God! Discussion on God!

I do not know to what extent I believe in God. I certainly do not believe in the strong sense, but only in a weak sense. Just as Mathematics has strong and weak proofs for a theorem, God’s existence requires a strong proof for my rational being to accept it as truth. The weak proof is there and I am sure you have heard some or other version of it. Typically, the abundant beauty and complexity of the natural world, with all the beasts and plants, oceans and mountains, including your favorite outdoor place, are testaments of God’s glory. But this need not be the case. A lack of imagination and ignorance in probability and the physical sciences prevents people from understanding that this universe could be brought about via stochastic processes – randomness that changes over time. Then there are those who actually try to substantiate the existence of God with “science” – intelligent design is a recent manifestation. To me, these are pathetic, desperate attempts, to justify faith in God in our increasingly secular worldview.

I think it is the task of the theologian to grapple with what we understand God to be. God is complicated. He is supposed to be love, while also being omniscient. The former quality, I heard at a recent valentines day party for Christians, where members of a panel from different Pentecostal churches all agreed that God is love. There was also a reading from the espistle of St Paul where the nature of love was discussed. I will not discuss these qualities here, but I am sure if you are Christian you have come across this verse of what “love is” and what “love is not”. I wonder whether anyone then will agree with me if say that God’s love is exhibited by letting our loved ones die. Last week, Valentines day Sunday, we heard the awful news of the death of a young man. He was in his late teens, a high school graduate and he just died in his parents’ car, while they were all traveling via Botswana to Zimbabwe. The mother was a teacher for the Holy Confirmation and she prayed out loud – one of the few people to do so in our Church – during the time of the mass when Catholics are invited to pray and offer their “intercessions” to the Lord. Now this, what type of love is this?

Then people will tell me, such as Philip Yancey in his book “Searching for the Invisible God” that not all things happen in God’s will. He means to say that bad things we are perplexed by are not afflictions from God, but are a consequence of the “fallen world” where evil prevails, claiming innocent victims in its path. This argument is, however, inconsistent with God being omniscient. Either one must abandon the omniscient aspect of God (is it even in the Bible?) or admit that bad things, freak accidents, are part of God’s Will.

Let us posit that God knows what pill Neo will take, the blue pill or the red pill, for argument sake. Then this means God has knowledge about Neo’s choices, even though Neo has free will. Indeed, I may know what agent X is going to chose without influencing agent X’s choice in any way. In this, case God can still be omniscient and give us free will, which means that bad things can happen due to our failings, not God’s.

Well, this is all good and dandy if we ignore the fact that God knew what Neo would take before Neo did. This is very strange for us to comprehend, because it means knowing – not predicting or guessing – but knowing the future. So if God knew what Neo would choose before he was offered to choose, before he met Morpheus and before he was even born, God is no longer letting Neo have freedom of choice.

There is a dilemma we run into if we posit that God still allows Neo freedom of choice. The first horn of the dilemma assumes God is the only being at the start of the creation, during that time in Genesis when there was only darkness. Then God must have known Neo’s plans. Now, here knowing the plans of a future agent called Neo must mean that God chose those plans for Neo. There is no other agent at this point and so God must be choosing Neo’s plans by knowing them. Therefore, he has given Neo no freedom of choice. The second horn of the dilemma tries to escape the first one by pointing out that knowing something does not mean ordaining that thing. For example, I can know that I am the being my mother will conceive will be my sibling, but this does not mean I made them my sibling. It is my mother and father who brought my sibling into being (with God’s help, but lets leave him out just for now). So in the same, it would be wrong to assume that God ordained Neo to choose the red pill just because God knew it. But then this assumes God was (is) just a passive being that knows everything while it is going on. Therefore, before the creation, God knew about Neo’s choices, but he did not ordain them as such. The dilemma comes in when we ask the question “well then, if God did not ordain them as such, than who or what did, before the creation?” To this question, I assume you are all silent, your lips pursed together, thinking about the consequences of my argument.

Therefore, do we relinquish the idea of God’s omniscience? This would be tantamount to admitting that he is not divine and omnipotent. I doubt you will stand for that. Therefore, you must admit that God does influence our choices. I say influence, because I am not privy to how much He has preordained and how much is left to us. Then God may be responsible for bad things, which means, God is not love in the way we understand love.

I mean St Paul writes about this in a letter to the Romans about God’s wrath :

But one of you will say to me , “If this is so, how can God find fault with anyone? Who can resist God’s will?” But who are you, my friend, to answer God back? A clay pot does not ask the man who made it “Why did you make me like this?” After all, the man who makes the pots has the right to use the clay as he wishes, and to make to pots from the same lump of clay ,one for special occasions and the other for ordinary use. And the same is true of what God has done. He wanted to show his anger and make his power known. But he was very patient in enduring those who were doomed to destruction. Romans 9 : 19-23

The idea of freedom is choice is torn asunder by the above passage. God can make people just for the sake of destroying them, as a potter can make pots for breaking, as pots for “ordinary use” are bound to break, while those for special occasions are cherished.

The fact that people are “doomed for destruction” in fact testifies to the fact that some people are meant to be killed and condemned. But there is a part that enervates me, the idea of God being patient with those who are doomed. Patience implies love, implies that God is giving a chance to repent, to become part of the fold. However, did we not just say that God created them for destruction? How can this be? It is for this reason that I believe Paul himself is just giving us his, divinely inspired, contemplation of how God operates. He himself is not sure of the answer to the question “Who can resist God’s Will?”

He appears to be grappling with the possibilities of an omnipotent God, giving the example of the potter and then he goes on to speak about God directly. First he makes it seem that God chooses those who are to be condemned, but then he ends of with something that suggests God was waiting on their human agency to redeem them before he finally destroyed them.

Paul did not understand God any better than we do now. The function of that piece of scripture must be to get us discussing how God operates and the tensions between love and omnipotence. So this is why I can only believe in God in the weak sense, because I do not understand Him/Her/It.

Indeed, in my heart of hearts, I tend to believe that God is just the most imaginative solution the human mind has come up with to the problem of being self-conscious.

This, however, does not stop me from being a Christian. I believe in Jesus Christ, as my savior, friend and lover of my soul and body (to whom I’m not always faithful). It is just that I doubt, I experience doubt and I have to live with it as part of my faith.