Room for God

A random thought occurred to me the other day:  God is a placeholder.   Let me explain what I mean by that.

It strikes me how we as a human species have conceived of the Divine over the centuries.  Although I’m a Christian, I’m fascinated by the beliefs and traditions of pagan antiquity, especially Greco-Roman religion.  There was a deity for everything—more so than the twelve major gods we may have learned of in school.  The list of Roman deities associated with birth and childhood alone is quite extensive:

• Cinxia is associated with the bridal belt, worn to symbolize that either she is bound to her husband, or he to her, or both.  During labor, the husband may have removed his belt, tied it around his wife, then released it with a prayer in order that she be released from the child she is about to bear.
• Pertunda enabled sexual penetration.
• Alemona fed the growing embryo.
• Vitumnus endowed the fetus with life.
• Postverta averted a breech birth.
• Lucina introduced the newborn to the light—still an idiomatic expression in most Romance languages, such as Spanish, where “dar a luz” (lit., ‘give to light’) means ‘to give birth’.

There are so many, many more, and if you’re interested, I can reference Wikipedia's extensive article.

Of course, we monotheistic Christians view this as everything from blasphemous and idolatrous, to simply superstitious and misguided.  Furthermore, as heirs of the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, we may also look upon this as naive, ignorant, and just plain silly.  I, however, see it as part of the human quest to see the Divine in everything, and would challenge you to recall the last time you looked for God in the very acts of exchanging rings during a wedding, or even in the simple act of removing the bridal girdle, or tossing the flowers.

And this is precisely the point I’m getting to.  As history ran its course, we as a species came to realize that many of these events do not have divinity attached to them, at least not in the way our forbears subscribed to.  Faith does not literally move mountains.  If an entire town gathers together to pray for rain, for mild weather, for a plentiful harvest, they may or may not receive these things.  No, we learned that these things are natural—and that human action, not divine intervention, helps us prepare for them.  We learned that if we save water, we will survive a drought because droughts come and go of their own accord.  Studying the earth taught us what conditions favor a more plentiful harvest.  And most important, we got used to the idea that because a drought, a flood, or a bad harvest is natural, then it is not punishment for sin, and therefore it is not sinful to prepare against these natural conditions.

While we did not give up our belief in God, we realized that God had less and less to do.  Thus a need was born to reconcile faith in God with common observation of our surroundings.  The 17th and 18th centuries saw the development of deism, which held that God indeed created the world, but subsequently left it to run on its own in much the same way as a clockmaker will fashion and assemble the gears of a clock, and then step back and let the clock run.  As such then, God does not involve himself in the workings of the world, but has created the laws of nature, the gears which operate our world.

Incidentally, this may have been the philosophy of the Founding Fathers of the United States.  It is true that this country was “not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion” (cf., the Treaty of Tripoli), but references to “nature’s God” in the Declaration of Independence (occurring next to “the laws of nature”) and “endowed by their Creator” in the Constitution demonstrate that they didn’t perceive this as an atheist nation either.

But the evolution of our way of thinking did not stop there, for the more we learned and acted out what we learned, the more we took that final step and largely did away with God.

Every Sunday after church, on my way to brunch, I walk past the First Church of Religious Science in New York.  True to its Enlightenment influence, their motto reads: “What man can conceive, man can achieve.”  Excusing the unfortunate lack of gender inclusivity, I don’t know, that slogan gives me chills—and not just because it’s a church slogan that ironically doesn’t even mention God.  Through our increased understanding of the fields of physics, mathematics, astronomy, and the like, we’ve learned that we are capable of pretty much anything:

• We’ve cured formerly incurable diseases and infirmities.
• We’ve probed everything from our own cellular structure to the makeup of planets and galaxies far away.
• We’ve built superstructures that house and connect our growing population.
• We’ve invented pocket-sized gadgets that pull information, knowledge, and communication literally from the air.

But let me tell you another thing we’ve learned.

This past century alone has seen more violence and bloodshed than any other century—probably in all of human history:

• We now have the technology to exterminate entire ethnic or social groups, and how we’ve used it!
• We’ve forcibly sterilized countless developmentally-challenged individuals simply because they and their would-be offspring do not fit our idea of the ideal human being.
• We have the capability to use, exploit, and impoverish entire populations for our own benefit in ways that are so subtle that average people may not even be aware of their own participation.
• We’ve eradicated entire forests (forgetting the lessons we’ve learned from the land?), and introduced harmful chemicals into the environment that threaten our ecological balance. 
• We literally bite off more than we can chew, consuming our resources carelessly, without considering what we will leave behind for future generations.

Yes, what man can conceive, man can achieve.

Now, more than ever, we need the story of God.

It’s funny how we’ve forgotten this story, but perhaps it’s so predictable.  Any sense of accomplishment naturally brings with it a sense of pride.  This can be healthy, but not if it makes you feel like the world revolves around you.  After all, the scientific revolution brought us the knowledge that the heavens do not revolve around the Earth.  However, the story of God, as we have received it, is admittedly so mysterious, so contradictory, and at times so preposterous that perhaps a ten-year old article in The Onion, a parody newspaper, describes it best: “Mistranslated Myths of Nomadic Desert Shepherd Tribe Taken at Face Value[!]”  It’s easier therefore for us to focus on those things we have learned through our own observations.  But what, in fact, have we learned?

• We accept the reality that space is infinite; but we dismiss the idea of an infinite God.
• We conceive of traveling through time, at least into the future; but we discard belief in a being that lives in, and transcends, all of time.
• We explore hypothetical sets of alternate universes with which, according to quantum mechanics, we may now be co-existing; but we reject the supernatural dimension of God’s realm, where saints, angels, and the souls of all the living reside.
• We study the properties of black holes, how they “suck” surrounding matter into their endless curvature of spacetime; but we discount the existence of hell, the place where, in its most basic definition, we are separated from the presence of God forever.

By saying these things, I don’t wish to argue in favor of heaven and hell as they have traditionally been imagined.  Nor am I arguing against science, for the things I have described either have been demonstrated, or fall within the range of examined and established scientific theories.  Nor do I want to pin science and religion against each other—or worse: portray them as though they are actually proving each other right.

My point is that we, now more than ever, need the balance of power and humility that science and religion respectively provide.  We must continue questioning, exploring, and learning, but we must not get ahead of ourselves.  We must never think or act as though we now (or ever will) have all the answers.  Science has opened us up to a universe of seemingly infinite possibilities.  But it has not answered our most fundamental questions: Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going?—you know, the ones addressed in the myths of that “nomadic desert shepherd tribe.”  In fact, science has brought a whole host of new questions and previously unimaginable concepts that we can’t even begin to understand.  In so doing, science has laid out in plain view how weak and imperfect we are—not in a negative sense that denies our species’ intelligence and capacity to learn, but in the sense that the more we discover, the more we discover that there’s more to discover.  Thus the journey never ends.

And thus there’s still room for God.