Two questions are frequently asked: Is there a God? If so, what is God? In keeping with the philosopher Karl Jaspers, you may say, "There is no God, for there is only the world, and the world is God." Or in synchrony with Immanuel Kant, you may be awed by the enormity of a starry night, in which time and space seem to become interchangeable, forming a spectacular tapestry. There you realize that the earth is only one minute portion of the mystic galaxy; you pause and exclaim, "Ah, there must be God!" Such a moment reflects the realization of the sheer wonder and beauty of existence-a seashell, a leaf, a bird's nest-and partakes of the mystery.
Even closer to home, you cannot help being awed by the complexity of your own body: your heart beats without any effort on your part, and you breathe without your own awareness. A myriad of hormones, neurotransmitters, and other messenger molecules pass through a perfectly programmed system. All of this represents the visible programming of the world, the universe, and our bodies. Then you wonder: "How could that be? Is there a programmer in all of this? Is the programmer God?"
The evolution of human beings began with the evolution of our minds and our attempts to understand the external world. Whatever we couldn't make sense of, we attributed to supernatural forces. These forces evolved from the most primitive gods to highly organized religions, only to be challenged with the evolving mind's reasoning.
Our attitude toward God has perhaps found greatest expression in some Old Testament injunctions, such as "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or likeness." This initially meant that, because God is invisible, we must not worship Him in statues, idols, or effigies. Not simply a tangible prohibition, this injunction soon developed into the metaphorical idea that God is not only invisible but also inconceivable, unthinkable. Neither symbol nor metaphor can describe Him and, furthermore, none may take His place. When we say something like "He is uninferable, unimaginable, indescribable," we are still using human language and concepts of a finite human being. Even the word He betrays its humanly conceived core. As Karl Jaspers tells us in Way to Wisdom, All metaphorical representations of God without exception are myths, meaningful as such when understood to be mere hints and parallels, but they become superstitions when mistaken for the reality of God Himself. Since every image conceals as much as it discloses, we come closet to God in the negation of images."
Even though the images are negated, the symbols and metaphors avoided, and visualization, thinking, and conceiving all prohibited, we cannot help attributing certain human qualities of God. This is because human beings understand by personifying. The Book of Genesis says that God created Adam in his own image, but we keep reversing the process. In A History of God, a history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Karen Armstrong notes a central motif in these three Abrahamic religions: a personal meeting between God and man, wherein God relates by means of a dialogue. We are adamant in overly personalizing God, whom we insist must talk to us in the way that humans talk rather than in more enigmatic ways. As Armstrong says, "... rabbis, priests, and Sufis [should] have warned me not to expect to experience [God] as an objective fact that could be discovered by the ordinary process of rational thought. They would have told me that...God was a product of the creative imagination, like...poetry and music."
During the Enlightenment, liberal Judeo-Christian theologians increasingly moved away from the notion of God as a literal person. That depersonalization of God has continued into the modern day. The conceptualization of God-as-person, though not meaningful, may be useful, if not inevitable, for some people. Each individual, if not each society, finds its God in idiosyncratic ways, frequently determined by its developmental stage. The Renaissance thinker Giovanni Pico della Mirandola said, "We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honor, as thou the maker and molder of thyself thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer."
It is interesting that, with such freedom to choose the shape and design, including that of a bearded old man with a not very pleasant temperament, we all have established God's sameness: spiritual love.
Whether it is a koan that we try to decipher (as in Zen Buddhism) or a treasure that we try to discover (as in Sufism), or a biblical figure that we try to emulate (as in Christianity), in many other ways we attempt to understand our relation to a greater force.
In his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, the Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez tells of a village where people are afflicted with a strange plague of forgetfulness, a kind of contagious amnesia that keeps working its way through the entire population. One young man, still unaffected, attempts to prevent the damage by putting labels on everyday objects and events, such as "This is a table," "This is a cow that has to be milked every morning." At the entrance to the town, on the main road, he put up two large signs: One reads, "The name of our village is Macondo," and an even larger one reads, "God exists."
We are born with the knowledge of God. God is an imprinted knowledge that can be forbidden or denied, but it cannot be erased. Look what happened in the Soviet Union after seventy years of suppression of religion. It seems the moment Communism collapsed, worshiping God returned in full force. Ana-Maria Rizzuto's psychoanalytic study The Birth of the Living God is confirmatory:
One patient among those I have studied, the daughter of militantly
atheistic parents, reported locking her door at the age of seven,
kneeling on the floor, and praying for a long time, "Please let there
be a God." While she was praying she felt guilty of betraying her
parents and afraid of being found kneeling, but her need for wor-
shiping somebody, something was stronger than their prohibition.
Human beings are innately spiritual beings. We may need to worship as soon as we become aware of ourselves. Around the age of four, children begin to ask the why of everything. A child may ask who moves the clouds and why. If told "the wind," she will not be satisfied but will want to know who moves the wind. Similarly, when she becomes curious about babies and how they are made, and is told that babies are made by "mommies and daddies in Mommy's tummy," the child still wants to know. It is this ceaseless chaining of questions that inevitably ends in the answer "God" does these things! Often that notion suffices for the child's inner need, even if she asks, "What is God?"
An extraordinary example of the deep desire to believe in God is cited by Karen Armstrong in her book A History of God. She tells the story of a group of Jewish concentration camp victims who decide one day to create a mock trial in which God is brought up on charges of extreme cruelty and betrayal. Despite arguments for and against God, the members of this impromptu court collectively find no evidence of His Divine intervention as a benevolent Being who counters evil and answers the prayers of good people. In fact, nothing dispels their fervent sense in His absolute and inexcusable culpability. They have no choice but to condemn Him. The rabbi of the group announces the final verdict: God is guilty as charged and should be punished with the death penalty. Shortly thereafter, however, the rabbi glances up at those assembled, says that the trial has concluded, and announces, "It is time for the evening prayer."
That very skepticism is the first indication that one believes in something. That something usually turns out to be God. This fact confirms the renowned theologian Paul Tillich's paradoxical point in his book Man's Right to Knowledge: If you start with the assertion that God exists, you can reach Him less than if you assert that He doesn't exist. In every culture without exceptions, every human being, including the atheist, sooner or later-especially at times of the impeding loss of a loved one or one's own severe illness or dying-longs for God. Could this yearning be a passion welling up from our deepest instinctual forces? Even Lynne Cox, a confirmed unbeliever, tells how she succumbed to such a force as she visited the old city of Jerusalem in her charming anecdote "To Aqaba":
