Thoughts on the Nature of God
The existence of God can be neither proven nor disproven. In a series of essays, I tried to show that whether the universe is deterministic or not also cannot be proven or disproven. Additionally, I showed that one could put constraints on the problem and reduce it to a question of whether the universe is infinitely continuous at any microscopic level, or not, if it were then it was deterministic. Analogously I can argue that though we cannot prove or disprove the existence of God, we can put constraints on what His nature must be if he does exist, given the knowledge we have of the world today and our existing concepts of God.
Generally God is considered an immaterial being that lives somewhere called Heaven. As commonly conceived, He is the ultimate dualism problem, in that being immaterial, He can still affect the material world. One of the implications of my saying God only works through people, is that we can find a way around this dualistic problem. More on that below.
The first constraint that I would argue for is that God does not break the rules of nature. In another essay where I first stated this I discussed its implications on the possibility of miracles. That is outside this discussion but will be covered at another time. What is important, however, is the question of a friend of mine who is a Lutheran lay pastor. He and I had some interesting discussions, and when I said that God does not break the rules of nature, his response was, “Is it because He will not break them, or because He cannot break them?” Further on in this essay, we will see that this has a major impact on the theodicic question. For now let’s look at how traditional Christian belief approaches this.
According to the Biblical tradition, God created everything, the Heavens and the Earth. Today we would generalize this to the Universe. Accordingly then, He also had to have created the laws by which it operates. Since He created the Laws of Nature, then He should be able to use or not use them as he sees fit. Many Christians today, think that God is directly involved in all events on earth, both natural and human-caused. They truly believe that He controls the weather, or can if he wishes, and other natural disasters as well as human-caused evil. They ascribe to a God that is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.
This belief leads them into some very serious difficulties when faced with the apparent success of evil or a natural disaster. The immediate question is, “How can God let this happen?” This is often met with the response, “It is not for us to know God’s ways,” or some equivalent. According to an excellent book on the history of evil in philosophic thought, this question was first asked in a meaningful way after the great earthquake in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1755. The answers all amount to, “I don’t know.”
No matter how we unpack the trio of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence, it is internally self-contradictory. It’s like the old sales saying, “Faster, cheaper, better, pick two.” In this particular essay, we will approach the problem as if omniscience and omnibenevolence are valid.
To justify this choice we can point out that, if God exists, he should be in a position of being able to know so much more than us, that whether or not His knowledge is truly infinite (the ultimate meaning of omniscient), it is so far ahead of ours that we can take it as a working example of omniscience. How could His knowledge be greater than ours? This is another implied ability of God, to know all that we know and more. If we constrain His knowledge just to that which we as humans collectively know, it is much vaster than what any one person knows. This is not just academic knowledge but all knowledge of life under all circumstances of human living. It is fairly simple to assume that He is able to sort and analyze this knowledge, removing contradictions, recognizing similarities and patterns, and defining gaps, given that He is able to acquire it. Generally, God is given greater knowledge than this, so we can take as an operational definition that God is omniscient.
Also we can point out that if God is not omnibenevolent, then why should we worship Him or respect Him? If his motivation is not our best interests, then there is no reason to have Him as God, other than to bribe him to be nice to us, to bend His ends to ours, or at least let us survive and hopefully prosper. There are some other implications of this question when we consider omnipotence.
Let us first examine the consequences of true omnipotence. First of all, if God is truly omnipotent, then He must have omniscience. Otherwise, He has power that he cannot correctly apply or perhaps even use for a failure in the knowledge required to do so. Anything less than omniscience immediately implies less than omnipotence. But if he is omnipotent, then he has the ability to alter anything, change the forces of nature, even, in principle change time. If he can do this, then why do bad things happen to good people, to quote a book title? The problem is that by our moral standards, he is letting evil happen[1] when he could prevent it, and is therefore culpable of being a part of it. One might make a utilitarian argument that says more harm would occur if He did not let it happen, but considering we posit God as a deontological being not a utilitarian being, this is a contradiction of Christian belief. It also contradicts the omnibenevolence attribution, or rather reduces it to a utilitarian calculation as well.
