A GOD PROBLEM If St. Anselm was correct, God is easily the biggest idea that humankind has ever taken on. It is indeed difficult to think of anything that is more pervasive in the human psyche, and completely understandable that such a vast subject be at the same time so fraught with difficulties. One of the most fundamental problems is the one of God's place in the cosmos, a problem that goads us into asking precisely where (if indeed It does exist) It is. It is entirely possible, you see, that the Deity is not in the universe at all, but maintains Its stalwart (and sublime) posture somewhere (and therefore somewhen) outside of it. Some graphics are necessary to properly illustrate what I'm getting at. The circle below represents God before the creation of the universe, at which time He would of course be all that existed.
This in itself poses no problem. But a major difficulty appears when we attempt the next step, which involves depicting the universe. In the interest of consistency, we of course want to use a circle for that too. But where exactly do we put it? If we put it next to God it appears that it is outside of God and God is outside of it, as if we were saying, "Here is the universe, and over here is God."
This arrangement clearly does not depict what is so universally believed of God, i.e., that He is everywhere. The placement of the two circles side by side clearly suggests that God is outside the universe and vice versa. Now I don't know about you, but I strongly feel that I am most definitely inside the universe. So when a theist tells me that God is everywhere I assume they mean that he is all around me, no matter which direction I look. But every direction I look (I gotta believe) is also inside the universe. Isn't it? Is this perhaps the real reason that we can't see God, because He is outside our field of view, i.e., the universe? If He is, then theists surely misspeak when they say that He is everywhere. The entire universe - surely - has to have some kind of foothold in the context of everywhere. Unless the theists are suggesting that God is everywhere outside the universe. But, somehow, I don't think they are. I get the distinct impression that they are proclaiming (and somewhat adamantly) that God is everywhere inside the universe, pervading it like some sort of miasmic gas. This is also confusing. If it's true, the two circles must somehow melt into one, with God and the universe existing coterminously.
But if this is the case, why does it not suggest that God and the universe are one and the same thing? And if they are one and the same thing, then pantheism rules the day. But the vast majority of theists don't care for pantheism. They insist that God is something other than the universe. But if that is the case, we are right back to the original problem. How do we arrange the circles? What about putting one inside the other?
This arrangement entails all sorts of problems. If we (arbitrarily of course) place God in the inner circle (in an effort to indicate that He is inside the universe) it appears that God is somehow contained by something larger than Itself.
What theist is willing to accept this? It suggests yet a further complication. If God is indeed inside the universe, doesn't that mean that (by the strictest logic) the universe is then outside of God? This is a rather sticky problem, and I can't help but wonder whether it has something to do with language itself. Is it a problem that we simply don't have the proper words to describe? What if the two circles represented a mother-with-child? We could of course (and often do) say that the child was inside the mother, but is it valid to reverse it and say that the mother is outside the child?
I suppose that she is, but for some reason it sounds strange to say it this way. When I think of the mother/child relationship I think of magnetic polarity. A south pole is not inside a north pole or vice versa. They exist simultaneously. We have yet to observe the existence of a magnetic monopole. In the same way, the mother and child also exist simultaneously. A mother could not be a mother without a child, and vice versa. They (as ideas) cannot exist independently. We cannot draw the same conclusion about God and the universe. Theists staunchly insist that there was a time when there was a God but not a universe. We could thus reverse the circle-in-circle above to show the universe inside God.
But this doesn't work either. It still feels as if God is outside the universe in much the same way that the mother is outside the child, as if the universe and God are two "separate" entities, so that God cannot possibly be everywhere in the way that we are led to think by theists. Theologians have a couple of words they like to throw around when they're discussing this issue, immanence and transcendence:
IMMANENCE [Lat: dwelling in], in metaphysics, the presence within the natural world of a spiritual or cosmic principle, especially of the Deity. It is contrasted with transcendence. The immanence of God in the world is the basic feature of pantheism. (Columbia Encyclopedia)
Theological gobbledygook. A lot of words that basically don't say a damn thing. I understand that the God issue can probably never be resolved, one way or the other. And this is perhaps the only way we should talk about God, the way I'm doing now, more or less academically, merely observing that it is difficult (if not downright impossible). But so many theistic enthusiasts in our midst go around spouting off as if they actually have some kind of knowledge about God, which I think is totally absurd. I don't believe a human being could ever have any knowledge of God, except perhaps that they could have none. It is my firm opinion that a person would have to be a god to know a god, in much the same way that you would have to be a woman to truly know women, or a man to truly know men and so on. It is true that men certainly know that there are women (being all that most of them ever think about), but this is an altogether different thing than actually knowing women, or, as it is more commonly expressed, understanding them. But in the case of God it goes deeper. It goes without saying that we could never understand God. But it must be stated that we could never know that a being was a god in the first place. We might guess or believe it was a god, but we could never know it. Could a dog know that a human being was a human being? I think not, at least not in the same way that we know that a human is a human. A dog simply knows that a human is something other. It doesn't know that it is human. A dog is not capable of handling such a conception. In the same way, we are incapable of handling the God idea. What we carry around in our heads is a purely human notion, one which we merely label as God. In the same way that we are something other to a dog, God would also be something other to us. But not just God. It is entirely possible that many beings could be other for us. How could we ever presume that we were qualified to make the decision about which, if any, of them was God? We couldn't. All that we could ever know is that they were other. We would have to be a god before we could recognize another one. A thing must first be cognized before it can be re-cognized. The problem lies in rising to the level of the original cognition. How Did We Find Out About God? The Bible: Why God Had Nothing To Do With It
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