THE REALITY AND NATURE OF GOD IN WESTERN RELIGION

PRIOR TO GOD, THE GODS
Polytheism preceded monotheism. In the tenth century BCE there was no belief in a single supreme Creator God. There were a few quite powerful “high gods,” as anthropologists have sometimes named them. In Egypt for a brief twenty years a pharaoh tried to eliminate the worship of all gods except his special sun god. Perhaps this is an unusual premature moment of monotheism. It is hard to be sure. But until the first millennium BCE, in all the great cultures of the world, there were many gods, not just one. They demanded sacrifices and praise; they wanted humans to feed and glorify them. These gods were normally of ambiguous moral character, at best. Even those which were not vain and petty and greedy, were nonetheless able to be quite cruel.
This is true even of the original religion of those who one day were to become the Jews, who in their turn would pass on their monotheism to Christianity and Islam. YHWH, the god who appeared to Moses, is described as a mountain-top god like many other mountain top gods in that era. In the territory of Palestine some of those who were the ancestors of later Judaic kingdom also worshiped the mountain god under the name El Shaddai, others referred to their god with the general name of Elohim (a plural form of El, meaning a god). A special god named YHWH was sometimes associated with Astarte, a goddess of fertility more often linked to Baal, god of fertility and rain. As the people of Judea came to share in one religious set of ideas they called their god by any of those names. This god, like others, could be cruel, angry, jealous. He demanded the slaughter of those who stood in the way of his people. Or so those people believed.
       By the time of the Babylonian Exile, however, in the sixth century B.C.E., the Jewish exiles had began to think of their god in a new light. Mercy and loving-kindness were much more often attributed to this god. And the god also became much more awesome, became God, with a capital “G.” This shift in ideas about God was parallel to similar shifts in India and China and Greece. In all these places an intellectual elite began to ruminate on what is Ultimate, on the origin of everything, on the nature of everything, on the meaning and purpose of everything, if any. So they found their answers in belief in an Ultimate Reality. In India it was Brahman, in China the Tao, in Greece various philosophers each proposed an answer. The Stoics, for example, argued that there was a fully rational order to the entire universe because throughout the universe a single divine principle of rationality was at work. They called it the Logos. Because many major cultures around the world began to speculate about the Ultimate Reality during, this era, around the 7th or 6th century B.C.E., it has been called the “axial” age, as though human history turned on its axis in a new direction. This is an exaggeration. Belief in a single Ultimate was usually just an overlay upon an ongoing polytheism, but it was a significant change nonetheless.
        Belief in the many gods is also a belief that there is no ultimate coherence to what happens in the universe. The gods were the major causes in the universe. But what one god does another can undo. As one god acts, another can be acting contrary, limiting the power of the first god. The gods were also quite humanlike, changing their minds at times, moved by various emotions, choosing to do this or that. So there was no way to predict what would happen tomorrow. The world was a place of fundamental uncertainty. Even the influence of the stars in early astrology, could not overwhelm the fickle power of the gods. But when Taoist and Hindu thought, when Jewish monotheism and Greek philosophy developed, they all believed that there was a single Ultimate Power behind things. Therefore, they concluded, all things ultimately have a single coherent order to them.
       It is not a coincidence that this axial age was also the time when formal logic was developed, particularly in Greece but also in other places. This is the time period when philosophy, science, and theology--systematically logical reflections on how things all fit together intelligibly--start shining. The practices that led to modern science go back a long ways. Among those practices a special element is the attempt to discover overall rational order to things. We will see the significance of that when in following chapters, but it is already part of the method of science we have reviewed: everything has to fit; everything can be tested against everything else. Naturalism also appeared in these times. Philosophers in all these places attributed less and less to the gods and more and more to the regular order of nature.
At the least, a major effect of this new rational approach was the death or subordination of the old gods. In Greece the philosophers were accused of being atheists, because many of them thought it was irrational to believe in the gods. In Jerusalem, the newly developed monotheism declared that the other gods were not real. In India, the gods were subordinated to Brahman. In all these place, in fact, most people tended to retain belief in the old gods. That was their family tradition; that was how they knew to live. The familiar faces of the gods were more welcome in the home that ideas about some hard-to-understand Ultimate Reality. But where there was an intellectual elite, people trained in the methods of rational analysis that their culture had recently developed, there also was a tendency to see the old stories as false stories. In Greece the word for a story is “mythos.” All these old myths began to appear to the educated as powerful tales but not the truth. So explanations of how the universe worked were “demythologized.”
       Inasmuch as the gods were often pictured doing cruel, immoral, and childish things, many of the philosophers and religious thinkers even wanted all people to give up belief in these gods. Hindus, Taoists, Buddhists, Jews, Greek philosophers found different ways to think about the Ultimate. Among the Greeks alone, Stoics, Epicureans, and Platonists had different interpretations. We will see a few of these. Because it is Western culture in which science first developed into its modern and highly effective form, we will concentrate on the interaction between belief in God, as in Western theism, and modern science.
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THE NATURE, ACTIVITY, AND EXISTENCE OF GOD

