De Deorum Natura: A Brief Personal History of God
Who or what is God? The pompous-sounding Latin title heading this article, “On the Nature of God,” is me flippantly pretending to be an academic.
Pop quiz: What’s the difference between academic and non-academic writing? The correct answer gets an “A."
What you do with that A is your own business.
A few people have already written about god, or God, so forgive me not for being innovative. Wouldn’t that be fun to have been the first? According to the Journal Sentinel book on writing style, God must be capitalized "in references to the deity of all monotheistic religions." The lowercase "god" is only used in reference to gods and goddesses of polytheistic religions.
This simple-sounding note on how to write the word brings up one of the best and most profound questions on the topic. Is there more than one?
My personal history with God has been a mosaic of both views. I was raised in a monotheistic religion. Or was it? This hasn’t really been settled about Mormonism.
One of Joseph Smith’s fundamental inventions was his answer to the eternal question, “And what came before God?” Smith said that God’s own God came before him just as your mom’s mom came before her. Did he practice polytheism or monotheism? Certainly, Mormonism is deeply rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, so one is tempted to say it’s still monotheistic. But Smith’s innovation is so earth-shattering that most Christians do not call Mormonism Christianity.
Smith also claimed to have seen God, which was another major break from tradition. The belief I carried as a youngster was that Joseph Smith had actually seen God with his eyes and heard him with his ears. What I should say today about my young view is that Smith was an “empiricist,” a term more associated with scientists than the religious. However, I would find out in more mature years over a glass (or two) of wine that my family members have differing ideas about Joseph Smith’s vision of God. Some say it was an hallucination. Another says it was a hologram produced by an alien starship.
It’s a fundamental question for theists: Do they perceive god (God) through their senses or through the imagination? I would say a hologram is perceived through the senses and produced by living beings. (Then there’s the question why would these beings present a hologram of God?)
I like the hologram idea because I think of Joseph Smith as a proto-American science fiction writer along the lines of Asimov and Hubbard. He just happened to be born during the Great American Religious Revival.
Learning about other folk’s concepts of God will tell you a lot about them. Do they have an innovative concept of God? Are they traditionalists, and which tradition? Did they inherit their beliefs from parents and community or come up with them on their own?
There are various kinds of atheists as well. Perhaps you are one who had “too much spiked God punch” and ended up with an hangover that has lasted. Or are you one who grew up with no god going back three generations? There are those philosophically inclined who concluded through rational deduction that the universe is random and in no way designed by a Supreme Being.
The Greeks were polytheistic, and their gods were basically humans—emotional, rhapsodic, pleasure-seeking—with superpowers. Zeus turned Hera into a cow so he could copulate with her without her consent. Apollo drove the sun up each morning. He was also mad about Aphrodite. There’s much more sex in Greek mythology than in, say, that of the Catholics or Muslims.
The Egyptians, too, were polytheistic, mostly. Was it King Tut’s dad that wanted to move to monotheism? Hindus believe in one supreme universal soul with many gods and goddesses representing various aspects of Brahman. There are the monotheistic religions of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Buddhism does not believe in a god.
I have to say that the idea of monotheism is more rationally attractive to me: if God is the top dude, then there has to be one top, albeit mysterious, Dude. Even the Greeks had Zeus.
Freud asserted in Moses and Monotheism that man’s step from polytheism to monotheism was a step toward a more stable civilization. He also reduced all religion to the longing for a father.
But isn’t Greek polytheistic mythology just so much fun? Achilles' mother is a god, but because his dad was mortal—which makes him, too, mortal—she dips him as a child in the River Styx to make him eternal as well. (An early baptism by emersion?) However, she is holding him by the heel of the foot so in that place he is vulnerable. In the final battle of the Trojan War, he is shot in the heel and dies. We call someone’s vulnerability their Achilles heel.
The stories of the gods help many understand human life. Religion is an attempt at causal explanation. And so is science. Darwinism is a causal theory of human existence. Many have rightly theorized that the more questions science answers the less religion does. Today, religious causal theory tends to be a traditional literary attempt full of mystery and awe. The philosophical or rational approach has now mostly become scientific and atheist.
How did I go from believing in God to not? I do remember being skeptical at various times from the age of five up into my teens. For example, looking up at the endless stars in the Utah night I was filled with many questions and certainly did not feel a connection to the Daddy in the Sky. Mormons are baptized at eight by full immersion in water into the “kingdom of God.” I was very anxious on that day. If I had the confidence I do today, I wouldn’t have let them. What eight year old is ready to make that decision? A major development in my thoughts on God came about when I was a senior in high school. Going beyond the few verses assigned to us from Milton’s Paradise Lost in our English Lit class, I read the epic poem in its entirety. Milton, like Plato, was a failed dramatist. In this great English work, he puts religion on the stage and presents God and the Devil as characters.
Lucifer turns out to be a much more interesting fellow.
Is Satan a God, I would ask? In the religion of my youth, this is a blasphemy, a paradox. But does not Satan have supernatural powers? Is he the second god of monotheism? I found that my family talked much more of him than of Big Daddy.
There is also Jesus. Wait a minute. Is he God? No, he is the Son of God. So, which one is God?
Joseph Smith put forth the theory that God is a “position” that could be filled by different personages, like the office of President of the United States. So, in Mormonism, it turns out there is one God, but it is an office, not a being: the CEO of the universe. Or is it just of the Milky Way Galaxy? Smith doesn’t say.
The Oxford mathematician and religious advocate John Lennox points out that religion has been the foundation of education and of science. Without Christianity, there would be no modern university that evolved from those set up by the dominant Catholic religion to explain God. Lennox sees the quest for God as fundamental to our quest for knowledge of the truth. He would argue that scientific skepticism comes from believing in that which is perfect, or God.
I acknowledge this history and admire Lennox’s point that the belief in God has led to a search for truth. Perhaps it is my history. Would I have been interested in the truth without an original belief in God? Is the search for truth and beauty synonymous with God?
Many grew up as atheists who share the search but not the belief. Surely, believing in God is no prerequisite for believing in the truth.
These days I learn more about God from watching my cat than any sermon I can recall. My cat seems to be superhuman in many ways. He hunts with profound accuracy, sleeps with abundant ease, and gets a free lunch.
The question I ask those who seem to want me to believe is, what would this concept of “God” add to my life? Would I still have my observations, be able to exercise a rational mind, and find the same meaning without this mysterious term?
Does God inform human pursuits in any significant way, or was Xenophanes right when he said that if men were horses, the gods would have hooves? He thought that the gods were, in fact, created in the image of man. This is a great argument in favor of polytheism.
The Egyptians worshipped the sun because the sun was the source of their own lives. The Greeks understood the gods to have all the passions and frailties they enjoyed. The Christians created a God who was mysterious and also full of suffering and redemption. The Mormons created a God who could play daddy and make some sense of “ex nihilo." (In essence, kicking the can down the road.) The Buddhists found no need for God on their way to enlightenment.
Johann Sebastian Bach signed almost all his compositions with the letters “S. D. G.” or Soli Deo Gloria—“To God alone, the glory.” This is reason enough to wonder about God.
My more philosophically minded friends tell me I believe in God because I believe in universals, such as truth and beauty. I'm not sure why they insert the concept of God between me and universal values, but I’m interested. Tell me more.
I’ve come to one certain conclusion: if God turns out to be real, He must be having a good laugh—He must be a Comedian. Just go to Costco tomorrow and look at people. Galileo wrote, "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use."