Free Congregation of Sauk County

First and most important, I want to thank all of you for inviting me back. It makes me happy to be here among all of you good people.

I want to share with you that I feel a great joy in giving this talk because this subject is very close to my heart. I have never doubted God’s presence and, in fact, I feel God close and intimate always. So I have an important bias to reveal right away. But to talk with all of you about God, to talk with free thinkers, is special to me because among you I must give rational reasons for theism. I am thrilled to take up this challenge. I have a picture in my bedroom wall, and it is not some image of God, but a photograph of Carl Sagan. I do have a well-worn copy of the Oxford Bible, I admit it, but I also have several copies of novels by Kurt Vonnegut. In my own theological writings, my goal has always been to propose a kind of God that even Sagan and Vonnegut might accept. We’ll see about that one!

So today I will try to show you that there is a rational way to consider God. And I really mean ‘consider.’ I’m not here to argue that God is the right answer. But believing in God isn’t necessarily an act of mindless faith, either. If you affirm reason as the method for answering religious questions, as I think all free thinkers do, then I hope to show that God remains a worthy possibility.

Let me begin by sharing a favorite poem of mine with you. It was written by e.e. cummings and is found in his book Xaipe (Key-ra), which is Greek for “rejoicing.”

I Thank you God for most this amazing
Day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
And a true blue dream of sky; and for everything
Which is natural which is yes

(I who have died am alive again today,
And this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
Day of life and of love and wings; and of the gay
Great happening illimitably earth)

How should tasting touching hearing seeing
Breathing any – lifted from the no
Of all nothing – human merely being
Doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
Now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

For me, the message of this poem is that there exists a special kind of joy. Not the joy found in ordinary life, not the joy of seeing a friend, not the joy of a good marriage, not the joy of children, or of success however defined. There is joy that precedes all these other joys and can endure when these ordinary joys fail. What is this joy? It is the joy of just getting to be anything at all, the joy of just getting to exist. And the poem says more.

The poem tells me that this joy is not some arbitrary or private or lonely assertion of myself or other human beings. If I feel this joy, if we humans together feel it, it is not a joy that is just me alone in the world or just us human beings alone in the universe.

The poem tells me that this joy is cosmic, true throughout the universe, shared by everything on the earth, and reborn every moment for us to have. Most important, this joy is shared by a creature who is present everywhere, a creature who is always in our midst and who persuades us that this joy in existence is not foolish and pollyannish, but is in fact the most profound truth there is. According to e.e. cummings, God offers us companionship in this joy-of-being.

I hope my presentation of this poem has been evocative. If it hasn’t been so evocative, perhaps maybe ‘provocative’ might be the better term. In either case, what I know I haven’t done is given to you any good reasons for considering theism. I have given to you my heart, but all of you have your own hearts. My whole presentation has been ad hominem, that is, I have given reasons for believing in God entirely under the guise of my feelings, and e.e. cummings feelings, about God. But my feelings about God, and even e.e. cummings’ feelings about God, however strongly felt, however gracefully presented, make clear to the rational mind no reason why anyone else should consider theism.

As free thinkers, we are committed to the rational pursuit of religious truth. This means that when someone offers an answer to the question of the meaning of life, that answer has to be more than an emotional appeal. The problem with emotional appeal is that it really only refers back to the personal life of she who makes the appeal. To demand a rational argument for theism is to demand that the theist appeal not just to personal feelings but also to something that includes all of us as human beings. One of these ‘somethings’ we all have in common is intelligence. A rational argument always appeals to the intelligence we all have in common. If my heart has anything to give to your heart, I must show that my heart is feeling something not just autobiographical, but something interesting for all of us.

Human intelligence grasps the common yet abstract features in experience, and makes them explicit. If I don’t appeal to your intelligence, then I’m really just relying on the authority or the ecstatic power of my own feelings. Authority and power are poor pathways to the truth. My goal is to encourage open, respectful conversation about God, as an alternative to authoritative pronouncements.