Belief in God is the most basic belief in the Western religions. There are three major aspects to belief in God. The first is the belief that God exists; the second is the set of beliefs about the nature of God; the third is the set of beliefs about how God acts in creation or history.
      Belief in the reality or existence of God, of course, is the anchor of all other beliefs in Western theism, whether Judaic, Christian, or Muslim. If God did not exist, then beliefs about God's revelation in Torah or New Testament or Koran would be at best a vague symbolic belief; the Christian belief in Jesus as the incarnation of God would be at best a pious poetic expression. If it can be shown that there is a God, then much else about these religions are more plausible.
       Beliefs about the nature of God are as important as belief in God's existence. Before a person can claim that God exists it is necessary to define "God." Otherwise it is like a claim that "gawmp" exists. A person cannot decide whether any "gawmp" exists without first knowing what it is. People who grow up in a culture in which the name of God is used often have a feeling that they know what it means. But they may be only just slightly clearer than they are about "gawmp." A person may think of God as kind and loving, and yet as dooming millions to hell. A person may think of God as the Infinite and Eternal Cause of all existence, yet speak of this God as though God were a finite being alongside of, albeit superior to, all other beings rather than a truly Infinite reality. It can be difficult to be both clear and consistent about what God is like.
        The third kind of beliefs about God are beliefs about how God acts, in nature and in history. These beliefs are closely connected to the beliefs about God’s nature. Is God the kind of being who actively intervenes in or guides the course of history. Jewish belief is based on the historical activities of a God who selected a people to be his own, who guided them out of Egypt and gave them a land to dwell in, and who continues to guide history up to the coming of the Messianic kingdom of peace and justice. This God is in charge of history. People must cooperate with God in the drama of history, in particular by following God's law. Their actions may have an effect on the coming of the kingdom. Islamic belief in God emphasizes much more strongly than Judaism the control that Allah (God) exercises over all history. "As Allah wills" predominates in Muslim thought. The course of history is entirely in God's hands. (Muslim theologies differ on this point; some are more activist, calling upon good Muslims to hasten the day of the Mahdi or Messiah to prepare the world for the last judgment.) In the main tradition of Islam, even people’s decisions are ultimately due to Allah.
Christian belief has had various interpretations of how God acts in history. The major categories of divine action are 1) creation, 2) general providence or planning, 3) special miracles, 4) the apocalyptic end of the world and the beginning of the kingdom of God.
       God’s providence is portrayed in one of the great works of St. Augustine, the early 5th century bishop of Hippo in North Africa, The City of God, (ca. 420 A.D.) It is a full and complex theory of the activity of God history. According to Augustine, God may have had a theoretical vision, as it were, as to how all of human history could have proceeded smoothly, without sin or suffering. The fact of original sin, however, foreseen by God from all eternity, induced God to impose on actual history an entirely different course, one that included the Incarnation in Jesus, in order to bring even greater good out of the evil of sin. Augustine also had a theory that God could have planted all future events, like planting seeds in a field where the rains are sure to fall and alternate with good sunshine. From the first moment of creation all that would eventually happen was already programmed by God to occur, with no necessity for miraculous intervention (though Augustine also believed in such interventions). This will all culminate in the Kingdom of God. Apocalyptic passages in the New Testament place the future of the world and its immanent ending in God's hands.
        These various beliefs about how God might intervene in or guide history portray God as one who plans ahead, and who can control the course of history in various ways. In general the Jewish and Christian scriptures have countless passages that imply an imaginable God as an free and active agent, planning and guiding events in the universe. This can be a somewhat anthropomorphic image of God. (See notion #1 on the next page here.) There are other ways of speaking of God, however. One way came out of the interaction of early Christianity with Hellenistic philosophy.
        In the early days of Christianity the best science of the day was part of philosophy. (The word "philosophy" had a broader meaning then than it does now.) The best theoretical scientists, according to the opinions of the day, were the philosophers who argued about the order and basic composition of the universe. The Stoics argued that there was a divine pattern inherent in the order of the universe. The order of the cosmos was evidence of a rational principle called the Logos which lay at the heart of the universe (see notion #2 on the next page.) The Epicureans, on the other hand, opted for an atomist philosophy which portrayed the gods and humans alike as subject to an all-encompassing unplanned flow of natural forces. The unplanned aspect was "chance;" the natural forces were laws of nature that operated ineluctably, imposing "necessity" upon the course of events. So all history was just chance and necessity, without divine guidance or plan. It was in this context that Christians had to explain to Stoics, Epicureans, and to each other for that matter, just how their God related to the overall course of nature. Platonists, on the other hand, described the source of the universe as a changeless One pure spirit, out of whom the universe emanates. All of reality is a divine “overflow,” all the way down to the least divine reality of all – materiality.

THREE NOTIONS OF GOD

1. The Everyday God, powerful, loving, and miracle-working, finite in some sense.
This is the God of the everyday imagination of Christians and Jews, a God who is Father (or, more recently, Mother); a Person (or three Persons), the most powerful Being in the universe. For Christians this Being has a human face in the person of Jesus. But even if the Christian thinks of this God as the Father/Mother (rather than as the incarnation of God the Son, to use the categories of Christian doctrine), this God is human-like (anthropomorphic), although in an utterly perfect and heavenly way. God is conceived of as doing various specific things: acting in history by working miracles, listening attentively to the prayers of individuals and answering them when it seems good to do so. God may be thought to change His (or Her) mind in response to prayer. Miracles count as empirical evidence of the existence and power and involvement of this God. This notion of God does not fit well with the methodological naturalism of science.

2. The Cosmic God, God of religious scientists and science-minded philosophers.
This God is evident to the rational mind through the evidence of the extraordinarily complex order of the cosmos as a whole as well as of individual parts of the cosmos. In past centuries the complex construction of the eye or hand was sufficient evidence to show that there had to be a God to have designed and created the universe. Early science marveled at this clockwork universe and concluded that there had to be a Watchmaker God. In contemporary times the order of the cosmos as a whole is the basic evidence, in particular the story of the evolution of the entire cosmos through very precise stages to the point of producing even human beings. This God need not necessarily do any miracles at all. The main work of this God is planning, creating, setting in motion, and now sustaining the entire universe in operation in accordance with the eternal plan and purpose. Most theologies include the idea that all events that happen were taken into account in the divine plan from all eternity, even the free choices that people would eventually make. This notion of God can fit with both methodological and cosmological naturalism.

