Who is God? Part 11

Who is God?

Part 11: If God is for this life only, then that is enough, and if there is more, so much the better

I suppose I should pause before finishing and consider if I have answered my question: Who is God? The answer is, of course, “Of course not”. This conclusion can be out of due respect for God who is obviously going to be beyond our ability to “pin down” and describe, like we might any other thing. However, beyond that piety it is also clear that I have merely bumbled about trying to say a few pertinent things, very inadequately. Nevertheless, if I try and sum up what I appear to be saying, I think it’s as follows.

God is a something. He is an entity, experienced in our minds (where else can we experience anything). However, he is an entity experienced as a person, rather than, say, a force or a principle or an idea. Although our relationship with this person is an interior process within our hearts and minds, it seems to “call to us” from beyond ourselves. That is, we are not simply having an inner conversation or inner reflections (no matter how profound or satisfying), we are having a relationship with someone other than ourselves who is “out there”. Whether there is ultimately someone out there is something we necessarily have to be agnostic about because we simply do not know and cannot know. If our experience strikes us as being of a relationship with someone else who is “out there”, that is apart from ourselves, but it is impossible for us to tell the difference between a relationship with someone who IS genuinely out there from a relationship with someone who appears to be out there but who is really entirely within our own minds, then we can never tell for certain if there is a God or not – in those traditional terms where God is only real if he is out there. This agnosticism is something we simply have to live with because there is nothing we can do about it. However, in terms of the life of faith, my key conclusion would be, as what we’ve just said about not being able to tell the difference is true, then, in practice, the experience of God operates exactly as though there truly, really is a God out there. I think the ultimate stumbling block for atheists is that they have feared, “Yes, this is all well and good, but IF it should ultimately turn out that there is no God out there, I will ultimately be a fool and be cheated out of what I hoped for”. It is as though I underwent an arduous journey because I was told there would be a wonderful destination at the end of it to make it all worthwhile – but I discovered that there is no wonderful destination.

However, this is using the model whereby faith is a wearisome loss of what might have been the joys of life in order to gain some wonderful heavenly reward, only to discover that you deprived yourself for no reason. However, everything I said about what it is I truly value about my faith in God shows that this is a completely false understanding of religion. It is clear to me that faith is what enriches life beyond measure and which costs me no good thing. IF it should turn out that after such a wonderfully fulfilling life of faith there is ALSO a life after death (whether that is just for the faithful or universally enjoyed) then that is for me a bonus. It’s a little unfair of me to call it a “bonus” for if such a life does exist it will be ineffably wonderful, but my sense is that my life of faith here on planet earth is reward enough.

To the atheist not wishing to be made a fool of I would say this. If you are right, and there is no life after death, then you will never discover that this is so, for when you die, your consciousness will cease and you will have no experience of anything after. This is true for me too, but it is only those who believe (IF life after death depends on faith) who will discover that they are, in fact right. This seems quite important to me. You are worried not to “bet on the wrong horse” but you will never know if you were right or wrong. However, those who bet on faith, if they are wrong they also will never know, but if they are right, then then will discover that.

It seems to me that we have a choice. I want to say that God is real and so the best choice we can make is to commit ourselves to living in relationship with him. However, I have to accept that I do not know if God is real, I simply believe that he is. Nevertheless, we have a choice. Looking at it now, it seems rather a bizarre choice, in that how can it be that it should be an open choice on a matter of such importance, but I do think it is the most important choice that human beings ever make. We have a free choice whether to believe in God or not. There is no compelling proof to convince us that we should. But neither should we be swayed by the modern secular view that it is foolish to believe in him. I believe we have seen that it is perfectly possible to frame our understanding of God in such a way that it is entirely reasonable and supremely fulfilling to live a life of faith in him.