Ch. 6 The God Statement (continued)
Non-God Statement
A Note to Atheists, Agnostics & Other Miscreants
I bet I lost most of you during that convergence bit solving the problem of natural evil. “How logically weak!” I imagine you exclaiming as you shut the book in disgust at my feeble mindedness. In fairness, you must remember that I acknowledged that my solution to the problem of natural evil was my weakest link and I merely said that the problem did not lay me flat. The problem of natural evil did leave me staggering. Staggering like a drunken sailor who if pinned to the sweating wall would admit to being intellectually agnostic. How can I honestly be otherwise? Is it possible that there is no God or at least not a good and fair God of love? I must admit that when I objectively look at the evidence it is quite possible that there is no omnibenevolent Force of Love behind the curtain; however, I do still believe that there is a sliver of hope that there is a Force of Love as the Ground of Being and I so I make my transrational leap while understanding why you do not.
Why do I still have a sliver of hope? Why have the facts not slain me? Because I have experienced God's love in encounter and mystical reverie; because I still find the cosmological Unmoved Mover argument persuasive and the probability for complex life formation low without some conscious intent; and because oftentimes people who are in a relationship with God (not just professing beliefs and especially not vehemently professing beliefs) display higher qualities of being in their centeredness, peacefulness, and loving kindness. I am confident that you could argue each of those points admirably. The universe may have needed no first cause to enter existence and low probability is not no probability. Atheists may also display high qualities of being including centeredness, peacefulness, and loving kindness. You may even think that my supposed divine encounters were just figments of my imagination though, at four years old, my idea of God was not “a feeling of undeniable love.” If I had been projecting an image of God that I received from my church, I would have encountered Jesus or an old white man with a beard or maybe even a dove with an olive branch but I encountered a feeling of undeniable love and I lived on to see the transformative outcome of that love in me and in the world around me so it is the Force of Love that I make my ultimate concern today. I think your admirable arguments prove that I am not necessarily correct but they do not prove me necessarily wrong. I still have hope.
I have read some of your books. Most of you are protesting a way of being religious that I too protest. You rightly point out that religiously boxed people are atheists to every religion except their own and you just add one more religion to the list. At the end of my major quest, I had not found “the” answer in any of the religions I studied so I pulled what I called a “Descartes” and got down to brass tacks: What must be true about God for me to love God? I decided that God, as a Force of Love, must be good and fair. Now, fairness seemed to be a pretty low bar for God, but fairness issues were so prevalent in religion that I decided the quality warranted separating out. So I made and continually make a transrational leap to the premise of a good and fair God as a Force of Love and deduce from there rather than looking at the facts on the ground and inducing. It is an existential leap that does color the lens through which I see the world: “it [is] realism carried to some higher pitch, in which facts [are] transformed by the more vivid light in which they [are] seen.” (W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage) I believe that we are answerable for the quality of being we bring to life. Motivated reasoning affects us all as we tend to attend to those aspects of reality that support our presuppositions about life. I presuppose love, goodness, and fairness. Love, goodness, and fairness are the more vivid light through which I see the world and the qualities of being I hope to bring to the world. I choose to believe in a good and fair Force of Love which I refer to as God but what I really believe to be important is a commitment to love as expressed through goodness and fairness regardless of whether or not the word “God” is invoked.
Celeste's Wager
Are you committed to expressing love through goodness and fairness? If so, I consider you to be GOD-centric and I am perfectly comfortable that you do not. If I am correct in my understanding of God, then I venture that God would not care about your believing in God. As a Force of Love, God does not require ego stroking. Saying “God” is cheap but expressing God's love is not. God knows the value of things.
For Those Of You Miscreants Who Are Scientists
Since we GOD-centrics are reaching out to you so nicely, I was hoping you would do us a favor. Using theoretical and mathematical physicist Pascual Jordan's "Observations not only disturb what is to be measured, they produce it" as your justification, would you please interpret epigenetics, biocentrism, panexperientialism, quantum mechanics, and M-theory through the more vivid light of love, goodness, and fairness using language we commoners could understand? If we are the instruments used to measure reality and our observations bring reality into being, why not be instruments of love, goodness, and fairness? “But I do not believe in a good and fair God of love,” you protest. “Well, if the White Queen can believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast, you can pretend to believe this one thing as a gesture of good will,” I reply. Even if you do not believe in a good and fair God of love, you may feel responsible for the quality of being you bring to the world especially since you, as the instrument of observation, impact the reality observed. So why not bring the qualities of love, goodness, and fairness to your scientific observations despite your lack of faith in their referent? I foresee science's being essential to our process of understanding God more completely. Right now, I am especially intrigued by the interplay of time and eternity and the role of consciousness in our understanding of God. As you no doubt know and get tired of hearing from the likes of me, a lot of famous scientists believed in some understanding of God: Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and even Francis Collins in our postmodern age so you would be standing in fine company. Scientists need not believe in God to be GOD-centric. If you wish to bring a loving, good, and fair quality of being to your practice of science, I believe you would be doing GOD-centric work and I would be much obliged.