4. The Metaphysical God, God of philosophers and mystics.
This defines God as the Infinite that lies beyond (and within) all finite realities. It is the Uncaused Cause, Absolute (independent) Beingness, eternal Mystery. It is a God about whom little can be said and then only in a carefully qualified way: this God is beyond all time and perfectly unchanging, for time is change; beyond all dependency on any other power of any sort, unaffected by anything that a creature does, although this God may have somehow taken into account from all eternity the acts of all creatures already (how this is possible is not knowable); this God is perfect personness and goodness and truth and beauty and unity in a totally infinite way, but all these words only say that God must somehow be the fullness of such qualities even though in a way beyond conception. This God is actively present in everything sustaining all in existence, including all in the divine purpose; but it is difficult to say how such a God intervenes to do specific miracles, and it would be incorrect to say that this God can have changes of mind or a change of direction. It is experienced by the mystic to be the fullness of perfection, often described metaphorically as a light so pure it blinds human consciousness. It cannot be grasped by mind, imagination, words, or images. This is incompatible with only metaphysical naturalism.

ADDITIONAL NOTIONS OF THE ULTIMATE REALITY

The choice is not simply between belief in God or non-belief. It is also how to define the Ultimate that one may be looking for. The three major options in Western thought do not begin to exhaust the possibilities.

4. The God of Process Theology, based on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead.
This is a recent variation on the Cosmic God. Whitehead developed a philosophical-scientific description of the entire universe, in which he postulated the existence and activity of an all-encompassing divine Element with two major aspects or “poles.” The eternally changeless aspect is the divine nature or character, a repository of unqualified values. The changeable aspect is the divine ‘Person’ who perceives every moment and event of the universe, evaluates the possibilities for greater value in each subsequent event, and lures or invites each moment towards that next best possibility. The ongoing all-pervasive lure of God accounts for the billions of years of cosmic evolution towards greater complexities and richness and consciousness. No single activity of God looks particularly divine or miraculous. It is only the cumulative effect of truly countless tiny moments of “luring” that is evidence of the on-going and all-inclusive divine activity in the world.

5. Pantheism: the entire universe is divine. Perhaps the entire universe is a living divinity, free to develop as it chooses. Or perhaps it has no freedom at all. The 17th century Jewish philosopher Baruch (or Benedict) Spinoza said that God and Nature were two names for the same thing. The divine reality is utterly rational, however, only in the sense that it operates by regular and reliable natural laws. In fact these laws of nature are the divine personality or character.

6. Stoic Logos The order of the universe is due to a divine and intelligent ‘fire.’ In fact the inner being of every human — the rational animal — is in fact a spark of the divine Logos. When a person dies his or her inner logos melts back into the single divine Logos. (This Stoic idea may have been borrowed from the following category:)

7. Atman. The single divine Self in Hindu Thought. We individual selves are nothing more than drops of the cosmic ocean of perfect consciousness and bliss which is the infinite and utterly changeless Atman (Self).

8. The Platonic One. There is a changeless, ultimate One which is divine and pure spirit. At the opposite of this pure spirit is materiality, which is the antithesis of divinity. The divine being of the One overflowed its boundaries, producing a single pure Mind, which in turn produced a supreme agent to further form specific aspects of the universe. This agent “reads” the mind of the Mind and sees there the categories of all the things that can exist. The highest things, but just lower than the Agent, are spirits. Some spirits “fell” into material forms, through forgetfulness. They are humans.

9. Brahman in Advaita Hindu Philosophy. A 9th century CE Hindu philosopher names Shankara proposed that Atman is just a limited way humans can use to talk about the truly Ultimate, which is Brahman. This is Reality, beyond all categories and change. It alone is really real; the world around us in not Brahman, therefore it is not really real. The only real thing in this world is the spark of Brahman in each person. People should seek to be released from this illusory world and become one with Brahman by losing their individual selfhood.

10. The Tao. The natural world is composed of 10,00 things. But through all of these runs the basic pattern of Yin and Yang, the two complementary aspects of nature. Yin and Yang arise from an even more basic reality, the Way, which in Chinese is the “Tao.” The way is formless and incomprehensible. It is not personal; it just is. Whoever learns to live in harmony with it will achieve peace.

Even more could be said about each of these. The point of these brief descriptions, however, is to indicate that the findings of science might or might not be compatible with one of these notions of a divine reality. Belief in the Tao, for example, might fit well with a scientific cosmology. Process theology claims that it fits well with both Western scriptures and with scientific thought.

God in the West

The ancient philosophers--Stoic, Epicurean, and Platonist--thought the early Christian God was an "everyday god," who actively intervened in historical events. This seemed to the philosophers to be too undignified for the highest divinity. This Christian God appeared to the philosophers to be rather like a super-Zeus of the old Greek beliefs, a high and powerful god but imperfect and limited. Christian theologians sometimes explained that the God of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures was in fact a cosmic God, like the Stoic Logos. Philo of Alexandria (more on him later) and Christians after him promoted the metaphysical description of God. This is clearly the most difficult to understand. It is a notion that can appear to be so vague as to say nothing in particular.
        Yet the notion of ultimacy is part of the definition of God. Ask yourself whether the definition of God allows God to be second to anything else, inferior to anything else, in any way whatsoever. Ask whether God, as usually defined, could even possibly be second or inferior to anything else. Anselm of Canterbury (1033?-1109) made people aware that they define the word God such that if their actual Christian God had any potential at all to be inferior to something else, then that Christian God would be reduced to the status of a god, perhaps of great power, but no longer the absolutely Ultimate Reality behind everything else. Anselm ended up defining God as "that than which nothing greater can be conceived." The concept of "God" is the Western way to answer the human question: what is the absolutely Ultimate? Here is a chart about perspectives on the Ultimate:

BASIC PERSPECTIVES ON LIFE: IN RELATION TO THE ULTIMATE
Here are some basic alternative answers that have appeared in history, to questions about the ultimate meaning and value, if any, of human existence.


