2) God is able and willing to change outcomes in the world.

For many people, God is not much use if he can’t do anything to help us. So, the interaction that God is able to make with people, as well as involving forming a relationship with people (entailing an interior life within the person’s mind/soul), must also include the ability to change outcomes that would otherwise have occurred in the world.

So, how does a spiritual being effect a change in the material universe? We understood earlier that God, as spirit, might be able to communicate directly to our minds if we are also spirit, but how does a spirit have any capability on the physical world? Perhaps an omnipotent God can just do it. God has never been thought of as “working” to achieve what he wants, he just wills it into being. This includes the whole of creation. God does not assemble materials and spend time and effort in some sort of process of creation, he “just speaks and it is so”. However, there are genuine conceptual problems about this. If the physical and spiritual are completely different ways of being, or exist on totally separate planes, how can they interact? How does a spirit exert the force necessary to stop a car from running over a child? It would have to simply be a law of the universe that this is possible, and we simply haven’t been able to observe this yet because we cannot do scientific experiments on spiritual entities. The evidence that some people detect of miracles would be indications that something is happening, but we are unable to provide proof.

So, there are questions about whether God is able to change outcomes in the world, but the questions about his willingness to do so are the bread and butter of many peoples’ faith – or lack of it. This problem is understood under the question of evil and suffering.

(A theological reflection in 7 parts)

I have recently explored how faith in God might look if the term “God” was defined in very different ways from how he is traditionally understood to be. I now want to give an overview of what would be necessary if we were to continue to believe in God in the traditionally accepted way. I take this to be the God of classical theism – that is the “omni” God (omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent) – combined with an understanding that God, because he is omnibenevolent, intervenes in the world to achieve his will. I will, in many cases, simply be identifying what would have to be the case, without necessarily being in a position to give an explanation of clear solutions to the issues being raised.

1. The reality of the spiritual

There must be a reality to spiritual beings, who can exist apart from the material universe but interact with it.

This entails the ability of spiritual beings or persons to exist. There needs to be a way for a being to live without a physical body, to think without a brain, to “do things” without a body, to be aware of things without senses. Such a being needs to cohere together and have a consistent unity without having a physical body to delineate the boundary between where I stop and you start. (We could imagine that, perhaps, spiritual beings were like swirls of cloud or smoke, in which case, how could we prevent an intermingling that ends the distinctive separateness of the two persons? Though perhaps this image is inextricably linked with a physical analogy of what spiritual beings might be like, when actual spiritual beings – being truly spiritual – would have no problem in continuing to be themselves – even in a crowd of persons. This crowd aspect is important because, when considering spiritual beings, we are not only considering God, but also our own existence as spiritual beings).

IF spiritual beings were possible, then it would provide a relatively easy way to understand life after death and the ability to live for eternity, for, without a physical body to decay, what danger can be posed to the ongoing existence of beings who are pure spirit?

If God is a spiritual being, then it quite easily explains how God can exist without being seen, and how he can communicate with us, in that a spiritual being would have no difficulty in communicating directly with another spirit, and if we are also spiritual beings, with, for example, there being a connection between our minds and our souls or spirits, then God would simply express his thoughts and we would become aware of them in our own minds.

If God is spirit, then this might explain his ability to be everywhere at once. In our physical bodies, we can only be in one place at one time, but a spiritual being such as God might simply be intrinsically present, everywhere and always, as a latent possibility. Then, when he wishes, he makes himself known to any other spirit he wishes, wherever they happen to be.

God, as a spiritual being, would certainly be an amazing entity, but perhaps we are even more unusual, in that God is always and only a spiritual being, whereas we are either both: a spiritual and a physical being combined, or we start of as one (physical) and then when we die, God imparts a spiritual existence to us that is in some way, consistent and continuous with the physical existence that we previously lived.

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.

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.

Who is God?

Part 10: I can accept living in the world as we know it to be, and believe that my faith is sufficient to help me

So, completely and ultimately satisfying is this relationship, that I can face with equanimity my death and loss of existence (if it should turn out that life after death is not possible for creatures who have once been mortal). I can (I hope, though I have not been severely tested – though I know of those who have been and still believe) bear with suffering, hardship and loss, without concluding that this means that there is no God or that he has stopped loving me. I accept that I live in a material universe that operates in the ways that we all know about. It is up to me to use whatever power I have to steer the bit of the universe that I have influence over in ways that accord with my faith in God. If I do that, then I believe that I am honouring him and that he is happy with me. If I do the opposite then I believe that God, quite rightly, feels the opposite.

I hope that we can see that this faith in God that I have is supremely precious, extremely powerful and effective in enabling a good life, a spiritual life, a life of faith in relationship with God. It is immensely good for me and helps me to be a force for good in the world. I think we can see that a community where many people share such a faith is an immense force for good in the world. (We do not deny that religion can be corrupted to be a force that produces evil as well as good, but that is the task we humans have: to choose wisely; God is not going to wave a fairy wand to “make everything better”. We are free beings and it is up to us to use our freedom well. In my view there is no better way to use our freedom than to form a relationship with God and so live with him.)

Who is God?

Part 9: What do I really value about God?

