Here is a solid and standard statement of some good old-fashioned internet gnosticism:
It reminds me of something I wrote in MAKING SENSES OUT OF SCRIPTURE:
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Such a view of God (technically known as Pantheism) is an ancient opinion which is particularly popular in the West these days because, as an atheist acquaintance said, it is a bit like spiritual methadone treatment. It gives you the pleasures and consolations of religious faith without any of the troubling demands. In the words of C. S. Lewis:
An “impersonal God”—well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness inside our own heads—better still. A formless life force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap—best of all. … The Pantheist’s God does nothing, demands nothing. He is there if you wish for Him, like a book on a shelf. He will not pursue you.[1]
Pantheism essentially tells us that God is identical with creation. And, of course, if God is Everything then we are relieved of the burden of having to choose between right and wrong, good and evil.
The trouble with pantheism is that it tries to make God something “beyond personal” but instead winds up calling God something less than personal. Many people harbor in the back of their minds the notion they are being “truly spiritual” when they say “We must get rid of the crude fancies of the puny human mind with its primitive agricultural images of shepherds, sheep, vineyards, and all the rest of it. We must instead thrust our spirits into contact with a realm beyond the imagination!” Nine times out of ten, what this means in practice is abandoning older and more nourishing religious symbols for new and impoverished ones. It usually means picturing God as an invisible energy field, to cite enormously popular sci-fi imagery. And the explanation for this is simple. It is not that the Energy Field devotee has a higher religious consciousness. It is simply that he or she has, like most people in a technological society, known things like magnetism or electricity as their closest experiences of invisible power. For ancients, this was typically imaged by the wind, which is why Jesus describes the Holy Spirit in those terms (cf. John 3:8).
[1] C. S. Lewis, Miracles (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), pp. 149-150.
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To call God the source of creation while denying that he is the Creator makes no sense. I think that it is wiser to say that he is the source of both masculine and feminine than to reduce him to an impersonal It. I think that the attempt to say God is Everything while then concluding that some people (“believers”) separate themselves from Everything is incoherent. I cannot make head or tails of what the difference between a “personal self” and a God self is if God is Everything. Personally, I enjoy being a limited being, and like that the people I love are all limited beings too, with very definite qualities, quirks, traits and feelings which I lack and they supply (and vice versa). I can grasp the idea that God is present in his creation and that his creation expresses and reflects him. But simply melting all his creation together and saying that Creation is him makes no sense to me since there is also the clear reality creation is infinitely varied and not identical and that I am very obviously not God when I sin. I think the meme is an attempt to express some things that are true (God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere). But I think the denial of the personal in God and the denial of distinction between creature and Creator sacrifices the possibility of love between God and human persons (and between human persons) for the false security of pantheism.
I also think there is a touch of smugness in the distinction between sophisticated “knowers” and simple-minded “believers” that comports rather well with Paul’s proverb, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up” (1 Corinthians 8:1).
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8 Responses
Excellent.
Of course, the flip side of this, is that Christian apologists do the same thing when asked to explain the lack of tangible proof for a God that supposedly wants to have a personal relationship with us. Now, all of the sudden, God becomes elusive and intangible: he is everywhere at once, yet nowhere to be found.
Then we get told that God can’t make himself known, because that would violate our free will. Also, if we don’t believe in the obvious existence of a God that won’t make himself known, we are stupid, malicious, evil and deserving of death. Or eternal torment.
But putting all that aside, why should people believe in a personal God over an impersonal one? I get that you prefer one over the other, but that has no bearing on whether or not any of them are true.
These are straw man arguments. Nobody says that there are no proofs for the existence of God. That’s how Thomas kicks off the Summa;. For him, the entire universe is tangible evidence of the existence of God. That God is mysterious and beyond our capacity to reason does not mean there is no evidence for him, but that having established his existence is not to have exhausted our comprehension of him.
Who tells you God cannot make himself known? That is what the word revelation *means*. I’m not at all sure every Christian is pleased and nothing but pleased at the personal nature of God, so the argument from wish fulfillment seems to go nowhere since pantheism can be equally argued to be wish fulfillment. As you note, the revelation of God as Judge has highly unpleasant possibilities behind it too. Both the Jewish and Christian traditions are rooted, in the final analysis, in *experience*, not in wishcasting. God revealed himself personally to Israel and, most supremely, in the person of Jesus Christ. Unsurprisingly, the apostles and the early Church reflected that experience in their conviction of a personal relationship with God.
I sometimes get the impression that what is meant by “tangible evidence” of God’s existence is simply that God does not submit to doing magic tricks and miracles for guys in lab coats. That is quite true. But it does not in the slightest mean that God does not exist, nor even that God will not offer tangible evidence of his existence. Merely that he does not do what you want him to do.
As far as my characterization of the arguments go, I think its fair to say that I might have been presented with a poor formulation of them, or that my interpretation was flawed. However, I don’t think its fair or charitable to say that I’m using a strawman, which implies that I’m deliberately and maliciously misrepresenting what I heard.
Now, I didn’t say they were arguing that there was NO proof for the existence of God. However, when pressed on the matter of the quality, reliability and accessibility of such proof, I’ve seen them fall back on saying that God making himself evident in such a manner would override people’s free will somehow; which never made sense to me because there is a supposed precedent for God making himself known in such ways, and there is also precedent for there being a distinction between believing in God’s existence and deciding to follow him.
When it comes to “tangible evidence”, how can I explain this? Well, imagine for a second that Christianity were fake. What types of arguments would they come up with? Wouldn’t a Church that had no Holy Spirit backing up their claims, claim otherwise anyways?
I dunno, I’m currently going through a combination of heat stroke and low blood sugar, so I’m having trouble getting my thoughts in order, so you’ll have to make do with that; but I think you know what I’m getting at.
Existence of creation is proof enough of a Creator.
There is no reason for existence of matter. Without a Creator who could create matter and energy ex nihilo, universe would not exist.
Every honest and rational scientist will agree that it’s impossible for matter or energy to spontaneously come into existence ex nihilo (with no energy/matter input). If it were possible, such matter or energy would come into existence all the time, but we’re not observing this. Furthermore, if such processes existed, there would be no reason for creation of all matter to occur exactly at a single point in space-time.
And while “big bounce” theory could explain how our universe came into being with being eternal, it doesn’t explain why our universe is the final one (due to net energy loss, it’s understood that it’s impossible for this universe to return to a singularity), and more importantly, it doesn’t even begin to explain where a previous universe came into being. It’s the intellectual fool’s “turtles all the way down” argument.
Well, we think that the moral certainty of the resurrection of Jesus is sufficient, tangible evidence of God’s desire to have a personal relation with us. I suppose some Christian apologists might take the approach you describe; I’m not aware of any.
Can our finite beings understand an infinite God?
Probably not – I guess that is why we insist things be “tangible.” To define and measure, control and demand.
It shouldn’t be hard to conceive of an infinite power. We experience things that have power over our lives all the time.
But infinite love… that’s a tougher one. The ancient Israelites rendered the word “love” as “group-belonging” – “you belong to me, I belong to you.” Can we conceive of a God that infinitely loves us in our deepest despair and suffering…
The goodnesses of this life we call grace. And at our death, we are brought to eternal life.
A repudiation of the worldly finite, and introduction into the divine infinite.
Such is love, and it is love that we seek and prize in this world and the next. God wants not just belief, but love. But belief is a start.
Being a mother, and a parent is the only way I can understand what God is about. I think that’s how he shares his crazy, ridiculous love with us —so we can grasp an inkling.