MOST BASIC OPTION: DOES LIFE HAVE AN ULTIMATE VALUE OR PURPOSE, OR NOT?

NO IT DOES NOT  This is basic non-religiousness (E.g. various secular humanisms)
YES IT DOES This is basic religiousness.

Theisms. 
The basis for believing in ultimate meaning is the existence of a Personal Being.
 Non-theisms
The basis for believing in ultimate meaning is an Ultimate Nonpersonal Reality

Immanentist theism
God is found only within the world
Non-immanentist:
God  transends this world:
Combination:
God is both immanent & transcendent—existing everywhere but distinct from the world

[Further variations on Immanentist or Combination theisms:
Jewish: God's will is in the Torah; God's power is in history.
Muslim: God's will and power is at work in every event, controlling all.
Christian: God is found in Jesus and in history (and in the Church).
Some further variations are possible; e.g.:
High Church Christian: God is manifest in sacraments and community
(Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans)
Pentecostal Christians: God is present in miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit]

     In the Judaic and Christian tradition, the earliest theological thinker who insisted that God is truly Ultimate is Philo of Alexandria. Alexandria was an intellectual center in the ancient world, the home of the famous library. “Philosophers”--i.e., the learned and the scholarly--gathered in Alexandria to have access to the resources of this wonderful library. They wrote in Greek, the intellectual language of the time.
      Philo was one of these scholars. There were many Jews living in Egypt, including Alexandria, whose families had been in Egypt for generations, some of them since the sixth century B.C.E., when Babylon had conquered Jerusalem. A group of Jewish scholars had translated the Hebrew scriptures into Greek. Legend had it that it was a group of seventy. The Latin root for seventy thus became the name for this translation, the “Septuagint.” This is the text of the “Old Testament” which early Christians used, since few of them could read Hebrew.
     Philo of Alexandria adapted his Jewish faith to what he thought was the best philosophy and science of the times. He insisted that God is the changeless Ultimate One, as Platonists said. But the God of Judaism is also an active Creator. The world is not God's overflow, as Platonists said. It is created by God out of nothing. God is not the highest aspect of the universe. Nor, for that matter, is God a rational force inherent in nature, like the Stoic Logos. Instead the entire universe is radically other than God, as God's creation. God is independent of the world; it is God who made the world to exist.
Christians in Alexandria reflected on their own belief in God. They agreed with Philo that God must be superior even to the One of Platonism. So Christians also would end up sometimes emphasizing God's utter transcendence of all categories of the universe, and therefore also the categories of human thought.

Works of PHILO JUDAEUS, trans. C.D.Yonge (London: George Bell & Sons, 1890), 255, 289, 338.

The Unknowability of God (255)
34. Who can venture to affirm of him who is the cause of all things either that he is a body, or that he is incorporeal, or that he has such and such distinctive qualities, or that he has no such qualities? Or who, in short, can venture to affirm anything positively about his essence, or his character, or his constitution, or his movements? But He alone can utter a positive assertion respecting himself, since he alone has an accurate knowledge of his own nature, without the possibility of mistake.
35. Are not those men then simple who speculate on the essence of God? For how can they who are ignorant of the nature of the essence of their own soul, have any accurate knowledge of the soul of the universe? For the soul of the universe is according to our definition - God.
36. Take this sun, which is perceptible by our outward sense, do we see it by any other means than by the aid of the sun? And do we see the stars by any other light than that of the stars? And, in short, is not all light seen in consequence of light? And in the same manner God, being his own light, is perceived by himself alone, nothing and no other being co-operating with or assisting him, or being able at all to contribute to the pure comprehension of his existence; . . . . of God from God, of light from light.
[End of the selection from Philo]

     Philo influenced other thinkers, Christian and Muslim and Jews.. Whenever people began to think about what they meant by the word "God," they ran into the alternatives: either God is a finite being or truly infinite. If God is finite, then no matter how powerful, intelligent, enduring, loving this God might be, He [they did not think it might be a She] would be a (limited) being. Limit implied the possibility of being surpassed. What could be surpassed was potentially second or inferior. The word "God" did not seem to be the right word for something that could be inferior to anything.
But if God is truly infinite, beyond all limit whatsoever, then God is also beyond what the human mind can comprehend. Only mystics might meet this God. The theologians of Christianity were willing to live with a mystical notion of God as the absolutely infinite and incomprehensible Creator. They were not willing to live with a concept of God as possibly limited like a Super-Zeus. Here is part of the famous analysis by Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, written around 110 C.E.

ANSELM OF CANTERBURY : PROSLOGION
St. Anselm's Basic Writings, S.N.Deane, trans. (Open Court, 1903), 1-10.

CHAPTER I. A Rousing of the Mind to the Contemplation of God. * * * *
Come, then, Lord my God, teach my heart where and how to seek You, where and how to seek You, where and how to find You. Lord, if You are not present here, where, since You are absent, shall I look for You? On the other hand, if You are everywhere why then, since You are present, do I not see You? But surely You dwell in ‘light inaccessible’ [I Tim. vi. 16]. . . . Never have I seen You, Lord my God, I do not know Your face. What shall he do, most high Lord, what shall this exile do, far away from You as he is? What shall Your servant do, tormented by love of You and yet cast off ‘far from Your face’ [Ps. I. 13]? He yearns to see You and Your countenance is too far away from him. He desires to come close to You, and Your dwelling place is inaccessible; he longs to find You and does not know where You are; he is eager to seek You out and he does not know Your countenance. Lord, You are my God and my Lord, and never have I seen You. You have created me and re-created me and You have given me all the good things I possess, and still I do not know You. In fine, I was made in order to see You, and I have not yet accomplished what I was made for. . . . .