Of course, it’s possible that God can affect things in the world directly, and probably most of us have – perhaps only a handful of – examples that give us pause for thought in the way events in our lives turned out remarkable beneficially. However, they are not certain, and they seem terribly weak compared to the obvious good things that a good God could do if he was inclined to act regularly in the world, such as end wars and cure sick people. There are pretty expert theodicies to explain how God can still exist alongside evil and suffering, but it leaves us uncomfortable with the gap between what God might do and the few examples we cherish (perhaps secretly) of when we feel we have discerned the hand of God “tipping the balance” in the direction of goodness. It seems, perhaps, fairer to accept that God does not act directly in the world – and this would certainly save many believers from agonising doubts over why God doesn’t act. I think we can also show that a God, who is an independent, personal agent, but who only operates through human agency, is a God worth adoring.

So, what is it that I value about my faith in God? I imagine that if someone I love dearly was desperately ill and the doctors had exhausted all their skills, then I would pray for a miracle. If I was on a sinking ship and all the lifeboats were gone, and the sharks circling, then I’d be very pleased if God could somehow give me a way out of the situation when there appears to be none. Yet, in fact, I have lived for over 60 years without requiring this. There were difficult times when it would have been nice if God had dusted off his fairy wand and given me a hand but the fact that I’m still here suggests that I didn’t need that. I acknowledge that I am very fortunate. I’m a British citizen, living through a period of considerable peace and prosperity. I had a good upbringing and possess a number of skills. So, I have not needed God to interfere in the working of the natural world to tip the balance in my favour. What I need is help in navigating my way through the natural world in a way of which I approve – which basically means doing good, avoiding causing harm to others and rejoicing in the life I have.

So, what I truly value about my faith is the rich interior life that I experience in relationship with God. I love the way he inspires me, comforts me, directs and reproves me, forgives me. I love the way I can share with him all my inmost thoughts, my sense that he is always with me, completely understands me and is always rooting for me. I love the truth that he shows me. I love the way that he lifts me up to ultimate experiences, and reveals the depth and wonder of life. It is not simply that in company with him I exult in the beauty of nature or am overwhelmed with reverence for life. Rather, beauty fills me, but then points beyond itself to someone (I call him God), a someone who is somehow the source and goal and fulfilment of this beauty (as of every other good thing). My deep reverence for life appears to be merely “a cover” for something even more deeply reverent which is behind, or within or which upholds and makes possible the life I revere. It is as though anything, no matter how supremely precious and profound it is, is simply an introduction to what is even more, and ultimately precious and profound. And this sense of precious profundity is experienced as a personal relationship. I am not inspired by principles or values or ideas; I meet someone of whom all these precious values are somehow a reflection of who he is – but even then not fully doing justice to who he is. He is always more. He is not a reflection of these wonderful values, principles and ideas; these wonderful ideas are a reflection of who he is. He is the source of the actual truth and existence of these precious things. All these precious qualities are “embodied” in God or, as God has no physical body, they are “personalised” in the person I encounter and give the name “God” to. Yet God is not – as in my understanding of ancient Greek religion – simply the personification of precious values; these precious values are a reflection of him. A secularist might say, “Why don’t you just say, “I believe in love”? After all, you believe God is love, so there seems no difference to me whether you say, “I believe in God” or, “I believe in love”. Yet when I say, “I believe in God” I do not just mean, “I believe in love”, though I might struggle to put into words exactly why I think that I am saying more when I say, “I believe in God”. Perhaps it is down to the personal aspect of God, in that, by believing in God, I am believing in an active agent of love, who is pouring love into creation (possibly only through human channels), rather than simply believing in love as a passive quality. I might have to admit that, if “God is love” then perhaps there is no difference between the quality of love that God has and the quality of love that we might conceive of as atheists if we were forming the concept of “perfect love”. Yet that concept of perfect love would, as it were, just be lying there waiting for us to do something with it, but, with the God of love, there is a person who is actively loving.

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.

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.

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.

Who is God?

Part 5: Does God add anything to creation?

There are also links with ideas of pantheism and panentheism. With classic theism, God is that being who exists outside of, or apart from, creation. With such a God, you could switch the universe off and on again, and God would not be fundamentally affected in himself. With pantheism, God is understood as some sort of divine spirit that pervades creation. It is NOT saying that God is simply the same as creation, for God’s existence is adding something to creation that it would lack if there was just a material universe. However, God is completely contained within the universe, and it might be possible to argue that in some ways God IS simply the same as creation. I think a lot of Hindu thought veers in this direction. It produces a profound reverence for life, and enables a spirituality that holds life as supremely precious (as opposed, say, to a materialist, mechanistic view of the universe as simply made of stuff that is available for us to exploit). Pantheism could be thought of as simply declaring that creation IS divine. Whether we are still saying that God is adding something to creation, I’m not sure, but if we weren’t, it wouldn’t matter anymore for we are now conceiving of creation itself as deserving of the holy reverence that theists reserve for God. I think that panentheism is a view that attempts to combine theism with pantheism with the view that there is definitely a something extra existing in creation, which is God (whereas our thoughts on pantheism led us into doubt on this point), but God is still to be found entirely within creation.

For countless millions of people, this clearly counts as a completely satisfying conception of God, empowering a deeply religious life. For a theist like myself, it raises questions about whether we are still really believing in God, and whether this is truly different from secularism (though I have admitted to the attraction of the idea of a secular religion). However, we began with the severe difficulties that the theist view of God as an independent person raises, and we have certainly found a way here to continue believing in God, though now conceived as a spiritual force that either exists within creation (panentheism) or as a spiritual force that is synonymous with creation (pantheism – perhaps?).