The God problem (part 1) [View all]
For a long time a variety of posters have asked for some better definition of God than much religion has traditionally offered. Here is the first of my posts offering some fresh thinking on this subject.
First, we must consider the outdated notion that the Bible is the Word of God. Traditionally most Christians have seen the Bible as revealing all we need to know about God. It is the Bible that traditionally comes out as the fundamental source of revelation. But if we take seriously what we now know about the structure of the cosmos, we have a problem in seeing the Bible as literally true and divinely revealed.
The Bible throughout assumes a two level Aristotelean universe, with the world down here and God up there. The Bible is stuck with the notion that God is a supernatural uncreated reality and the world a natural created reality. The Biblical cosmology posits this two-tiered universe. If we today dont believe that any more, most religious people dont know how to abandon it. We are like the Australian child who got a new boomerang for his birthday, but couldnt throw the old one away? That idea may have gone out when Copernicus came in, but like the tar baby, we are unable to turn it loose.
The Biblical record, therefore, is based on what we now believe to a mythical cosmological system that does not now and never has existed. This pre-scientific religious fallacy posits not only a spatial division between the world and God, but also a hierarchical relationship. God is above us, up there somewhereomnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent. Revelation comes as God chooses to reveal himself from his supernatural realm. The Bible contains the record of the way our religious ancestors saw that revelation.
This brings us to the heart of our problem. It allows, indeed it mandates, the notion of God as a person, an entity who exists apart from our human sphere in some supernatural realm. Persons must be somewhere, and they must have attributes or they are not persons in any way we have defined the word. So God is a personal character who lives in a supernatural reality.
In this posting I have only laid out the religious problem in believing that the Bible is divine revelation in which God is a person existing in some non-worldly supernatural realm. In my next posting I will talk about an alternative way to understand God, based on a post Copernican understanding of how the universe is put together.