First Unitarian Universalist Society of Albany
"The Idea of God"
Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore September 10^th, 2000

Various Contemporary Approaches to God

Can you think about God? Can you be convinced about the existence of God because you have read all the evidence? The atheist also has his evidence; he has probably studied as much as you, and he says there is no God…You may have read the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, or other books in which various erudite scholars have skillfully described what God is, asserting this and contradicting that, but as long as you do not know the process of your own thinking, what you think about God may be stupid and petty, and generally it is…surely the first question is, how do you know what you think is true? Can thinking ever bring about the experience of that which is unknowable? Which doesn't mean that you must emotionally, sentimentally accept some rubbish about God…It is no good my sitting here speculating, building temples, churches, and getting excited about them. What I have to do is to stand up, walk, struggle, push, get there, and find out [for myself].

Albert Einstein

The fairest think we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of mystery--even if mixed with fear--that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elemental forms--it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man. I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves.

Hans Kung

This earth of ours is a speck of dust in comparison to the totality of the Milky Way, which includes some hundred billion individual stars, one of them being the sun. And, again, this Milky Way of ours is a speck of dust by comparison with galactic clusters, some of which contain ten thousand galaxies, so that the number of observable galaxies may well amount to a hundred million. The more, then, I reflect on the amazing conclusions of astrophysics and, again, like human beings from time immemorial, look up into the clear night sky, am I not to wonder what it all means, where it all comes from? To answer, "Out of nothing," is no explanation. Reasons cannot be satisfied with that. The only serious alternative…is that the whole stems from that first creative cause of causes, which we call God and indeed the Creator God. And even if I cannot prove him, I can with good reason affirm him: in that reasonable, tested and enlightened trust in which I have already affirmed his existence. For if the God who exists is truly God, then he is not only God for me here and now, but God at the beginning, God from all eternity.

Viktor E. Frankl

The concept of God need not necessarily be theistic. When I was fifteen years old or so I came up with a definition of God to which, in my old age, I come back more and more. I would call it an operational definition. It reads as follows: God is the partner of your most intimate soliloquies.

Sermon

I am a believer and an unbeliever. And I do not think I am alone. The vast majority of Unitarian Universalists do not accept the idea that Jesus Christ is their one and only Lord and Savior. Most of us do not believe in an anthropomorphic image of God. And many of us also do not believe homo sapiens are the end-all be-all of existence. There is more. Many of us refer to that more using the word God.

Personally, I’m pretty dissatisfied with the word ‘god.’ Too many connotations cloud the word’s meaning. I’d like to argue for creating a new word, say ‘Godallahom,’ people can approach without prejudice.

In fact my excursion into the world of the American Sufis in the early 1980’s allowed me to do just that. I didn’t have any emotional baggage around the word "Allah." I was open to exploring the experience of chanting the phrase "La illa ha il allah," translated roughly as: there are no lesser gods only the one unifying God. For hours we swayed back and forth in a circle surrounded by redwoods lifting our hearts in devotion. Something inside me was changed by that experience of communion with a sense of transcendent being beyond me and also within me.

While I appreciate the Sufis, I’m a Unitarian Universalist first. My faith includes the wisdom of the world’s religious traditions but is not limited to them. While we Unitarian Universalists include, we also examine and analyze what we include before go beyond tolerance and give acceptance. A critique of the majority Christian view has been part of the evolution of our religious identity. We have rejected the Augustinian conception of Original Sin. We have questioned and for the most part rejected the exclusivity found in the Christian and Jewish revelation. Science teaches us far more about the eternal laws that govern the universe than any scripture or prophecy ever has. The ironclad reliability and predictability of these natural laws has led many of us to question if there is anything else going on. Science has dissected reality and found no God at the center --- yet.

Yet is the key phrase. Science is very good at discovering what is repeatable and observable. Mathematics is very good at finding relationships between abstraction and reality. Neither science nor mathematics are as good at making sense of what it all means and finding greater purpose.

