Who is God? Part 7

Who is God?

Part 7: Is God just in the mind or is there something more?

So far, we have begun to explore alternative conceptions of God, and I believe we have done enough to justify belief in such a God. It does add something to even a principled atheistic philosophy of life of commitment to profound values. However, these conceptions were under the broad path of non-personal understandings of God – as a force, a sense, a framework, but not as an independent personal agent in the classical sense. For me, as someone who has always treasured my sense of a personal relationship with God, I’m not sure that this is enough. So, let’s explore the other broad path of understandings of God and see if a belief in a personal agent God is still justified – most notably given what we said earlier about there being no clear evidence of God acting in the world.

As a religious person, I’ve always resented the secular criticism that belief in God is “just a psychological effect in the mind”. It’s certainly a valid and powerful criticism. We began by facing the challenge to religious belief in God that “there’s no-one out there”, and the first broad path encompassing ideas of God such as “the ground of our being” were an attempt to counter that – and pretty successfully too, I think. The question is whether we can do the same for the view of God as a personal agent. I must say that I am much easier with the complaint that God is just “all in the mind” than I used to be for I now realise: where else are we going to experience anything except in our minds? Everything that we experience in the material world – which secularists have no difficulty with accepting – is experienced within our minds. How can our experience of God be anywhere else except in our minds? In this respect, the only substantial difference between God and everything else is that everything else that appears in our minds does so through the intermediary of our senses – in contact with some external, tangible material object, whereas our experience of God is directly into our minds, putting us in contact with a tangible spiritual object. There is the objection that we are talking about objects. We could argue about whether it’s possible to have an object that is spiritual – though believers may counter that it is simply because God is a spiritual entity that he is able to “appear to us” directly in our minds rather than through our senses. There is a stronger objection that the point about material objects is that the senses are not simply an intermediary between our minds and external reality, but, rather, the experiences in our minds derived from our senses are real because they relate back to an actually existent, external object. However, for God, there is no verifiable proof that the experience in our minds of God relates back to anything that actually exists apart from our minds. We can note that I can experience in my mind now the image of a unicorn or a two-headed gorilla, but that in no way implies that such things exist. However, I can also experience in my mind now a feeling of deep love for my family, or patriotism, a sense of fair play, the importance of telling the truth. These are not physical entities, but they are definitely entities. So, a danger of trying to defend existence in God through the “ground of our being” or “reverence for life” route is that these are, indeed, definitely entities, but in the category of “ideas”, and so they are only real in the mind, and we have not established belief in a God who is “out there”. And I think the important aspect of this desire is that God should be more than my mind; he must not be simply my creation, of which I have charge.