What use is God if he can’t actually do anything for us?

Part 8

Some responses to the things we’ve lost:-

The other great comfort and joy of life in heaven is the thought of reunion with those I love. I love the idea of all their trials and tribulations being behind them, every wound healed. There they are radiant in joy, blissfully at peace – and then I shall join them and share life with them forever. They are being “kept safe” until we meet again. This is perhaps the only thought that can comfort us in our loss and pain. We shall see them again and they shall be well. Moreover, even when all is well in earthly terms with those I love, my time with them is so short. I long to explore and experience the infinite richness of that love for all eternity.

To lose this is a very great loss indeed.

I do have a possible philosophical reinterpretation of what life after death means, but it gets pretty convoluted explaining it, which might suggest I’m clutching at straws. I will return to the issue of life after death another time, and see what sense we can make of it. Of course, it’s possible to have a robust philosophy of life that helps us to cope with death, including the thought that we have gone forever; however, we have certainly lost something very precious, and we recall Paul’s words that if our faith is only good for this life then we are to be pitied as fools.

Perhaps a fruitful answer will lie in the idea that, just as religious experiences of transcendence give us a sense of union with the infinite and eternal, then our moments of intense love with our loved ones are also moments of infinite and eternal significance.

3. Final justice will not be done

This is a serious loss. It does place greater emphasis on righting wrongs now, rather than waiting for God to do that in heaven. I think it would be possible to become philosophically strong and wise and so be able to bear terrible blows that life deals you. However, it is a source of severe disaffection and anger to think that justice will never be done, and it could lead to terrible and destructive, including self-destructive, actions

4. Specifics of religions will need to be reinterpreted.

Many believers would find this a terrible loss. For many, their faith exists precisely because it is believed in as literal truth. However, for these believers they would not dream of converting to my new framework, and are completely secure and happy in their faith. For those non-literal believers, including those who are troubled in their search for truth, there has been a long history already of reinterpreting religion – for example, seeing miracle stories as parables. I think that if you are prepared to follow this new framework, you would have no problem in reinterpreting specifics of religion – even things as important as the resurrection of Jesus. (We will look at Jesus separately another time.)

What use is God if he can’t actually do anything for us?

Part 7

Some responses to the things we’ve lost:-

2.) We will not go to heaven when we die.

This would be a huge loss!

It is a very great comfort and joy to me to think that one day “every veil” will be removed and I will see God as he truly is. All that is presently unfulfilled will be fulfilled; everything that is not well will be made whole.

However, I have surprised myself by starting like this – I have not immediately focussed on living forever. Instead, I seem to be interested in fullness of life, rather than eternal life, or life after death. What I am conscious of now is a lack of completeness, of unfulfilled potential, of mistakes spoiling what might have been. So, I see heaven as putting all these things right.

I have long been aware that merely resuscitating my body and giving it immortality is not the full job that’s required. I need to be transformed into the “perfect” version of me.

This might actually give some ways forward for reinterpreting what I mean by life after death, and still finding great value, even though I expect to be dead. The greatest spiritual experiences are often of transcendence, when, for a short while, you feel at one with the universe: we who are finite and temporal feel in union with the infinite and eternal; we who are so flawed in our moral characters feel uplifted to share in spiritual perfection. In those moments, we feel that we can “die happy”, and we have, in fact, reached the highest experience possible. I think (and hope) that just about everybody has a few of these experiences in their lives, and it is the claim of religions that they can become common through spiritual practice. Because we are mortal, physical creatures, these experiences usually last just a few moments, however, I think that this is the experience of heaven, and if heaven does exist, then to live there is simply to continue in this state of bliss forever. As our spiritual experiences in this life have a timeless quality about them, there is some sense in which we have experienced heaven on earth. It is a truly lovely thought to think that it might be possible to “wake up” the other side of death to discover that God has gifted you a new spiritual body as a vehicle to live in and, even more importantly, has gifted you a new version of yourself whereby you have achieved the perfect spiritual version of yourself while remaining completely in tune with the unique individual you are. We might think of this as being the equivalent of all the spiritual benefits acquired through 10,000 years of intensive meditation suddenly being acquired while simultaneously losing the burden of a physical body that has rudely reminded you throughout life of its needs.

To lose the hope of life after death would be the loss of a very great prize indeed, and we can see that my attempt to argue that, in a way, we’ve still attained it in brief glimpses is very feeble.

What use is God if he can’t actually do anything for us?

Part 6

How serious are these losses?

In practice, perhaps only reflective, philosophically-minded intellectuals could adopt this sort of religion. However, I think not. Given that the essence of religion is, I think, the personal relationship with God, I think we might be able to still promote a vibrant, attractive religion that everyone could adopt. A key point is that, in practice, the new way of understanding religion operates extremely similarly to the traditional way of understanding.

