What use is God if he can’t actually do anything for us? Part 9

What use is God if he can’t actually do anything for us?

Part 9: Where have we got to?

My new framework of understanding God as the voice in our heads successfully retains what is, in practice, the essence of religion for most people: the sense of a personal relationship with God, who loves them, guides and strengthens them, and to whom we can talk and receive answers as the word of God to us in the particular situations of our lives. We have justified a life of faith that makes sense within the indisputable ultimate framework of reality contained in the outlook that we are products of the Big Bang and evolution. In living our lives, our faith is just as vibrant as ever, and, in practice, believers would notice no difference between their life of faith with the new understanding of God and their life of faith with the traditional understanding of God – within this life on earth.

However, our attempt to bring faith within the sphere recognised by science through the Big Bang and evolution has ruled out the possibility of life after death. On investigating this, we see that this is a very great loss indeed. Of course, if there is no such thing as life after death, we need to accept that – and always follow the truth, so, in one respect, we have not lost anything, for the previous belief that we would meet again in heaven was mistaken. It’s also perfectly possible to commit to a life of faith based on the (true, if it is true) understanding that we only have one life – and we just need to be strong in spirit to do so.

Personally, I think I can cope with the ideas that justice will never be done, and that specifics of religion will need to be interpreted. However, the thought that those that I love so much will one day cease to be is hard to bear, and so the loss of this traditional hope is enormous.

We will need to consider then the traditional call to simply have faith that God does indeed exist as believers have always said he does, and that he will give us eternal life in heaven. We simply have to accept that on this point (I think all the other points still stand) it is impossible to bring faith within the realms of what science can support. On reflection, this was always going to be the case as science is only able to investigate the material universe, so, as life after death depends on the existence of a metaphysical spiritual reality, it was always going to be beyond what we can accept with certainty rather than by faith alone.