Good God!

Hey, let’s talk about God.  I don’t mean using His Name in vain, or anything like that.  And I don’t mean let’s shout at each other like we were in church.  I’m talking about having a serious discussion, with God being the topic.

In the middle of the last century, the hot topic was Is God Dead?  But to me, that was jumping the gun, because I’m not sure anybody ever really got around to establishing that He existed in the first place.  Stephen Hawking, who is a self-professed atheist, states that the laws of physics can explain the existence of the Universe without the need for postulating the existence of a Creator.  I guess we’re going to have to take Hawking’s word for that, because physics at his level is Greek to me, and if it’s Greek to me, it’s Greek to you, believe me, unless of course you happen to be Greek.  But even assuming that Hawking is correct (as we must, for our purposes, anyway) all he’s saying is that there doesn’t have to be a God, and he doesn’t think there is one.  But not even Stephen Hawking can definitively say that there isn’t a God.

These days, we hear a lot about something called “Intelligent Design,” which is just a fancy way of saying, “if this is here, Somebody must have made it.”  Well, I’ll take Stephen Hawking’s word for the fact that "it ain’t necessarily so,” at least with respect to the individual marvels that the “creation scientists” typically point to as “proof” of the existence of God.  But again, I suppose that Somebody might have “made” the world.  But even if that were so, we’d have no better chance of being able to prove it than the ants digging in that ant farm in your kid’s room would have of proving that you exist.

So, maybe there’s a God.  Maybe there’s a being or a spirit or an entity that created all that we’re aware of as the Universe.  That’s where you’ve got to start.  So how do you prove whether or not there is such a One?  Lots of philosophers and theologians have tried, and for various reasons, none has succeeded.

Plato and Aristotle, among others, advanced what is called a “Cosmological Argument” for the existence of God.   Many others, including most notably St. Thomas Aquinas, have elaborated upon it.  The Cosmological Argument goes like this:  Everything has a beginning, and occurs as the result of some cause.  If you go back far enough, there has to be a beginning of everything, and the Cause of that beginning is what you’d have to call the First Cause… or the Uncaused Cause… or God.  This is why you’ve got to think of God as eternal—if nothing caused Him, then by definition he was always (and will always be) present.  For those of you who attend Christian churches, that might ring a bell:  “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, etc.”  Of course, Stephen Hawking seems to be challenging that, but if you think about it a little, you come to realize that there’s a major flaw in his reasoning, in that it requires an assumption that the laws of physics always existed as we now know them, and if that’s so, where’s the First Cause for them?

Stephen Hawking and most other physicists, by the way, trace the beginning of our Universe to something called the Big Bang, and conveniently deal with the problem of what, if anything, existed before the Big Bang by concluding that a) there’s no way of knowing; and b) it doesn’t matter to our understanding of the existing Universe in any event.  Of course, the Universe is and always has been defined by physicists by reference to what we know about it, and our conception of the Universe has changed quite a lot since it was conceived, a few thousand years ago,  as something flat carried upon the back of a giant turtle and surrounded by a series of crystal spheres, so I’ll bet that if you got a couple of drinks into Stephen Hawking he might admit the possibility that there are a few more questions to be answered around the fringes of his current theories.

Of course, both Plato and Aristotle believed in an eternal cosmos, that existed without beginning and without end, and that sounds a little more like the prayer mentioned above.  “Pantheists” believe that the Universe itself is God—i.e., that God is everywhere.  That works out pretty nicely, because if the Universe itself is everywhere and is eternal it would pretty much be occupying the same space as the omnipresent and eternal God that we’re looking for here.  Plotinus, back in the Third Century, felt that the Supreme Being would necessarily cause the Universe to exist, merely by the fact of His own existence, “creatio ex deo,” as expressed in Latin.

There’s something called the Ontological Argument, among the proponents of which was one Rene Descartes (the “I think, therefore I am” man.)  Those who favor the ontological approach to the problem of the existence of God usually define God as an entity “than which there can be no greater.”  Well, that’s clearly inviting discord, because who’s the greatest is pretty much a question of opinion, at least at the elite level.  Remember, even though Muhammad Ali just flat out told everybody the he was The Greatest, people fought him anyway, and eventually even whipped his ass… sort of.  And why would we assume that our Creator would necessarily be The Greatest?  In Robert Heinlein’s novella “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag,” for example, the Creator of our Universe is revealed to be a fledgling artist whose work (i.e., our Universe, including us) is judged—presumably by entities greater than the Creator—to be so seriously flawed that it has to be painted over. Maybe we—and our entire Universe—are just a mistake. How would we know? Of course, there are some people (like the Biblical Moses, for example) who report that God talks to them personally.  Oral Roberts once told his flock that a 900-foot Jesus tapped on the window of his upper-story office and told him to build a cancer treatment center.  Another time, Roberts announced that God would be “calling [him] home” unless he raised eight million bucks by the middle of March.  There are visitations from angels reported, too, and what about the Bible itself, touted as the Word of God? Like the old song says, “How do I know?  The Bible tells me so.”  Sounds a little circular, if you ask me.

And even if there is a Creator, who says that He would necessarily be all-knowing, all-powerful or all-good?  And how could He possibly be all three of those things, given the travesty of human history?  If, for example, God was all-knowing, He would have known about the Holocaust before, during and after the event.  If He was all-powerful, He could have prevented it.  And if He was all-good, He would have prevented it.  Does the occurrence of the Holocaust therefore prove that there is no God?  Or only that there is no God that is all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good?  (This, by the way, is called “The Problem of Evil,” and was first stated, so far as we know, by Epicurus.)

What if God were only two out of three?  If He were only all-powerful and all-good, for example, but not all-knowing, he might have just missed the Holocaust.  The Universe is vast.  Or maybe the “Deists” are right, and God just lost interest after creating the Universe, and pretty much lets it run itself—sort of like if you had an uncle who won the lottery, but figured that you were pretty much on your own if you fell behind on your mortgage.  A far scarier prospect, to me anyway, is the possibility that God might exist, and be all-powerful and all-knowing, but just not all-good.  After all, we’re supposedly made in His image, and it really doesn’t look like there was a serious attempt to make us all-good.  Or maybe the Holocaust was a special case, sort of like the invasion of Iraq, in which the shot-caller’s judgment was warped by pique at the victims’ previous bad acts against a relative… or something like that.

When we pray, to Whom, exactly, are we talking?  Is it to the Person in Charge, or simply to a lackey sitting in a celestial call-center?  Or an intern?  Or an apprentice?

Now, when I lie awake in the middle of the night and fret about all this stuff, I really tick off the lady of the house, who proudly boasts of her freedom from religious indoctrination and wants to know why in God’s name (well, she doesn’t say it like that, of course) I want to waste my time pondering the imponderable.  Heck, that’s like asking why I want to waste my time on James Bond or Star Trek… in other words, a good question.  But I guess there’s a part of me that wants to know, in the event I’m ever tempted to pray for anything, whether it would be more like I’m petitioning the White House or Santa Claus. Well, God and Santa are both magic, and either way, you might get an answer, but it might not be the one you’d like.  Still, from being a kid I remember that even if Santa didn’t bring me exactly what I wanted every time, he never gave me a real kick in the teeth like a World War, an auto accident, or a cancer diagnosis, either.  God, on the other hand, is always “waxing wroth” and smiting people… or so it says in His Own Book, anyway, and apparently, unlike Santa, or even the dentist, He never gives out toys.