I also think that a creative response to the new demands of religion could produce wonderful things. And we acknowledge that the pain and puzzle created by traditional religion – eg why did God let that bad thing happen? – will be gone. So, for example, if final justice is not to be done by God in the afterlife, religious people might be more passionately committed to delivering as much justice as possible on earth. If there is no life after death, the life we have now becomes even more precious – but still enhanced by the spiritual life that our faith in God brings us now.

Let’s have a go at thinking through in more detail what these losses entail.

Some responses to the things we’ve lost:-

1. There is no point praying for God to change the world to give us something we want.

However, there is still a great deal to pray for – we are simply shifting our focus from: “This is what I want, please will you get on and do that for me Lord”, to, “This is what I want, so I must commit myself to achieving it, using God’s inspiring power to help me”. All of the inner life of prayer is still effective in terms of sharing a personal relationship with God who guides, strengthens and inspires you.

For me, this would be very honest prayer, realistic and effective – and perhaps more motivating to effective action because I know that any relief is going to be provided through human agency – including me.

It also contains no problems of evil and suffering.

The loss for a believer like me would be minimal, and I think that, on balance, I would gain

What use is God if he can’t actually do anything for us?

Part 5: Things we have lost in our new understanding of God

1. There is no point praying for God to change the world to give us something we want. (Remember, all these things can be helped through human agency – just not instantly and miraculously, by the power of God) This covers a lot of good things (as well as some unworthy, selfish things):- Sick people to get better. Natural disasters not to happen or improve. Wars to stop. A good and worthy thing to happen eg get a job

2. We will not go to heaven when we die

This seems a suitable conclusion: if God only exists within our minds, then he does not exist as a metaphysical spiritual reality, in which case other metaphysical spiritual realities such as souls and heaven won’t exist either. I do just hang on to the possibility that there might be something – but I think this probably needs to be let go of, and we’ll consider it more closely another time.

I do think that something of the value of profound ideas like life after death may still be able to be salvaged through reinterpreting the idea – perhaps in a similar way to the way the “keeping the faith” idea preserved the effect of being able to pass on prayers to others.

3. Final justice will not be done

If there is no God, and no life after death, we will just have to accept that some people will literally get away with murder. Those who suffer the grossest injustices will have to come to terms with the fact that their one chance of life has been blighted or ended by utterly selfish, wicked people, who don’t care at all about the damage they do to others.

4. Specifics of religions will need to be reinterpreted. Religions usually have miraculous elements, and these will have to be reinterpreted. In particular, in Christianity, the religion depends on the claim that Jesus rose from the dead – with the implication that we too will live with him in heaven. It is not impossible to reinterpret these aspects – and many Christians have been doing this successfully for generations – but it is a big undertaking.

What use is God if he can’t actually do anything for us?

Part 4

Nevertheless, what use is God if he can’t actually do anything for us?

Well, I think I’ve already answered this: the whole of the inner life of personal relationship is as vibrant as ever. This has not been downgraded to self-reflection, meditation, or adopting inspiring principles and values as your philosophy of life. God is still experienced as a person with whom you have a supremely deep relationship. God acts as an independent agent to guide and strengthen you. All the spiritual gifts that are usually deemed to be gifts from God are still available to you. This relationship with God is what powers a supremely fulfilling spiritual life of freshness, purity, vitality, love, peace, joy; it imparts ultimate meaning to life and connects your individual, finite and temporal life with the universal, infinite and eternal.

However, let’s approach the question from the angle of: what have we lost?

In reality, if this new analysis is correct, we have lost nothing, because God has never been changing things in the external world; we just, mistakenly, thought he was. Of course, if we now explicitly accept this, we are losing the hope that he might – and this hope is very important indeed. On the other side, we lose all that hurt and confusion that religious people feel when a good prayer isn’t answered. So, let’s try and list our losses, and asses how serious they are.

What use is God if he can’t actually do anything for us?

Part 3

I still want to claim that just maybe God can change things in the world, and that there’s certainly no harm in praying for him to do so. However, this may just be me refusing to let go of old habits and to accept the conclusions of my own thinking. You could say that, when you’ve tried all possible human agency, there is no harm in praying for a miracle. It’s not going to work because we’ve accepted that God doesn’t do miracles, but as disaster is looming your way anyway, it’s not making things any worse, and may give an important and valid inner strength that: “all we can do now is consign our situation to the Lord”. I accept that there can be harm in saying prayers like this if you use the prayer instead of doing everything that human agency can to make a situation better. If my loved one is gravely sick, I take her to the doctor and hope that medical expertise will be sufficient to save her life. I still pray – that in her inner life and my inner life – we will find strength and peace and guidance, but I expect it to be medical skill that will save her. If she is saved, I still give thanks to God, and if she is not, I ask God to comfort us. This does not detract from me also being deeply grateful to the medical staff who actually did the work of healing her.

What use is God if he can’t actually do anything for us?

