh at its preposterous nature. Indeed, if god in in the universe then he/she/it is an object in that same universe and thus subject to its laws, in which case god cannot act in the omniscient way claimed in many religious traditions. Further, if god is outside the universe then it is not possible to act in or be known in the universe. Thus, the notion of god as discrete being is ontologically problematic, a condition of the notion of god well discussed long ago by Spinoza.
However, if existence is found in transcendence, in the states of consciousness that are beyond the material substances that compose the universe, then god exists in the sense of being in the realm of meaning as a substrate there. I am aware that I am sounding rather platonic here. But my approach to this problem is not the same as Plato, who saw transcendence as being outside of consciousness and human experience in some eternal realm, beyond-universe and corporeal existence. Quite the contrary, divine transcendence is not outside or separate but woven into the core of human existence and into the structures of consciousness. It may well be a survival strategy of humans as a species in binding communities and providing an existential core to existence. So, god, I contend, is an integral phenomenon of human existence. God as meaning-consciousness then becomes the sense that drives intentional action and authenticity in the world for billions of people.
It is at this point that I want to introduce the issue of religious experience. I have heard atheists articulate their disdain for such experience, and even suggest that religious adherents are mistaken at best and psychologically deranged at worst. However, religious experience is a powerful existential engagement with the divine, however that is understood. It provides a unified sense of purposefulness that is especially affective in scope and transformative in function. For many ostensibly sane people of faith, religious experience provokes the good, though I am aware that extremism and excesses are possible. It is, I suggest, remarkable how similar are the experiences of people from vastly different religious traditions. This experience might not necessarily be gushingly emotional. It could be the earnest devotion of a Muslim in daily prayer or the gentle stir of a Christian hymn or the rhythmical chant of a Hindu prayer to a deity or the singing of the Torah in a synagogue. In these examples the unified core of meaning and the centeredness of the existential response are parts of the common experiential ground. God is thus a structural core in authentic experience.
Religious experience is especially formed and given linguistic shape in prayer. Prayer may be viewed in some quarters as a stylized form of address to a deity but in essence it is both a community-orientated expression and a personal call from self about the deepest human concerns and aspirations. It is a cry from concerns and a call for the need for action in the world. Prayer is thus a unifying articulation (formal or written, informal and spontaneous) of human trepidations and exaltations that, in fact, we all share.
In sum, instead of seeing god theistically as discrete entity, with all the philosophical and ethical problems that notion entails, and instead of dismissing the idea of god as delusion as many atheists do, there is a third way, an alternative that embraces the unifying and the good in the idea and proffers respect for the genuine religious experiences of people. This alternative is to conceive god as a universal thread of unified meaning that resides in experience and emerges in the performative out of such experience. It is an essential feature of consciousness that finds its concrete form in practices that empower and affirm individuals, and it acts as the glue within effective and inclusive religious communities.
God thus becomes the ground of our being: a delicately woven fabric within our awareness and consciousness that finds its greatest expression in altruism and in acts of compassion that affirm the worth of every person. The inwardness or the internality of god finds tangible form in intentional acts of goodness and justice. If one is willing to ask, listen and observe then, as I have, you will see this delicate woven fabric at play in all religious and spiritual traditions and practices. God is the name given to this ineffability and to the core of coalescing purpose that a human can discover in reflecting on the universe and in sensing the universal in the particular.
I have seen evidence of this third way in the intricate and embodied teachings and practices of Buddhism and the centredness of yoga. There are hints of it in the the mystical way that has found expression across faiths, religions and traditions. And there is a core of it in the movement for environmental consciousness that drives the need to protect this vulnerable planet we call earth. Perhaps it has been there all along in the indigenous spiritual connection to land experienced by tribes across the planet.
Conceiving god in this third way, has at least three benefits for how humans live, experience the world and relate at an individual, community, national and international level. The first is that god as fabric in consciousness brings a shared sense of spirituality across religions and faith traditions. There is thus room for dialogue, curiosity and shared hope as the problems of humanity are confronted together.
Secondly, there is a downplaying of difference and schism, which has been the instigator of conflict, war and religious fractures in the long and sorrow tale of human woe throughout history. In finding these narratives of commonality, in looking for shared spirituality, in reifying authentic felt religious experiences of joy, hope and connection, there is a chance to find a place for god that is not the preserve of religious zealots.
Finally, when we conceive god as unifying fabric in the core of our being, there is a sense of affinity that we feel for other spiritual beings that leads to compassion, understanding and openness; in other words, an ethics built on seeing the face of the other, as Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, has so beautifully articulated. In this way we can not only experience god in ourselves but god in the other, regardless of race, sexual orientation, gender, age, educational level, wealth, ethnicity or religious tradition.