CHAPTER II. That God Truly Exists
Well then, Lord, You who give understanding to faith, grant me that I may understand, as much as You see fit, that You exist as we believe You to exist, and that You are what we believe You to be. Now we believe that You are something than which nothing greater can be thought. Or can it be that a thing of such a nature does not exist, since ‘the Fool has said in his heart, there is no God’ [Ps. xiii. I, lii. I]? But surely, when this same Fool hears what I am speaking about, namely, ‘something - than - which - nothing - greater - can - be - thought’, he understands what he hears, and what he understands is in his mind, even if he does not understand that it actually exists. For it is one thing for an object to exist in the mind, and another thing to understand that an object actually exists. Thus, when a painter plans beforehand what he is going to execute, he has [the picture] in his mind, but he does not yet think that it actually exists because he has not yet executed it. However, when he has actually painted it, then he both has it in his mind and understands that it exists because he has now made it. Even the fool, then, is forced to agree that something - than - which - nothing - greater - can - be - thought exists in the mind, since he understands this when he hears it, and whatever is understood is in the mind. And surely that - than - which - a - greater - cannot - be - thought cannot exist in the mind alone. For if it exists solely in the mind even, it can be thought to exist in reality also, which is greater. If then that-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought exists in the mind alone, this same that - than - which - a - greater - cannot - be - thought is that - than - which - a - greater - can - be - thought. But this is obviously impossible. Therefore there is absolutely no doubt that something - than - which - a - greater - cannot - be - thought exists both in the mind and in reality.

CHAPTER III. That God Cannot Be Thought Not to Exist
And certainly this being so truly exists that it cannot be even thought not to exist. For something can be thought to exist that cannot be thought not to exist, and this is greater than that which can be thought not to exist. Hence, if that - than - which - a - greater - cannot - be - thought can be thought not to exist, then that - than - which - a - greater - cannot - be - thought is not the same as that - than - which - a - greater - cannot - be - thought, which is absurd. Something - than - which - a - greater - cannot - be - thought exists so truly then, that it cannot be even thought not to exist.
And You, Lord our God, are this being. You exist so truly, Lord my God, that You cannot even be thought not to exist. And this is as it should be, for if some intelligence could think of something better than You, the creature would be above its creator and would judge its creator—and that is completely absurd. In fact, everything else there is, except You alone, can be thought of as not existing. You alone, then, of all things most truly exist and therefore of all things possess existence to the highest degree; for anything else does not exist as truly, and so possesses existence to a lesser degree. Why then did ‘the Fool say in his heart, there is no God’ [Ps. xiii. I, lii. I] when it is so evident to any rational mind that You of all things exist to the highest degree? Why indeed, unless because he was stupid and a fool? [End of selection from Anselm]

ST. THOMAS AQUINAS (1225-1274)
Aquinas provides another classical instance of a metaphysical approach to God. His theology was dominant in Catholic and Anglican thought up to recent years. Aquinas insists that while we can legitimately apply our concepts to God by way of analogy, and assert therefore that God is truly good, perfect, infinite, and so forth, we cannot really comprehend what this is like.

Thomas Aquinas on Knowing and Naming God: Summa Theologica I, Ques. 3-13.
In the introduction to Question 3, Aquinas lays out the sequence of topics for Questions 3 through 13. He says he will discuss:

I. How God is not: 1. simplicity, 2. perfection, 3.infinity, 4. immutability, 5. unity — all negations.

II. How God is known by us:
` 1. In heaven, yes. 2-3. Through an image or eye, no; 4. nor by the mind’s own power.
7. Not even the blessed in heaven truly comprehend God.
12. God as known by reason: Because [sensible things] are His effects and depend on their cause, we can be led from them so far as to know of God whether He exists, and to know of Him what must necessarily belong to Him as the first cause of all things, exceeding all things caused by Him.”

III. How God is named:
1. “We can name something insofar as we can understand it.” “In this life we cannot see the essence of God.” We know God from creatures as their principle and by way of excellence and remotion.” “In this way He can be named by us from creatures, yet not so that the name which signifies Him expresses the divine essence in itself.” Reply to objection #2: “We attribute to him abstract names to signify his simplicity, and concrete names to signify his substance and perfection, although both these kinds of names fail to express his mode of being, forasmuch as our intellect does not know him in this life as He is.”

Aquinas’ analysis can be summarized in this way:
When a person says that God is [good, love, power, etc. . .]
what the person can actually mean by this is only this:
God is the fullness of the perfection of what human beings know as
[goodness, love, power, etc. . .]
although in a way identical with the absolute unchangeable divine
simplicity, i.e., in a way beyond human comprehension.

Thus, for Aquinas human language is correct, but inadequate. It is legitimate, and it is the best way that a finite mind can apply words to what is beyond all words; it is the best way to think of what is beyond all thought. It is the best set of images available to imagine what is beyond all imaginings and thoughts and words: God.

Taoism:
The idea that there is an incomprehensible Ultimate is not restricted to Western religions. In the philosophical Taoism of China, the Tao is said to be the formless which gives rise to forms. The person who claims to understand the Tao does not understand it. The person who knows the Tao acknowledges that it cannot be understood.
The earliest collection of Taoist sayings is the Tao Te Ching [Pronounced Dow Duh Jing] whose origins seem to be in the 5th century BCE. Of its 81 brief statements here are #1, #42, and #56:

The Tao that can be told of is not the eternal Tao;
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth;
The Named is the mother of all things. (1)

Tao produced the One.
The One produced the Two.
The two produced the three.
And the three produced the ten thousand things.
The ten thousand things carry the yin and embrace the yang,
and through the blending of the material force they achieve harmony. (42)

He who knows [the Tao] does not speak.
He who speaks does not know. (56)