Does He follow the laws of nature out of the respect for our intellectual strivings to understand them? After all, if He changes and alters them willy-nilly, we would never understand them. But then again, why should it be in His interests for us to do so? Why should He want humans to be the cantankerous, ego-driven, independent creatures, that we are? For that matter why should he want us to have free will? These last two questions are obviously rhetorical, but they touch on much of the mystery that comes with the omni-triad.
From my perspective, the idea that God is not omnipotent is the easiest way to deal with the contradiction. God follows the laws of nature, because He cannot do other. At the same time this absolves Him of the problems of theodicy. He allows evil to happen only because He cannot prevent it. But what does that leave us then? He can still be omniscient and omnibenevolent and be unable to do all that He wants to help us.
But if He cannot disobey the laws of nature, just as we cannot, what is His value? What can he do? After all we define him as not material in our world. For that matter, if He is not all powerful, how do we know He is there to start with? Why should we have any belief in Him or His efficacy? If we expect physical demonstration of Him, there is no reason. The example of the professor that says, “If there is a God, let Him strike me dead in the next 20 seconds,” and twenty seconds later says, “I’m still alive, there is no God,” is cheap theatrics not valid philosophy or theology. It also happens to be massive arrogance to consider oneself so important among all the people of the world that God would take the time to strike one person dead just to show His existence. For that matter, it also runs against the omnibenevolence idea, because God is not benevolent to just believers, but to all.
There is a means by which God can be effective on earth, people. God communicates with people.[2] In the Old Testament it was often in dreams or visions. There are stories of direct conversation, e.g. Abram and God over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. My own thoughts are that it can be dreams or visions but also something known in a moment of quiet openness. It is not necessarily a voice or vision, but knowledge, and it is conveyed as a choice. In one sense this seems more impotent than potent, but humans are the biggest show on the planet for better or for worse. And regardless of the historical theories that times make the man, history is full of people that single-handedly made a difference either by their own efforts or by recruiting people to help.
We as humans effect the world around us by creating physical objects to change it. We become more effective by recruiting other people to help us do this. From this activity come our societies and cultures. It is not a far stretch to consider that God would do the same thing by asking people to do things that they might not think of themselves, but once having considered it, subscribe to the effort with all their will. And yes, one can look at it like a numbers game just as sales people do, out of so many candidates will come prospects, and out of so many prospects will come closures. The only thing I would think is that with God’s greater knowledge, He has a higher success ratio.
Again however we still must consider that using people is not perfectly efficient. Some evil is so great that only large groups of powerfully motivated people can overcome it. Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Stalin’s USSR, and Mao’s Red China come to mind. The first fell by the force of the Allied Armies. The other two fell from the combined Cold War efforts and their own internal contradictions. Also not all good seems to be rewarded, but that is another topic.
After first admitting our ignorance of whether God exists or not for certain, if we accept His existence as a belief, then what value is that belief? First it is the North of our moral compass. All morality to theists, at least those that believe that God is more than the First Watchmaker of the Universe, starts with what they think God wants as moral standards. (It is not the place to discuss here that most of those standards can be arrived at from non-theistic belief systems.) Most Christians take it much further, ascribing to Him all the power we discussed above, and then asking for various blessings, assistance, and forgiveness. That discussion is for another time. Second, it may be a source of comfort in times of trouble—God is watching out and will help as He is able. Third, He may indeed “talk” to people when they are open to it and He needs their assistance. It is not a forceful “Du wilst,” but “I would like you to….,” or “Have you considered….”
[1]It is evil as opposed to bad because having the power to control it makes Him responsible for it, therefore it can be considered intentional.