Part 2

A similar, hugely beneficial effect of our new understanding of God, relates to the idea of keeping faith. Again, this acts both within the individual life of each believer, and actually operates as a channel of communication between people – even though they are not in contact. Interestingly, this channel works in exactly the same way as in the traditional understanding of God.

So, traditionally, let’s say I am worried about my daughter, who lives a long way away, and is having a hard time. I am not going to be able to visit her to comfort her for ages. So, I say a prayer to God and give him my message of comfort for my daughter. I conceive of him drawing close to her and saying, “I have a message for you from your father; he is rooting for you and sends his love”. However, this sounds like the sort of thing we now acknowledge God cannot do: he is not some sort of spiritual telegraph system; we said that God can only work within each individual’s mind. However, under the idea of “keeping faith”, God does indeed act as a sort of spiritual telegraph system, even though both my daughter and myself are only talking to ourselves (or, rather, talking to the God who is the voice within our own minds), not to each other. So, I keep faith with her and with God. I go out into my garden to look at the moon, and in my heart and mind, I say my prayer: “Dear Lord, I love my daughter so much; please will you lift her up by your great Spirit and give her the strength she needs”. At some point – and the timing is not crucial – my daughter keeps faith with me and with God, and in her heart and mind thinks things over before God and says to herself and to God: “I bet my father is thinking about me and sending me his love, and calling on you Lord to lift me up by your mighty Spirit. And I know too, Lord, that you want me to be whole and well”. As we said at the start, that our new understanding of God maintains the whole of the inner life of personal relationship with God, then, as my daughter says her prayer, all the sustaining love and power of God floods into her heart and mind. The message of my prayer has been delivered to her because we both kept faith.

What use is God if he can’t actually do anything for us?

(This is a long theological and philosophical reflection, coming in 9 parts)

Part 1

Within our new framework of understanding for religion, we have preserved in its entirety the whole of the believer’s inner life, sharing a personal relationship with God. However, we have given up any claim that God can do anything in the external world to change anything that would have otherwise happened anyway – except, of course, for human agents changing the course of the world through the choices they make, as they live out their faith. The effect of people living out their faith is enormously strong for each individual, and in a society where there is a strong faith community, the effect can be redoubled and redoubled many times over.

In this understanding, prayer is not an appeal to God to change something on our behalf; when it is personal private prayer, it is a means to gather our thoughts and devote our resources to achieving a goal, and when it is corporate prayer, it is a means for the community to share its values and goals to direct it to those actions that it approves of. So, for example, in an entirely genuine way, the church prayed, either in general for those in need, or, in particular, for Mrs Smith, who was known to be having a hard time. The prayer was for God to help her. However, one of those praying was moved to decide to visit Mrs Smith with an offer of help. This is understood to be “God answering our prayers”, even though we know there is an entirely explicable human chain of communication and decision. However, it’s not a con trick, pretending that it was all God’s work; it is a beneficial outcome that happened only because the community of faith turned to God for guidance.

God: who are you; what are you?

Part 6

I do want to admit that in some of my other writings I have perhaps too readily expressed confidence that I know that this voice is not me. Though you can see why I’m reluctant to claim it as my voice, for the conclusion that it leads to is that I am God (and you too, of course).

What is it? I admit that many of the things “God tells me” are not rocket-science; they are not divorced from what I might have worked out for myself – though I have had a lifetime of training myself “in the ways of God” through imbibing ideas, stories, values about him. However, it still feels as though it is coming to me from outside of myself. And sometimes (maybe quite rarely, I’m not sure) this external voice takes your breath away. It is utterly, shockingly, transformingly different. It gives incisive judgement in ways that are exhilaratingly liberating, uplifting, creative, energising, full of vision and hopeful possibilities. If this is me (and it must be me if we are saying that all those other occasions are me) then this is an extraordinary capability of the mind. It seems much more authentically truthful to say, “God has spoken to me”. Although it’s quite a tame illustration (after all, what could do justice to God) I wonder if an appropriate illustration of this is if you have ever played chess with yourself. You just can’t fool yourself. It’s possible that you might make a move and then a few moments later think of a good countermove for “your opponent”, but I don’t think it’s possible to be suddenly shocked by yourself in the way that a real opponent can.

The word “authentic” has crept in and is this the essence of it? Yes, all the voices in my head speak in the way I speak, but I recognise all the voices as my own – even if I am arguing an issue not just from two sides but from several. But when “the voice of God” speaks I do not recognise it as mine. I can tell when I am trying to smuggle my ideas in under cover of God’s will, but when God genuinely speaks to me, it is recognised as authentically him. It is other; it is not me.

I realise that this is circular reasoning: when I feel that something is true (authentic) it’s because I feel that it is true (authentic). Probably there is no getting round this. This means that, ultimately, it is a judgement. A free choice. “Who do you say that I am?” I say that you are the Lord.