Who is God? Part 8

Who is God?

Part 8: Even if we cannot prove that God is an independent agent “out there”, in practice, he operates as though he is.

Can such belief be justified? Belief in what I would describe as a “personal God”?

I have written at greater length elsewhere, outlining my ideas on God as an experience of the transcendent who expresses to us an independent voice. A brief summary would be as follows.

There is an experience of the transcendent. Is this “just” in our heads or is it an experience of something “out there”? It’s probably impossible to decide this, given what we’ve said about all our experiences (including tables, chairs etc) being within our minds. However, the experience of the transcendent certainly seems to fit into the same sort of category of entity as love, truth, beauty etc. It is an experience that is there to be discovered. Crucially, this experience of the transcendent is experienced by us “with a personal face”. That is, we do not experience, for example, being inspired by a profound principle, we experience a relationship with someone. That is, the transcendent certainly appears to us to have an independent, active quality, rather than merely being the passive recipient, or reflector-back, of whatever thoughts and feelings we put onto it. This could all be a peculiarity of how our minds work, so that, although it appears to us that we are in a relationship with someone external to ourselves, we are, in fact, simply having an inner conversation with ourselves. My key point is, firstly that we have no way of telling which it is, and, if, in practice our experience of God (even if it could somehow be shown to be falsely perceived as a personal relationship with someone else) operates in ways that are indistinguishable from how a relationship with someone other than ourselves works, then – in practice – we are having a relationship with a God who is “out there”.

I feel that this is a pretty sound argument to establish a justifiable belief in a God who is more than “just a psychological effect in our minds”. We still have huge theological issues to answer for traditional believers. A key one is that scepticism we noted about whether God is able to act in the world – to change anything that would otherwise have happened anyway in the material universe. If God “can’t do anything”, then this is a huge loss for most believers. Many would question what’s the point of God if he can’t do anything to help you. He might as well be “just in our minds” – that is, an invention of our own minds. However, we did note how many secularists who reject faith in God are rejecting an unworthy view of God – for example God as a fairy Godmother who waves her magic wand to take all our troubles away. And we noted when considering the “ground of our being” way, that those who have succeeded in continuing to believe despite severe doubts have done so through creating a much more sophisticated understanding of God. So, perhaps, on deeper thought, it is not disastrous to belief in God to accept that, “No, God does not change the world” – except, of course, and this is a very big thing indeed, in the way he changes the world through changing us. Perhaps human agency is how God achieves his will – and this is clearly a very profound idea indeed, and well-worth constructing a faith around.