What you believe pt 4

So, when constructing reality, the whole is often more than a simple sum of the pieces. Especially when the whole is infinite. When you get to the infinite, simple math does not always work the same way. What is half of infinity? Another way to put it: when we put God in a box, what ends up in the box is not God.

Human religions (including many variants calling themselves Christian) have wildly different constructs of who (or what) God is. I think that all of us to some degree look into our own hearts and minds and figure out what God must be like by (a) extending ourselves to a bigger size, saying "what would I be like if I were God" or (b) "what kind of God would I like there to be?" No wonder that there are so many different religions. As Christians, we would say that we believe that God solved that problem for us by revealing Himself. This revelation is not exhaustive or complete - our brains would explode trying to take it all in - but what has been revealed to us is true, even if we do not understand it all. One problem for us is that many of God's attributes seem to our minds to contradict each other, creating a philosophical problem, or paradox. Add to that the human desire to explain everything and our need to be "right" about everything, and there are an infinite number of arguments we can have with each other. Again, this is too huge of a subject for a mere blog, coming out as a stream of consciousness like this. Therefore I want to examine one small aspect of this question, which has been the theme of these posts - the idea of error by subtraction.

If we look at God's self-revelation in the scriptures, we see many attributes. Let's examine a few that we know about:

1. Beneficence: God is good.
2. God is love.
3. Holy: separate from sin, pure.
4. Just: every sin must be paid for, period.
5. Merciful.
6. Omnipresent & Omniscient: everywhere, all knowing
   
7. Omnipotent: all powerful.
8. Personal: has will and intelligence and personality
   

Even a casual reading of this short list opens up all sorts of problems for us. How to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering in the world if God is loving and all powerful and holy and good? How can you possibly reconcile justice and love? How can a loving God condemn people to eternal punishment? Not only do some of these attributes seem to be in direct contradiction to each other, some of them open up lines of thought that take us way out of our comfort zone.

What is man's response? Subtraction. But look how a few various subtractions work out in real life:

Eastern mysticism: Get rid of personal, and you also lose love. God becomes a force, or a pantheistic "everything around us" It is interesting that in many eastern religions with this philosophy, the problem of man becomes that he thinks he exists, which can be fixed by leaving behind our own personality and desires, meditating on nothing until we cease to exist (and reach Nirvana). If God is the great cosmic force and we only suffer because we have broken off and started wanting to live a real life, then a sort of spiritual suicide is the ugly result. Reality doesn't really exist.

Islam: The God of Islam is described as powerful and merciful, but I have been told that they do not describe (or think of him) as loving. He is just in the sense of hating evil but there is a capriciousness to it all - some bargaining (putting good on one side of the scale to balance the evil) and then just hoping that his favor comes to you. Islam is intensely legalistic, with most of its structure consisting of myriads of rules governing every element of daily life. I have read that the rules are as specific as which side to lay on when sleeping, how to correctly pick your nose, how to greet various types of people, which foot to use to first enter a house, etc.

The great american middle: I read an article that described the great american "mush god" who is a loving grandfather and friend. The one you pray to in public meetings who approves of all people, would never punish sin and who you would like to "have a beer with". He will let everyone into heaven (except Hitler and child-molesters of course) and his one other commandment is not to judge the moral habits of others. That leaves out a great many of God's attributes, especially holiness and justice. Really, though, it also leaves out goodness (though believers in that kind of god would argue that point) because it leaves no solution to the problem of evil in the world unless you also drop omnipotence or omniscience. In other words, he doesn't know everything or he can't fix everything.

Most religions drop either Love/Goodness, Holiness/Justice or Omnipotence/Omniscience. These groups of attributes are especially hard to reconcile - sort of like parallel lines going off to infinity but never touching. Can they all be true?

My contention is that the God of Biblical Christianity is the point where all of these lines come together! I know that this is the stuff of a 24 volume tome of advanced theology, but I will try to touch the subject in my next blog. Stay tuned.

to be continued....

P.S. please drop me a line or make a comment if this is interesting or helpful to you as a reader. I would love questions as it will help me think better.