God – A Personal Decision

By Gregory

In previous posts, I’ve discussed how I find most mainstream views on God unsatisfactory – I also believe growing numbers of people do, too. This trend, in my opinion, underlies a few of today’s common spiritual realities:

• The popularity of the New Atheism – these thinkers have made clear, solid arguments against Santa-God and have shown belief in such to be a form of magical thinking that cannot endure in the light of honest questioning.
•  The emergence of the Nones – people who claim no specific religious affiliation and usually describe themselves as spiritual, but not religious. Many of the Nones are, in part, turned off by religious institutions that feel comfortable speaking about (for?) God with unjustifiable certainty – a nice of way of saying, God in a Box.

Living with Uncertainty

God’s existence cannot be demonstrated in a logically, convincing manner any more than can God’s non-existence. Intelligent arguments can be made for either claim. Theology, therefore, must be done with a large, constant dose of skepticism, and with great care not to create a God in our own image or according to our own desires.

Once we admit the extent of our unavoidable, logical uncertainty, we understand that theological humility requires an epistemological conservatism –all theology is speculation – all God-talk is metaphorical. Pretending to be certain when no final, conclusive evidence can be offered — is an intellectual and a moral failing.

Illative Reasoning & Personal Decision Making

One’s approach to God is ultimately a matter of judgment and personal decision making, made on the basis of varied, but inconclusive evidence.

The process by which we reach such judgments has been called illative reasoning. Illative reasoning operates by drawing together several variant strands of arguments and evidence, none of which is conclusive on its own, but together offers a reasonable argument. Its function relies on the mental operation of insight.

Many of our core convictions cannot be demonstrated with certainty – our ideas can be given defense and support through the accumulated knowledge of daily experience, the accounts of reliable witnesses, information from what we determine to be authoritative sources, deduction and induction, and critical reflection on our own experiences aided by ongoing verification and corroboration – none of which on its own is air-tight or convincing, but when put together allows for us to reach tentative, but satisfactory conclusions – at least in our own eyes.

Reasonable People Can Disagree

Illative reasoning is most properly engaged from a realist perspective. Realism requires that we cultivate a general openness to reality, allowing reality to disclose itself to us. Ideology is the opposite of receptivity – it is the attempt to force reality to comply with our ideas and as such does not lead to genuine knowledge.

Illative reasoning is operating equally in the atheist’s belief in a purely material cosmos just as much as it does in the theist’s belief in a created cosmos made-shaped by God, as the traditional polytheist’s belief in a living cosmos shaped by many divine powers, and so on – all these perspectives are speculative and matters of personal judgment.

Not everything that matters to human beings can be settled by an objective assessment of fact; there are times, many of them have to be decided on some other basis, according to some narrative the individual comes to trust.

Scripture & Uncertainty

What about the scriptures? If we accept the philosophy of God I am outlining here, what do we do with our sacred texts that speak about God with far more certainty, and even claim to contain God’s on words?

In many ways, the discussion of the scriptures requires a whole set of different blog posts. But for now, let me say that just as I don’t approach God through magical thinking, I don’t use magical thinking to read the scriptures either.

The scriptures are our spiritual ancestors’ record of their wrestling with God and life and meaning. Most of the texts engage in allegory, mythical narrative, symbolic content, and Jewish Midrashic technique. The scriptures are the words of the spiritual community inspired by their experiences and thinking of the Divine – not the simplistic Word of God – as if Yahweh dictated the books by whispering in the ear of desert dwellers of days gone by.

Simplistic and literal reading of the sacred texts does violence to them and leads to atrocious theology – and a theology and worldview that doesn’t sync with reality – or the truth, for that matter.

Clearly, we can learn from engaging our ancestors’ views on God and other matters, but as with any important matter – a little learning and lots of honesty go a long way.

A Deeply Existential Decision

Despite so called proofs for the existence of God offered by theists and the insightful work of the New Atheists and others, the question of God’s existence – however defined – calls for a choice before it calls for an answer – or from another perspective, our choice is our answer.

And as with most profound, existential choices, even the choice about God, when approached honestly, it’s weighed on the basis of values. The encounter with goodness, beauty, and love is not solely a function of the intellect, but also of the heart and will—or to use a somewhat highly unfashionable word, of the character of the whole person.

Such decisions are not a matter of engaging in some kind of multiple choice test; it’s the commitment of the whole self to a way of seeing the cosmos that can be neither satisfactorily proved nor disproved rationally, but has to be accepted or rejected on its own terms. To accept any such vision of the nature of existence is to define one’s identity and relationship to the whole cosmos; to refuse to accept any such vision is also to define these things, in a different way; and in a certain sense, you don’t make that choice—you are that choice the choice becomes obvious when you realize the orientation you opt for in life.

Those who conclude that God has some basis in reality usually apprehend the order of the cosmos as being rich in love and awe. At the very least, a decision for God is a decision to affirm the World/Being is good – it is agreement that it is better that something exists rather than nothing.  And it is the recognition that everything that exists stands in relation to everything else in an interconnected, unified system imbued with truth, goodness, and beauty.

This is not to say that Atheists don’t value love or see the wholeness of being – but they don’t see a concentrated unity underling, infusing it all – a concrete orientation that those of us inclined to theism call God.