The Hindu Tradition
Similarly, the ancient Hindu reflections on the original Reality came face to face with the incomprehensible. The Rig Veda, a major sacred text of Hindu tradition, in Hymn 129 of Book X, at the end of this Veda, said to be written about the eighth century B.C.E., proclaims that no one can grasp whatever it is that is the origin of everything. This may be the very first known instance of reflection in writing on the nature of the Ultimate reality. With little or no previous philosophy to guide it, it has many more questions than answers, and the attempts at answers do not always agree with one another.
Then was not non-existent nor existent:
there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it.
What covered it, and where? and what gave shelter?
Was water there, unfathomed depth of water?
Death was not then, nor was there aught immortal:
no sign was there, the day's and night's divider.
The one thing, breathless, breathed by its own nature:
apart from it was nothing whatsoever.
Darkness there was:
at first concealed in darkness this All was indiscriminate Chaos.
All that existed then was void and formless.
By the great power of Warmth(2) was born that Unit.
Thereafter rose Desire(3) in the beginning,
Desire, the primal seed and germ of Spirit.
Sages who searched with their heart's thought
discovered the existent's kinship in the non-existent.
Transversely was there severing line extended:
what was above it then, and what below it?
There were the begetters, there were mighty forces,
free action here and energy up yonder.
Who verily knows and who can here declare it,
whence it was born and whence comes this creation?
The Gods are later than this world's production.
Who knows then whence it first came into being?
He, the first origin of this creation,
whether he formed it all or did not form it.
Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven,
he verily knows it -- or perhaps he knows not.

If all this seems very abstract, think of it instead as “sophisticated.” In comparing religious belief with scientific ideas, it is important to remember that science is also quite sophisticated. It is no longer an everyday unsophisticated method of seeing which ideas fit with each other and with the evidence. Science applies precise and complex means of getting data and use highly developed rational techniques of analysis. The religious ideas we are most used to, however, are the ordinary everyday ideas that we learn by the time we are in high school. It is certainly all right to compare everyday religion to everyday beliefs about the world. But if religious thought is to be compared to science, it should be the sophisticated forms of religion that are set in relation to the sophistications of science.

ATHEISM

In the meeting between religion and science, belief in God has been challenged by the fact that science does not need the concept of God. We will see ways in which the growth of science made miracles less plausible. We will see that the theory of evolution makes belief in a Designer and Providential Orderer for the universe less plausible. In neither case is God’s existence disproved. But God increasingly became a “God of the gaps,” as one person put it. As science explained more and more aspects of the universe, God’s activity could still be found only in the gaps, where science had not yet explained how certain things could happen without God’s plan or intervention.
       A famous example begins with Newton’s guess that God must be constantly at work in the universe to keep the whole thing from starting to wobble and fly apart. In particular Jupiter seemed to be slowing down and Saturn speeding up. If God did not intervene Jupiter would fall into the sun and Saturn would fly out into space. So God was need to keep tinkering with the mechanism of the universe. By the early 19th century, however, the astronomer LaPlace had solved the whole problem with some excellent math work. He showed that Jupiter and Saturn had a regular pattern of oscillation because of their influence on each other. In the long run the slowing and speeding up reversed and then reversed again, creating an extremely long-term stability.
       Another famous astronomer of the time, named Herschel, reported on a meeting of LaPlace and Napoleon, LaPlace’s former student, at a country villa for some vigorous discussion. LaPlace gave an explanation of his theory of planetary oscillations, He went further and presented his theory of how the entire universe could have evolved from primordial matter in motion. Napoleon is supposed to have remarked: “But what about God?” Napoleon’s question was based on an assumption that the universe needed the idea of God to explain it. In a somewhat legendary version of this meeting, LaPlace is said to have responded: “Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis.” LaPlace thought he had closed all the gaps. There was no left-over unexplained evidence that required the God-hypothesis to explain it.
        None of this disproves God’s existence. We can still ask about the source of the original matter in motion. Perhaps a concept of God is needed to account for the existence of any universe at all. Moreover, the few disbelievers stood in opposition to generations of highly intelligent and informed people, to whom the existence of God was highly plausible. Surely, it could be argued, that the few agnostics and atheists were not probably more correct than the thousands of brilliant philosophers and theologians whose belief in God was firm and part of a highly rational analysis of the world.
        In the 19th and early 20th century, there were three influential atheists who offered explanations as to why most people in history believed in God in spite of the fact, in the opinion of these atheists, such belief was incorrect. These three were by no means the only atheists. But they had a common theme: they cast suspicion on belief in God by portraying it as a fiction that people construct or accept in order to alleviate certain anxieties of life. A 20th century philosopher named Paul Ricoeur therefore called them “the masters of suspicion.” These three are Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud. All three of them are “reductionists,” reducing religious beliefs and practices to underlying human processes. Religions often claim they come from God, from “above,” so to speak. These masters of suspicion say that religions come from below, from our own human needs.

LUDWIG FEUERBACH, 1804-1872.
       In a work entitled, The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach said that we humans tended to "project" into the sky above us some of our own ideas about ourselves. We have minds open to the infinite yet we are finite and fallible. We are able to conceive of perfection, but this only makes us all the more aware of our imperfections. We become anxious about ourselves, guilty over our failings, fearful of our potential for mistakes. So we seek some Perfect source of forgiveness and help and guidance.
       Our sense of the infinite allows us to dream up the possibility of an Infinite Reality. Our own thought about perfection allow us to think of the Infinite as Perfection. We give a name to this Infinite Perfect Reality-- we call it "God. In order to imagine the perfection of this Infinite God we look to the best aspects of our own human nature, exaggerate those aspects into perfection, and then attribute those aspects to God. Thus we make God [i.e., our idea of God] in our image and likeness. We make this God distinct from us by contrasting our imperfections and finiteness with the infinite perfections of this God. But it is really our own ideal selves we are worshiping,, when we worship God. Feuerbach labeled this a kind of “projection,” as though we projected our own image into the sky but in a perfected form.
       To Feuerbach this "projection" is not just a pleasant fantasy. It is a way in which we rob ourselves of self-confidence. It is truly we humans who have the power of goodness and creativity and freedom. But conscious of our limitedness, afraid to take on too heavy a responsibility, we tell ourselves that we are not really very good or creative at all, that our freedom is rarely used for anything but doing harm. So we conclude that we should leave things in God's hands. By this we sacrifice our autonomy and increase our dependence. What humans need to do, said Feuerbach, was to recapture a sense of our own value by recognizing that there is no God, there is only our own inner potential for "divine" goodness and creativity and freedom, potential which we must develop in order to improve life. The impulse at work here is humanism--an affirmation of the worth and potential of the human person--in a purely worldly (“secular”) form.

