Who is God? Part 6

Who is God?

Part 6: Is God simply our sense of reverence for life? And is that enough?

I am both attracted by, and torn by, the view of God as, in effect, and perhaps in reality, nothing more than “reverence for life”. I am perhaps being unfair by saying that God is “nothing more” than reverence for life, as reverence for life is a very wonderful thing indeed, and if we all had it perhaps many of the world’s problems would be dealt with. Nevertheless, I am troubled by the idea of God as reverence for life, for, if he is just that, why talk about God at all? Why not just admit that the highest spiritual goal for humanity is to have reverence for life? We could decide that all our talk through the ages about God has simply been a story to help us to develop our reverence for life. We could, of course, continue our religious life once we accept that God is “simply a story”, and we might in a strange counter-intuitive way, for humans are strange counter-intuitive beings, decide that it is better to keep talking about God, for somehow our reverence for life comes alive when we put it in a story about God. Such an approach would help all believers who struggle to believe in the personal, theistic God, for we could now all clearly understand that it is “just” a story. It would also enable all secularists to also become religious, because they also embrace the God-story as an effective way to hold that reverence for life, which is now recognised as the ultimate goal – and recognised as what we have meant all along when we used the word, “God”. This is certainly a practical solution to the problems of believing in God, and may well be much more effective than trying to teach people to just have reverence for life, as a principle to live by. We all understand that if we extracted the key ideals from a film and published them in a list, we are likely to be unmoved by them, but those ideals put into a story in the film may move us greatly, perhaps sufficiently to change our lives.

Nevertheless, for the searcher after truth, it does seem to me that we have lost God. It is now reverence for life that we desire, and the concept of God is simply a useful vehicle to help us to live with that reverence. And perhaps that is ultimately what religion is: a way of living, especially in community. The ultimate goal in religion is to find a way of life that brings peace, meaning and purpose, which limits the harm we do, and enhances our care for others. “God” is our invention to spur us on in this goal and to help us to understand what the goal is.

I am often struck by the religion of the ancient Greeks, which seems to me to be the personification of qualities and values. So, if it is courage that you need, or mercy, or whatever quality, you do not simply summon up from within yourself the desired quality, instead you call on the gods, and implore that the god or goddess of whatever quality it is you desire will come to you and impart it to you. The beauty of this view of religion is that it can be held literally, in very simplistic form, as believing that, of course it was not me in myself who became brave, it was the god of bravery dwelling in me. However, the religion can also be understood in a very sophisticated form: “Don’t be silly; of course we don’t literally believe that the only reason I blew my top was that the god of rage over-powered me, but it expresses in poetic, mythic form the very deep truth about how I seemed to lose control of my actions, and it helps me to understand and come to terms with that.