Awe as a Way to God

By Gregory

Too often, the cart is put before the horse – the question “do you believe in God?” is asked prior to the question “what does the term ‘God’ mean or signify?”

The Ubiquitous God

The concept of God(s) has been omni-present in human history. Its meaning has varied, although certain themes remain consistent. Human approaches to the Divine have included polytheistic and anthropomorphist visions, as well as monotheistic and abstract ideas. God has been likened to a person, a force, a principle, and a process. Yet notions of the Divine rooted in transcendence, transformative power, unity, creativity, power, and life, have remained persistent in human culture.

Many speak too easily about God today and what they say is often banal. Many quickly assume they know exactly what “He” wants, thinks, likes, approves of, condemns, and expects. We tend to tame and domesticate God.

Idolatry is always a danger with those who claim exacting knowledge about God. There is the danger that people imagine “him” as a larger, more powerful version of themselves, which they can use to endorse their own ideas, practices, loves, and hatreds. Worse, they can call on this Divine projection of themselves to attempt to control events and others.

God of the Gaps

An unfortunate tendency in contemporary theology is to invoke God as the solution to gaps and limitations in human knowledge. In such cases, human ignorance becomes the justification for God’s existence – not exactly solid theological ground upon which to stand.

God should not be affirmed as the answer to scientific problems awaiting solutions. The purpose of theology isn’t to intervene in science over questions that science is much better prepared to address, but to relate the material universe studied by science to questions of ultimate concern—of value, meaning and purpose—which science can’t address and are instead the proper sphere of religion.

We must recognize that metaphysical realities are often passed by, unnoticed by the tools of science as the sea is not caught in totality by the fisherman’s net. In such cases, one should not accept an absence of evidence as evidence of absence nor the absence of answers as proof of other claims – God is found in the light of mystery and awe, not in the dark gaps of human intellectual problems.

Is Contingency a Gap?

There are several seemingly credible (at least interesting) explanations for the existence of the universe that do not, strictly speaking, require God. Physicists including Stephen Hawkins, Steven Weinberg, and Richard Feynman, biologists including Ursula Goodenough, and philosophers including Quentin Smith and Loyal Rue all offer fascinating insights into spontaneous creation and order – a universe that either always existed or unfolded by natural means from an ever existent singularity.

Yet even in such elegant explanations there remains both a sense of inexplicable awe as well as something missing – a dimension not discussed, a reality not acknowledged. Putting aside, for a moment, arguments of fine tuning and the right conditions for life to emerge, any engagement with cosmology and questions of human origins leaves one with an almost conviction of the non-accidental character of such emergence as well as a pervasive order and direction inherent in reality.

Within the complex matrix of sufficient reason, causation, emergence, teleological thinking, and the nature of time – we begin to glimpse some sense of the multiple layers of contingency of the universe – contingency on some emergent cause that prompts the original expansion of singularity, the contingency on inherent principles that guide the ordered emergence of matter and energy, and the contingency on the regularity, continued existence, and direction of the unfolding.

Despite the protests of many, the universe appears to have an internal logic that inevitably drives matter from nonliving to living, from simple to complex, from inert to consciousness – in a seemingly clear direction toward life and increasing complexity for the sake of survival. (Protests abound, in part, because science cannot properly detect or evaluate meaning, purpose, or value.)

We should stand in awe at such reality. And this awe, if carefully cultivated, reveals more than can be sustained by a mere mechanistic or materialist vantage point that necessarily holds out the accidental nature of everything that is. Awe is more than an emotion; it is a way of understanding, an insight into a meaning greater than us. Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also hint, however remotely, at something supreme. Awe is a sense for transcendence, for the reference everywhere to mystery beyond all things. It enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common.

We may dismiss the above as poetry and assume that the universe, broadly speaking, is a meaningless affair. Still there is no logical or philosophical necessity that adopting a position of cosmic nihilism requires that all attributions of human purpose be treated as unjustified. We need not reduce human life in the particular to nihilism. It simply means that human purposes may have no detectable scientific significance. However, human ends do not have to serve scientific ends in order to be genuine. Nor do they have to be eternal in nature. Nor is science capable, strictly speaking, of engaging such questions of meaning.

Granted, positing meta-principles of inherent order and direction is a far cry from asserting a personal God of love, or the Divinity of Jesus, or Yahweh at the burning bush. But it does begin to create a space for metaphysical considerations of Divinity, of mind, of over-arching intelligence, or eternal order, and so on, that are not merely spiritual assertions into “gaps”, but justified speculations that can help ground, at least partially, later theological claims.

Again, such assertions are not simplistic efforts to offer God as filling for the gaps in human knowledge. We are not speaking here of problems in need of answers – science will continue to provide answers – rather, we are speaking of mysteries that call for reflection and meditation. Mystery does not cry out for solutions or answers – it finds its resolution in awe and wonder and a willingness to engage its depths.