[2]It becomes highly speculative physics, but gets around the problem, if we hypothesize that God exists as some sort of field complex in the dimensions other than our own three. Since speculative physics now hypothesizes that the universe is composed of many dimensions, then all things may inhabit more than just the three dimensions we are used to. God would interact with humans through their nervous system’s electrical fields, via the non-spacial dimensions.
Generally God is considered an immaterial being that lives somewhere called Heaven. As commonly conceived, He is the ultimate dualism problem, in that being immaterial, He can still affect the material world. One of the implications of my saying God only works through people, is that we can find a way around this dualistic problem. More on that below.
The first constraint that I would argue for is that God does not break the rules of nature. In another essay where I first stated this I discussed its implications on the possibility of miracles. That is outside this discussion but will be covered at another time. What is important, however, is the question of a friend of mine who is a Lutheran lay pastor. He and I had some interesting discussions, and when I said that God does not break the rules of nature, his response was, “Is it because He will not break them, or because He cannot break them?” Further on in this essay, we will see that this has a major impact on the theodicic question. For now let’s look at how traditional Christian belief approaches this.
According to the Biblical tradition, God created everything, the Heavens and the Earth. Today we would generalize this to the Universe. Accordingly then, He also had to have created the laws by which it operates. Since He created the Laws of Nature, then He should be able to use or not use them as he sees fit. Many Christians today, think that God is directly involved in all events on earth, both natural and human-caused. They truly believe that He controls the weather, or can if he wishes, and other natural disasters as well as human-caused evil. They ascribe to a God that is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.
This belief leads them into some very serious difficulties when faced with the apparent success of evil or a natural disaster. The immediate question is, “How can God let this happen?” This is often met with the response, “It is not for us to know God’s ways,” or some equivalent. According to an excellent book on the history of evil in philosophic thought, this question was first asked in a meaningful way after the great earthquake in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1755. The answers all amount to, “I don’t know.”
No matter how we unpack the trio of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence, it is internally self-contradictory. It’s like the old sales saying, “Faster, cheaper, better, pick two.” In this particular essay, we will approach the problem as if omniscience and omnibenevolence are valid.
To justify this choice we can point out that, if God exists, he should be in a position of being able to know so much more than us, that whether or not His knowledge is truly infinite (the ultimate meaning of omniscient), it is so far ahead of ours that we can take it as a working example of omniscience. How could His knowledge be greater than ours? This is another implied ability of God, to know all that we know and more. If we constrain His knowledge just to that which we as humans collectively know, it is much vaster than what any one person knows. This is not just academic knowledge but all knowledge of life under all circumstances of human living. It is fairly simple to assume that He is able to sort and analyze this knowledge, removing contradictions, recognizing similarities and patterns, and defining gaps, given that He is able to acquire it. Generally, God is given greater knowledge than this, so we can take as an operational definition that God is omniscient.
Also we can point out that if God is not omnibenevolent, then why should we worship Him or respect Him? If his motivation is not our best interests, then there is no reason to have Him as God, other than to bribe him to be nice to us, to bend His ends to ours, or at least let us survive and hopefully prosper. There are some other implications of this question when we consider omnipotence.
Let us first examine the consequences of true omnipotence. First of all, if God is truly omnipotent, then He must have omniscience. Otherwise, He has power that he cannot correctly apply or perhaps even use for a failure in the knowledge required to do so. Anything less than omniscience immediately implies less than omnipotence. But if he is omnipotent, then he has the ability to alter anything, change the forces of nature, even, in principle change time. If he can do this, then why do bad things happen to good people, to quote a book title? The problem is that by our moral standards, he is letting evil happen[1] when he could prevent it, and is therefore culpable of being a part of it. One might make a utilitarian argument that says more harm would occur if He did not let it happen, but considering we posit God as a deontological being not a utilitarian being, this is a contradiction of Christian belief. It also contradicts the omnibenevolence attribution, or rather reduces it to a utilitarian calculation as well.