KARL MARX, 1818-1883
       Where Feuerbach had spoken generally of religion as a human creation based on our sense of finiteness, Marx focused on the specific problems of the oppressed. Religion is an illusion, Marx said (i.e., God and other supernatural beings are illusory), used by people to express their misery from the conditions of life in this world by contrasting this life with an idealized world to come, by contrasting the callous rulers of this world with an idealized otherworldly leader who is God. Religion is therefore the cry of the oppressed, an expression and sign of their distress. Religious otherworldliness promises pie in the sky in the great by and by; it thus becomes the opium by which people dull their awareness of their current pains in this world.
        Critical analysis of religion is the "premise of all criticism" because all critical analysis of human social and political and economic life has to start with the recognition that all these forms of life are products of human history just as religion is. If we can become aware that even our religions are just the product of human thought in history, then we can recognize that so are our social, political, and economic forms. In that case, for the first time in history we will be able to deliberately chose to accept, reject, or change these forms. We can thus take power over the conditions of our own lives. The attempts in the former U.S.S.R. to follow Marx's program for society turned out rather disastrous. China is still digging out from under the effects of his thought.      Historians will continue to analyze this. But Marx was inspired by a compassion for the oppressed, a compassion that has its roots, many have claimed, in the Judaeo-Christian ethic of love of neighbor. Ironically, then, Marx's criticism of religion as he saw it operating in Europe was a criticism inspired by that same religion. He offered a vision of justice, freedom, and equality for all human beings. It is also all the more ironic, therefore, that the regimes which have operated in his name have destroyed so much freedom, justice, and equality. Up until recently liberation theology movements of Latin America have sometimes found inspiration in his ideas.

SIGMUND FREUD, 1856-1939
       Like Feuerbach and Marx, Freud declared religion to be a set of illusory beliefs, childish behavior in which we find the means to assuage guilt about thoughts of rebellion against our parents, and a childish insistence on having a Superparent to guide, protect, and help us in the midst of life's dangers. For children this is a kind of necessary neurosis--a set of compulsive behaviors that help us through childhood. But it is a neurosis that adults ought to outgrow, says Freud, as they learn more rational behavior.
       Freud invented psychoanalysis. Its main supposition is that there are non-conscious memories, feelings, anxieties, compulsions, ideas present and working in people in ways that they are unable to recognize and which they repress, keeping them out of conscious awareness because they are threatening. So Freud “reduced” a lot of human ideas and behavior to underlying and non-conscious psychological structures of the mind. He did this to religion also.
       On this basis Freud proposed a number of rather odd theories about the origin of religion. One of these begins with what Freud called the Oedipus complex. In the ancient Greek myth Oedipus killed his own father and married his mother. Freud claimed that in primitive culture at one time the young men killed their father to get his power and status. Then they felt guilty. They appeased this guilt by making offerings to a father-figure god. This was an origin of god-worship, said Freud.
       In a revised version of this, Freud said that every boy also wants to do away with his father and have his mother all to himself, Freud claimed. But boys are afraid of the power of the father, so they repress their desire for the mother and ease their anxiety by a strong devotion to their own father, as well as to any father-figure like God. Their anxiety so strong this becomes a neurotic compulsion, though they cannot recognize this. Their religious belief is thus a neurotic illusion, says Freud.
       This theory of Freud’s, however, has not fared very well. He did a little better in a work entitled The Future of an Illusion. He began with the assumption that religious beliefs are unfounded. Historically they begin with belief in spirits and in gods, which Freud considered superstition. He thought that people tended to anthropomorphize the forces of nature, what he called the “humanization” of nature, in order to deal with the threat of death and suffering that nature (or “Fate”) subjects us to. Here is an excerpt from The Future of an Illusion summarizing his thought.

For the individual, as for mankind in general, life is hard to endure. The culture in which he shares imposes on him some measure of privation, and other men occasion him a certain degree of suffering, either in spite of the laws of this culture or because of its imperfections. Add to this the evils that unvanquished nature--he calls it Fate--inflicts on him. One would expect a permanent condition of anxious suspense and a severe injury to his innate narcissism to be the result of this state of affairs. . . . But how does he defend himself against the supremacy of nature, of fate, which threatens him, as it threatens all?
With the first step, which is the humanization of nature, much is already won. Nothing can be made of impersonal forces and fates; they remain eternally remote. But if the elements have passions that rage like those in our own souls, if death itself is not something spontaneous, but the violent act of an evil Will, if everywhere in nature we have about us beings who resemble those of our own environment, then indeed we can breathe freely, we can feel at home in face of the supernatural, and we can deal psychically with our frantic anxiety. We are perhaps still defenseless, but no longer helplessly paralyzed; we can at least react; perhaps indeed we are not even defenseless; we can have recourse to the same methods against the violent supermen of the beyond that we make use of in our community; we can try to exorcise them, to appease, them to bribe them, and so rob them of part of their power by thus influencing them. . . .
For there is nothing new in this situation. It has an infantile prototype, and is really only the continuation of this. For once before one has been in such a state of helplessness: as a little child in one's relationship to one's parents. For one had reason to fear them, especially the father, though at the same time one was sure of his protection against the dangers then known to one.
* * * *
In the course of time the first observations of law and order in natural phenomena are made, and therewith the forces of nature lose their human traits. But men's helplessness remains, and with it their father-longing and the gods. The gods retain their threefold task: they must exorcise the terrors of nature, they must reconcile one to the cruelty of fate, particularly as shown in death, and they must make amends for the sufferings and privations that the communal life of culture has imposed on man. . . . .
What it amounts to is this: life in this world serves a higher purpose; true, it is not easy to guess the nature of this purpose, but certainly a perfecting of human existence is implied. Probably the spiritual part of man, the soul, which in the course of time has so slowly and unwillingly detached itself from the body, is to be regarded as the object of this elevation and exaltation. . . . Over each of us watches a benevolent, and only apparently severe, Providence, which will not suffer us to become the plaything of the stark and pitiless forces of nature; death itself is not annihilation, not a return to inorganic lifelessness, but the beginning of a new kind of existence, which lies on the road of development to something higher. And to turn to the other side of the question, the moral laws that have formed our culture govern also the whole universe, only they are upheld with incomparably more force and consistency by a supreme judicial court. In the end all good is rewarded, all evil punished, if not actually in this life, then in the further existences that begin after death. And thus all the terrors, the sufferings, and the hardships of life are destined to be obliterated.
[End of the excerpt from Freud]

