Who is God?
Part 12: What if God is not?
An atheist might complain that I am not facing up seriously to the possibility that there is no God. I challenge them to respond to my claims that it is reasonable and beneficial to have faith in God, but am I open to their claim that “He is not there” – out there or anywhere else. However, I think that everything above recognises that possibility. I have acknowledged that extreme scepticism about God is valid, that the evidence for him is at least ambivalent, and the whole discussion above is prompted by an attempt to still find scope for belief when traditional understandings of God – under the banner of “the God of classical theism” – have been undercut. I agree that the best two options to this challenge are to either give up faith and become an atheist, or find an alternative understanding of God. It is that which this article has explored, and, I believe, shown ways forward for belief.
So, when I pose myself the question: “What if it was possible to show definitively that there is no God “out there” as an independent agent?”, I don’t mean to suggest that I have any further doubts. What I mean is that we would have to come to a clearer categorisation of what our beliefs in God actually are. I think a very critical assessment that they are a delusion, a fantasy, simply false, is not justified. Believers would simply have to accept that the word “God” refers to “the idea of God”. In this case, God would indeed be “just in the mind”, or a psychological state, but I don’t see any insuperable obstacle for believers to overcome, and they would just say, “OK, that’s what my belief is then: a set of ideas, values, stories, principles, rituals, a moral code, a basis for community, a way of looking at the world, a way of living. Fine; this is what I choose to live by and how I love living”. All that would have happened is that the inescapable agnosticism that was mentioned earlier – because it is simply impossible to prove God’s existence or lack of existence – has been replaced by certainty – if such certainty was somehow possible.
Believers such as me, who hold to a view of a personal God, would have to accept that God is after all a psychological state that I have created in my own mind. The supremely precious and perfect God whom I believe in is an ideal which I (with thanks to the faithful communities through the ages) have taken to heart and revere, using it as a sounding board for my thoughts and a generator or reflector-back of many powerful and positive values and energy. The supremely precious interior life, which I believed to be caused by a relationship with God is, in fact, an interior relationship with myself, whereby a portion of my mind has taken on the persona and, indeed, the character and qualities of God, and I now happily chat away with myself, using it as a mechanism to encourage myself in the way of life I approve of.
The key question would be whether I could continue with this faith if I knew for certain that this is what I’m doing, and there is “no God out there”. It’s long been observed that the benefits of faith come to us whether God is there or not, just so long as we believe. Once we doubt, the whole positive structure comes crashing down. Thankfully, I can never know for certain if God is there or not – not unless there is a life after death to confirm it. However, our thoughts today indicate that even if we hypothetically face up to a certainty that there is no God, then we still have a basis for a life of faith. Such a faith would then be immune to doubts, because it has fully taken on board the possibility that “God” is simply our word for those beliefs, way of life etc mentioned above.
I repeat my claim that faith in God is entirely reasonable and supremely fulfilling.
Spiritual Devotion 