Does He follow the laws of nature out of the respect for our intellectual strivings to understand them? After all, if He changes and alters them willy-nilly, we would never understand them. But then again, why should it be in His interests for us to do so? Why should He want humans to be the cantankerous, ego-driven, independent creatures, that we are? For that matter why should he want us to have free will? These last two questions are obviously rhetorical, but they touch on much of the mystery that comes with the omni-triad.
From my perspective, the idea that God is not omnipotent is the easiest way to deal with the contradiction. God follows the laws of nature, because He cannot do other. At the same time this absolves Him of the problems of theodicy. He allows evil to happen only because He cannot prevent it. But what does that leave us then? He can still be omniscient and omnibenevolent and be unable to do all that He wants to help us.
But if He cannot disobey the laws of nature, just as we cannot, what is His value? What can he do? After all we define him as not material in our world. For that matter, if He is not all powerful, how do we know He is there to start with? Why should we have any belief in Him or His efficacy? If we expect physical demonstration of Him, there is no reason. The example of the professor that says, “If there is a God, let Him strike me dead in the next 20 seconds,” and twenty seconds later says, “I’m still alive, there is no God,” is cheap theatrics not valid philosophy or theology. It also happens to be massive arrogance to consider oneself so important among all the people of the world that God would take the time to strike one person dead just to show His existence. For that matter, it also runs against the omnibenevolence idea, because God is not benevolent to just believers, but to all.
There is a means by which God can be effective on earth, people. God communicates with people.[2] In the Old Testament it was often in dreams or visions. There are stories of direct conversation, e.g. Abram and God over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. My own thoughts are that it can be dreams or visions but also something known in a moment of quiet openness. It is not necessarily a voice or vision, but knowledge, and it is conveyed as a choice. In one sense this seems more impotent than potent, but humans are the biggest show on the planet for better or for worse. And regardless of the historical theories that times make the man, history is full of people that single-handedly made a difference either by their own efforts or by recruiting people to help.
We as humans effect the world around us by creating physical objects to change it. We become more effective by recruiting other people to help us do this. From this activity come our societies and cultures. It is not a far stretch to consider that God would do the same thing by asking people to do things that they might not think of themselves, but once having considered it, subscribe to the effort with all their will. And yes, one can look at it like a numbers game just as sales people do, out of so many candidates will come prospects, and out of so many prospects will come closures. The only thing I would think is that with God’s greater knowledge, He has a higher success ratio.
Again however we still must consider that using people is not perfectly efficient. Some evil is so great that only large groups of powerfully motivated people can overcome it. Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Stalin’s USSR, and Mao’s Red China come to mind. The first fell by the force of the Allied Armies. The other two fell from the combined Cold War efforts and their own internal contradictions. Also not all good seems to be rewarded, but that is another topic.
After first admitting our ignorance of whether God exists or not for certain, if we accept His existence as a belief, then what value is that belief? First it is the North of our moral compass. All morality to theists, at least those that believe that God is more than the First Watchmaker of the Universe, starts with what they think God wants as moral standards. (It is not the place to discuss here that most of those standards can be arrived at from non-theistic belief systems.) Most Christians take it much further, ascribing to Him all the power we discussed above, and then asking for various blessings, assistance, and forgiveness. That discussion is for another time. Second, it may be a source of comfort in times of trouble—God is watching out and will help as He is able. Third, He may indeed “talk” to people when they are open to it and He needs their assistance. It is not a forceful “Du wilst,” but “I would like you to….,” or “Have you considered….”
[1]It is evil as opposed to bad because having the power to control it makes Him responsible for it, therefore it can be considered intentional.
[2]It becomes highly speculative physics, but gets around the problem, if we hypothesize that God exists as some sort of field complex in the dimensions other than our own three. Since speculative physics now hypothesizes that the universe is composed of many dimensions, then all things may inhabit more than just the three dimensions we are used to. God would interact with humans through their nervous system’s electrical fields, via the non-spacial dimensions.
posted by Bill | 5:51 PM
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