Up until the last 30 years, Unitarian Universalists have relied more and more on the scientific worldview for purpose and meaning. Valuable as that worldview may be, I wonder if this reliance may be misplaced since science is a method of seeking knowledge -- not an end in itself. I interpret the surge of interest in spirituality, particularly among people of my generation and younger, as a hunger for purpose and meaning that the academy cannot provide. Making a religion out of an endless searching process is not satisfying for many. Yes, we need to continue our search and grow throughout our lives but we also want answers we can live by. That desire for satisfying answers has driven me to reexamine our religious and philosophical heritage.

We are not the first who have looked up at the sky on a clear and cloudless night in wonder and awe. Science and technology have done little to advance the search for answers to the cosmic ‘W’ questions. Why am I here? Why is there anything at all? What is the purpose of my life? Who or what is behind all this?

Up until the age of science, that question has always been answered with some reference to a being or beings greater than ourselves. For the last several thousand years that being has been called God.

Getting a handle on all that has been thought, written and said about God stretches one’s synapses and neural pathways to their limits. This morning I’d like to point our attention to the some of the roots from which we draw intellectual sustenance and support the flowering of contemporary thought about God.

The tap roots are the three great Greek philosophers, Pythagorus, Plato and Aristotle and the schools that sprung up around them. I’ve been listening to Dr. Robinson of Georgetown University’s lectures on The Philosophy of Ideas recorded for The Great Courses on Tape series. He calls Aristotle one of the best arguments for alien intervention in history. (Jesus might rival him on that score) Aristotle does more to advance knowledge than anyone before him and few since. Aristotle stands on the shoulders of Plato whose thought still shines brightly today. Twentieth century theologian Alfred North Whitehead is quoted as offering humbly that his powerful theological writings are but an embellishment on Socrates' wisdom. And finally Pythagorus, the founder of the discipline of mathematics, discovered enduring truths far beyond his own time.

Most of us will remember from geometry of course the Pythagorean theorem: A squared plus B squared equals C squared. While this formula explains how to calculate the sides of a right triangle, the formula is independent of all worldly right triangles. In fact, all worldly right triangles will be close approximations to the ideal right triangle. No actual right triangle can be exact and perfect. The theorem is independent of reality yet has held true for real triangles since the Pythagorus’ time and will continue to hold true far into the future, probably forever. Pythagorus’ theorem is an eternally true idea that has correspondence with surprising reality.

From this observation, Pythagorus discovered Mathgod, the divinity of number. Physicists and mathematicians to this day have a special feeling of reverence for formulas and equations. There are numbers such as pi and e that recur with regularity.

Douglas Hofstadter, professor of cognitive and computer science commonly known for his book Godel, Escher Bach, got his start studying sequences of numbers and looking for formulas to predict the series. He writes of his faith, when analyzing a difficult sequence, that there is a deep, even profound order in the world of numbers:

Why do I say this? Because "Mathgod" – the entity behind the scenes, the abstraction responsible for the patterns of mathematics – doesn’t, generally speaking, like irregularities and inconsistencies. Mathgod likes perfect patterns not imperfect ones. Why? Mathgod only knows.

Plato takes the idea of an underlying order to triangles a step further by stating that underlying everything that exists is an ideal form on which it is based. This podium, that chair and window are but examples of the eternal forms podium, chair and window. Mathematics proves to us, again and again, there is an order that supports everything we can discover from what exists. It is an order that speaks of an Orderer greater than the Olympian Gods throwing lightning bolts and sleeping with mortal women.

Aristotle, a student of Plato for 20 years, spent a lifetime discovering just what that order might be in just about every direction, be it mathematics, physics, or biology. Aristotle looked to worldly experience to abstract the deeper order while recognizing that this order may be harder to see as precisely as the order of a perfect triangle. Aristotle is famous for detailing the intimate relationship between cause and effect, action and reaction. In his metaphysics, he traces back all cause and effect, all motion which is begat by another motion, to the first mover, to the God’s God.

About the same time Aristotle is making his great discoveries, Israel was conquered by Alexander the Great one of his students. The tribal Hebrew priests of Palestine had little in their science and mathematics to compare with the brilliance of Greek thought. They did however share a strong commitment to one God, a God’s God.