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This chapter has been a set of description of ideas about God. We will review many topics in the following chapters, from miracles to cosmos to evolution to the nature of the person and to ideas about the nature of religious faith. Each will pertain to different aspects about the existence, nature, and activities of God. Conflicts between religion and science may be a conflict of science with one notion of God but not with other notions. The metaphysical notion of God, as was said briefly, is the most compatible with science. The notion of God as cosmic Designer may fit with science also. The notion of God as one who intervenes miraculously in the flow of natural events is the notion most in conflict with scientific thought. That is the topic of the next chapter.

GOD: a brief bibliography
Mortimer Adler, How to Think about God. NY: Macmillan, 1980.
A delightful philosophical book which in a little over a 170 pages introduces a person to classical arguments for the existence of God. The bibliography at the end is also excellent. Adler is a self-confessed "pagan," raised a Jew and married to an Episcopalian, who taught for many years at the University of Chicago.
Karen Armstrong, A History of God. A. A. Knopf, 1993.
A very ambitious and thorough description of 4,000 years of religious belief, from the time of the god onward. Includes a description of God is Islam also.
John B. Cobb and David Ray Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition. Westminster, 1976. Two leading U.S. process theologians have produced this fairly readable summary. Ch. 3 is on God; Chs. 1-5 provide a good overall introduction to process thought in 94 pages.
Denis Edwards, Human Experience of God. NY: Paulist, 1983.
An Australian Catholic priest covers a number of ways of experiencing or relating to God, in the course of which Edwards also defines what the word "God" means. He finds God primarily in the dimension of mystery.
Edmund Fortman, S.J., The Theology of God: Commentary. Milwaukee: Bruce, 1968.
A good representative of pre-Vatican II Catholic theology of God. It differs very little from post-Vatican II, except that it lacks the emphasis on human experience such as Edwards highlights. This consists mainly of excerpts from top notch 19th and 20th century scholars, Protestant and Catholic alike.
Robert M. Grant, The Early Christian Doctrine of God. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1966. This brief survey has held up well. In 101 pages it touches on major aspects of early Christian belief, from the New Testament up through the second century. A few extra pages provide some bibliographic references.
John F. Haught, What is God? How to Think about the Divine. Paulist, 1986.
Five ways to think about God, each based on aspects of life with profound depth or endless openness to them, all reflecting the idea that God in the end is Mystery. God gets forgotten, says Haught, when people restrict themselves to science, because science is concerned with the knowable. God is precisely what lies beyond the scope of science: the unknowable Mystery.
Kimball Kehoe, The Theology of God: Sources. NY: Bruce, 1971.
The sources in this case are not modern scholars but original classical Christian sources from first century Roman empire up to the First Vatican Council in 1869-70.
William Lane, God?: A Debate Between a Christian and an Atheist (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004)
Sally McFague, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age.
Fortress, 1987. This is a great book to sample from. McFague reviews and stretches various models of God, including "God as Mother." She challenges all models of God which praise patriarchal and dominating power as divine ideals. McFague is a Protestant scholar.
Thomas V. Morris, Our Idea of God: An Introduction to Philosophical Theology.
Intervarsity Press, 1991. This is as clear as a book can get about ideas this abstractly philosophical. Chapter 6 is a good sample, discussing how God's characteristics are not distinct from God's perfectly simple Divinity. Every chapter is excellent, albeit dry. Morris, a Protestant philosopher teaching at Notre Dame, shows thorough and subtle knowledge of the history of analysis of God in Western theology.
John A..T. Robinson, Honest to God. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1963.
The first three chapters of this book summarize the ideas of this Anglican bishop on the nature and presence of God. Chapter five "Worldly Holiness" spells out the implication for prayer and religious life. This book shocked many Christians in 1963. Almost thirty years later it is still being absorbed. Its ideas are similar to those of Shea, Haught, and Macquarrie.
John Shea, Stories of God: An Unauthorized Biography. Chicago: Thomas More, 1967. This has been a fairly popular book among serious and educated religious readers. Shea argues that it is difficult but necessary to let loose of easy images of God and acknowledge the mysteriousness of God. In practice this means seeking to find and to create the godly around us more than trying to relate directly to a Person-God in our mind which in the end is only an image. Shea is a Catholic priest

ATHEISM: Check Gordon Stein, ed., The Encyclopedia of Unbelief (Buffalo: Prometheus Bks, 1985) at the reserve desk on the second floor in the library for ideas. Also see anything written or edited by Paul Kurtz for an American humanist's unreligious viewpoints and references.