What is God - DTC 1.1
Consider Divinity
DTC, that is, Deep Thinking about Christianity, or some such similar thing, is a series of nontechnical posts that contain my responses to the biggest intellectual challenges to Christianity. As I explain in the preface, I hope that both naturalists and believers will benefit from this series. The Introduction contains a prospective outline.
The Divine
The word “god” has a lot of baggage. Those from monotheist religions might have the urge to correct my question, “what is god”, to “who is God”. Others, variously from Eastern religions and from the post-Christian West, might reject the realness of the referent of the word, claiming that there is nothing real that can be called “god”. Still others have various notions that god must exist in certain ways or have particular attributes. Do these concepts have anything in common? Can we confidently posit anything about god?
If we consider a general, vague notion of god, we might come up with a synonym—the divine. God is, if nothing else, divine, right? Surely whatever anyone means by god, it is or contains the notion of divinity. Unlike the various specific views of god, divinity does not come with irreconcilable baggage. Divinity is just an idea, a quality, or an attribute of some sort, not an actual existing thing or person. Let’s consider divinity.
There is no way to separate some idea of other or beyond from the divine. This feature of the word is surprisingly consistent throughout history. For millennia, various forms of the word 'divine' have been used to refer to deities who are typically thought of as being in the sky—above and beyond the reach of man. This has been especially significant in cultures that are deeply connected to nature. Such people groups rely on the sky to bring light and rain. They recognize the cycles of time — days, lunar cycles, and seasons — by movements in the sky. It is not hard to imagine ascribing the cause of these changes to the sky itself or to entities in the sky. Practices that involve petitioning the sky for its gifts make sense in this context. Perhaps the line between religious baggage and the idea of divinity is not as substantial as I had hoped.
As has been caricatured in the phrase, “the god of the gaps”, what we ascribe to the domain of divinity shrinks as our understanding about the world around us grows. As the relationships between the cycles of the sky and the cycles of nature become better understood, the relationship between the sky and the divine becomes more dubious. The domain of the divine shifts from beyond our reach in the sky to beyond our reach in another realm entirely. Perhaps it is not even right to say that the divine is in a ‘place’ as we understand it.
In any case, divinity remains beyond our grasp. It is inherently what we are not; it is unearthly, or at least beyond our understanding. Divinity is a proxy for mysteries and movements that we do not comprehend. Nevertheless, these mysteries still occur. Insofar as we accept the existence of the mysterious, we might say that divinity does something; it acts, even if only in mysterious ways. In keeping with the tradition of the word, it is right to ascribe ‘that which happens without explanation’ to divinity. Perhaps with enough time and effort, we could narrow this down to “that which happens and is impossible to understand”. Some philosophical work might need to be done on understanding the concept of “understand,” but I will leave that for another time.
In our day and age, what place is there for the divine? If we consider the happenings of our world, little seems truly impossible to explain. Broadly speaking, there are two ways that people tend to explain things. The first is to ascribe some things to metaphysical causes—causes that are beyond nature and the “laws of physics”. The second is to believe that all things happen due to material or physical causes—we can call this view physicalism. How do each of these groups deal with things which seem impossible to explain or with the divine?
Those who believe in metaphysical realities immediately have candidates for the divine; namely, whatever is metaphysical, or perhaps the cause of that which is metaphysical. These things are inherently inexplicable, at least by the laws of nature. Things like numbers and ideas are obvious candidates to be metaphysical things. Those who believe in divine persons, or gods, might be justified in calling them metaphysical as well. Likewise, many posit that the human soul or the conscious experience are metaphysical. But just how real are these so-called metaphysical things? Are they more real than material things, or perhaps less real? Numbers certainly seem real, in some sense, but they are not physical. Indeed, if we call metaphysical things real, their realness must be different from the realness of a material thing. In what way does a number exist? Even if this question has a satisfactory answer, metaphysical things would need to have some inexplicable influence on the physical world to qualify as divine. Numbers and ideas have no obvious means for this, unless we propose that humans are somehow inhabited by them—that such ideas have agency. Divine persons, on the other hand, can readily be imagined as having the power to interact with the physical world, but it is not obvious that divine persons are real. Thus, with metaphysical objects, we have the dual problem of admitting their realness and specifying how they influence the physical world in ways beyond our ability to comprehend.
In the physicalist’s view, it is difficult to come up with anything that is truly divine. Perhaps in considering the very nature of material itself we can find some suitable mysteries. Indeed, if we reject the notion that there are metaphysical things underlying physical objects, we may be inclined to replace our metaphysical notions with something else; the question “Why are material things the way that they are?” must be answered. We might say that objects exist without need of further explanation. But, is this not in and of itself mysterious? Is matter necessarily the way that it is? Does it have to behave the way that it does? Does it have no specifying cause? It seems compelling to consider that what we call physics — the way that material things interact through time — could be different. There is nothing physical that proves or explains why physics is the way that it is; though there certainly is evidence suggesting that it is the way that it is. So, while physicalism can make observations about physical phenomenon, thereby evidencing the “laws of physics”, the necessity of these phenomena remains mysterious. Why couldn’t some part of an equation in these laws of physics be different, even if only slightly? We might even make the strong claim that the answer to this is unknowable, based on the physicalist’s limit of existence inside the physical system. This is akin to asking the question, “Why does something exist rather than nothing?” We can know that something exists because we think we know what it means for ourselves to exist and perhaps that objects in the world around us exist, but we do not have the ability to comprehend true non-existence.
Curiously, both the metaphysical and the materialist accounts suggest similarities in what we might call divinity. In the above accounts, that which underlies reality is divine. It is truly beyond our reach — beyond our ability to comprehend — because it is fundamentally different from ourselves. It is not material in the way that we are, for that could be explained. Likewise, the divine must not be some simple metaphysical abstract ideas, such as numbers, as these do not cause anything in our material existence in and of themselves; they do not seem likely candidates for “that which underlies reality”, although theories postulating this do occasionally arise. As far as my account of mainstream beliefs go, a better candidate for divinity in both the physical and the metaphysical perspectives is something that underlies physical reality itself. This removes both material things themselves, as well as “simple” ideas. Rather, in either of the ways that people tend to explain things, existence taken abstractly — not as individual objects, but as the substrate upon which objects exist — is divine, or at least is caused by the divine. It is the the most deeply mysterious facet of what we know as reality in both the metaphysical-accepting and physicalist perspectives.
There is a sense in which the conversation ends here. If god is divine, then based on my arguments above, god is unknowable. What more is there to say?
We must not overlook the profundity of existence itself in this search for divinity. If existence is a substrate caused by the divine, or is itself divine, what does that say about our existence in this substrate, or about the existence of physical objects in general? Furthermore, can we discover something about the divine based on the very fact of existence itself, or from the way that existence is? These are the questions which must be pursued in order to answer the basic question of “What is God?”.