It is very important to realize the great differences in how the Greek philosophers and the Jews of this time conceived of their monotheism. There were many competing visions of Gods and Goddesses circulating that the prophets constantly harangued the Jewish people to stop worshipping. The religion of Baal, of the golden calf of fertility, was familiar, comfortable even functional for the farmer wanting a good harvest. The God of the Jews was not an abstraction. He walked in the garden in the cool of the day. He had feelings of anger and rage at Adam and Eve. He changed his mind when asking for Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. He wants a relationship called a covenant with his creation. This God acts in time, has a plan and expects an ending to the story.

Now, let's remember Mathgod. Does Mathgod have corporeal existence? Has Mathgod feelings? A will? A plan and an ending to the story? No. Mathgod is independent of the material world. Mathgod is uninterested or invested in my devotion. Mathgod will explain to me how the univese works, how to build my house but Mathgod will not occupy it with me or hear my prayers.

Now let us bring into this discussion a Gallilean carpenter named Jesus. For over 300 years both Greek and Jewish thinking intermingled in Palestine while each tried to assert cultural hegemony. Whether directly or indirectly, Jesus took a lesson from the Greeks on seeking universal principles. Jesus declared that his abba, or father, was not just his father, not just the father of the Jewish people, but the father of all, even the Greeks. Jesus is notable for who he included, the centurion, the unclean, the poor, the sick, the prostitute and the Samaritan. Jesus brought a vision of a loving God rather than a vengeful, jealous God or a distant, abstract God.

The unexpected twist in this story was the report that Jesus survived his crucifixion and ascended to heaven like Elijah. His followers must have wondered, could Jesus be more than a mortal Rabbi? His disciples knew that the Torah revealed that at the beginning of time God walked the earth. Could this mean that this man who walked with us and defeated death was actually God? How do you make sense of all this?

The intersection of these questions became solidified in the apostle Paul, a Jew, a Roman citizen with a solid Greek training, who becomes a Christian. We could call Paul the first Christian because he was the first one to record in writing anything about their faith, even before the first Gospel, probably Mark, was written.

These ideas of God didn’t blend well then and still don’t blend well for Unitarian Universalists. The early Christian churches had all kinds of ideas about how to understand the life, teaching and death of Jesus. But that is not the way of empires. Empires value order over truth. Rather than continue to creatively explore the diverse philosophies of God, the Roman church listened to Augustine’s answers and settled the question in the Nicean creed.

Much to the Roman church's displeasure, the continuing exploration of the idea of the nature of God continued within the church and outside it. The Eastern Orthodox Church and the Islamic world continued close contact with Greek philosophic texts during the dark ages. Mystics inside and outside of the church taught that God was a reality that could be experienced by the seeker. Efforts to Christianize the world brought Europe in contact with belief and unbelief that came home with the conquerors to inspire their philosophers and theologians.

There are few questions about the nature, authority, will, or law of God that have not been ruminated over by great and insightful minds. We too are full of ideas, opinions and assumptions about God. All of us have cobbled together our views of God from second or third hand opinions. Perhaps a few here today have taken the mystical path and puzzled out an answer from personal revelation.

Whatever God is or is not, the idea of God keeps changing with the expansion of human wisdom. Be not deceived by the changing views accepting or rejecting this or that idea of God. The mystery of existence is not so easily resolved as asserting one’s belief or unbelief in yesterday’s idea of God. The assumptions we use to make meaning of our lives and the vision informing our willful actions must be brought into conscious awareness if we want to know ourselves and live deliberately.

Since the total reality or unreality of the nature of God is most likely beyond human comprehension, none of us will ever have all the answers. Those who feel drawn to explore the idea of God have much to gain from sharing the journey together. If I have piqued your interest in such an exploration, I encourage you to sign up for my evolution of God class.

Don’t be discouraged by the impossibility of the task. Even though every idea about God will be imperfect, there can be great satisfaction in the search. There are highly meaningful provisional answers that can shape and guide our lives for the better to be found along the way.

This is how I can say I love the Lord with all my heart, soul and strength and also say I reject many of the Biblical God ideas. The provisional idea of God I accept and strive to embody, moves me to dedicate myself, my heart, soul and strength, in the service of life as it becomes what it becomes.

Do I know that idea of God is right? No. Do I know that that idea of God brings an inner harmony to my being that Pythagorus, or Buddha, or Rumi might have recognized? I think so, but I’m not done yet. And I hope you aren’t either.