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Where is God? Hearing about the new cosmology, perhaps for the first time, some folks become unsettled about their faith. They may have heard that Thomas Berry has declared “a moratorium on God talk.” They may read his books, or those of Teilhard de Chardin, and wonder what has happened to the God they learned about as a child and still picture today. The truth is that none of us has a true and complete picture of God, nor is it possible to any of us in our present bodily form. Perhaps the mystics, seers, and shamans come closest to a really good vision of the divine, but they have it in a form which cannot be fully communicated in words, so that we cannot really benefit from the experience. From what they are able to communicate, however, it is clear that what they are describing is covered over with cultural overlay, so that mystics cannot even help one another to see it more clearly. As perhaps an extreme stratagem, there is the apophatic method, wherein God is described in terms of what God is not. There is a saying in Buddhism, “If you meet the Buddha, kill him.” The meaning of this rather strange saying is that if you think you have captured the full reality of the Buddha, you can be sure you have not; you should get rid of your illusion. The same is true of the Christian God, or any other deity. If you think you have fully understood the nature of God, you may be sure you have not. We humans, however, find it too uncomfortable to live in such an ambiguous state of affairs. We resort to a partial understanding, what scientists refer to as a model, and we may even convince ourselves that the model is the real thing. We are familiar with model airplanes, model railroads, meteorological models. Models are resorted to in science when the phenomena to be described, whose behavior is to be predicted, are too complex to be encompassed fully. So a simplified version is built up, usually in the form of mathematical equations, in which certain features, sometimes important and numerous, are simply overlooked. Such a model will be useful for the purposes for which it has been developed, but should not be extrapolated beyond its defined limits. That there may be different, even contradictory, models in use at any given time should therefore not be surprising. Each will be useful within its own limits. Most of us carry around in our heads some contradictory models of God, and it seems to cause no trouble until we are forced to think about it. If we were asked to describe God, we might first draw on the thread that comes from the Greek philosophers. God is omnipotent, omniscient, the unmoved mover, the uncaused cause. God is three persons in one nature; but one of the persons has two natures. The categories and descriptions are carefully drawn and have stood the test of centuries. This model, however, does not seem fitted to draw to God’s self any fervent devotion or prayer. We also hold on to a number of models drawn from Sacred Scripture, without taking account of the fact that the cultures in which these pictures were derived have long been replaced by more mature ones. We read, for example, of a very human God who walks in the garden of Eden in the cool of the evening, who presumably sweats uncomfortably in the heat of the day. This God seems fearful that Adam will become himself like a god (polytheism?) if he eats the forbidden fruit. God then calls down the ultimate penalty upon Adam, even though Adam claims the fault was Eve’s and Eve claims it was the serpent’s. Later, God is displeased with how the people on earth have behaved and decides to wipe it all away with a flood, saving only a few favored human beings and a sample of animals to be brought forward into a new existence. Again, such behavior hardly seems wise or mature, but perhaps suitable for the less evolved culture of the time. There is the request that Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac, presumably to test his obedience; but a test which would be uniformly condemned by today’s standards. Then there are the countless instances of military favoritism and the condoning of the slaughter of enemies, even women and children. There are many more troublesome accounts, and the best which can be done with them is to treat them not as realistic stories but as moral lessons. Even so, the lessons seem mostly not suitable for our time. Teilhard and his followers have had to develop a model of God which is suitable for our time and culture. The most extraordinary and revolutionary aspect of our time, even beyond our technology and the endangering of our planet, is our empirical knowledge of our origins and of the evolutionary process which has brought us where we are today. This understanding is too discordant with our older model of a static universe and a once-for-all creation. A new model of God needs to be one which fits the role of the Creator into an evolutionary framework. God, in this new model, is seen primarily in an immanent aspect, as being profoundly present in nature and in each of us. In some way God was fully present in the original cosmic seed at the time of the original flaring forth (or “big bang”), but at the same time there was not a predefined blueprint of how everything would evolve. Evolution has proceeded through too many false starts and dead ends, led to too many ineffective vestigial remains, to be considered to have followed a predetermined master plan. God, then, is present in every moment of time, creating and evolving forms as each opportunity presents itself. It would seem, then, that God changes as the world changes, that God’s self evolves. Then is God not unchanging, omniscient, omnipotent, etc.? As a response, we need to say that this model requires God to be immanently within all of creation, evolving with it. We cannot make a claim, however, that this model captures the whole reality of God, only that it seems to suit best for our time and culture. It sounds like pantheism, and perhaps in some way it is. On the other hand, Whitehead speaks of panentheism rather than pantheism. In his view, there is a transcendent aspect of God as well as an immanent one, and it is this transcendent aspect which sets the direction for evolution and leads it along. If we have need to revive the attributes of God, like omnipotence and omniscience, which we inherit from the ancient philosophers, perhaps we can think of them as applying to the transcendent aspect of God. But it is with the immanent God that we are most profoundly connected here on earth, as we share in the work of creation, bringing forth higher consciousness, working for peace and justice, spreading hope for a better time to come. Dom Roberti |