To me, religion is one of the arts and sciences. Religion explores a dimension of life, as do physics and astronomy and art and literature. Each discipline is defined by the question it then explores. In the case of religion, this question is, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ or ‘What makes life worthwhile?’ or ‘To what have I cast my final loyalties in life?’ When we ask these kinds of questions, so-called existential questions, then we are practicing religion. ‘God’ is one answer to the question of the meaning and worthiness of life. What might a philosophical approach to God say about God that persuades rather than forces, that makes theology an adventure and a conversation?

First, we need to know what philosophers mean generally by ‘God’ when they explore the topic. I like the definition offered by St. Anselm in twelfth century Europe, which goes like this: “God is that, then which nothing greater can be conceived…” Why is this a good formal definition of God, in my opinion? Well, first of all, it’s short. But I also like Anselm’s definition because it connects God with other notions commonly associated with God. If ‘God’ is the label for what is the greatest conception possible to the human mind, then ‘God’ is certainly connected with other terms connotating “greatest conception”: perfection, supremacy.

What I would like to do now, in the tradition of free thinking philosophers, is to share with you an argument for God’s existence. The hope of the argument is to show that if you have inclinations toward theism, there is a rational way to pursue your inclinations. You can consider theism and still be a humanist in the tradition of Carl Sagan and Kurt Vonnegut.

You’ll notice that I said “if you have inclinations toward theism.” Lots of people don’t, and there are rational atheististic approaches to religious exploration. Rational approaches to God, quite frankly, as you are all about to see, involve a conceptual attitude towards life’s issues that just isn’t interesting to many people. Also, for some of us, notions of God just aren’t helpful in making life feel more meaningful. If you’re one of those persons, I thank you now for your patience. But those of you more attracted to the conceptual side of religion, or the more mystical side, my following argument for God’s existence might make God more interesting.

So consider the general concept of ‘being.’ Considered logically, there are up to two possible kinds of being. There is factual being, meaning, the kind of being that can exist but also might not exist. This is the kind of being that we humans have, that all living things have, and all so-called physical things: rocks, liquids, stars, planets, atoms. We exist for awhile, and then we stop existing. Even the whole known universe probably has this kind of factual being, given that the known universe began in a so-called ‘big bang’ and might end in a re-collapse of spacetime. Then there is eternal being, or necessary being, and this is the kind of being that exists without any beginning and without any end. This kind of being has unqualified existence, and exists no matter what the facts say. Anselm concludes that God must have this eternal kind of existence if God is understood as “that, than which nothing greater can be conceived.” Why? Because eternal being, being which abides no matter what the facts are, being which can never fail, is the supreme example of the concept of being. Eternal being exemplifies ‘being’ in its maximal, or supreme, or perfect sense. So Anselm concludes, and I agree, that whatever God is, it must have eternal being.

So granted, if you will permit me, that God must have an eternal kind of existence, does ‘eternal existence’ in general make any sense? I think it does. I wager that our kind of existence, factual existence, logically implies eternal existence. Why? To me, some eternal kind of existence must finally explain the existence of any and all facts because if only facts explained facts, then we must face the possibility of non-being, or nothing. If some big fact was the explanation for all the other facts in the universe, that big fact would still be a fact, would still be a big fact that might not exist and, given enough time, would not exist. And if the big explanatory fact, the fact that gives being to all the other facts, if this big fact stop existing, then the whole universe would seem simply to wink out of existence, and we’d have nothing.

But the idea of nothing doesn’t make any sense, when I think about it. The idea of nothing is the idea of the total absence of being, and this idea has no positive meaning on its own. Consideration of nothingness constantly requires the prior acceptance of being, so nothingness as a supposed concept contradicts itself. The necessary presence of being is the only alternative. So as best as I can understand, being is eternal. There is no creation of the universe.

So being is eternal. And, God is the term for the concept of an eternal creature. But ‘God’ is not the same thing as ‘being.’ The goal is to show not simply that ‘being’ is eternal, but that there must also be an eternal creature.

One thing I can now argue is that there are creatures, though. In fact, my next step is to claim that “many creatures exist.” I am saying that the universe is very social place, with many actual creatures that have their own particular existence and share their existence with other creatures. This step accords with the apparent evidence of our senses, but we know that our senses deceive us. Yet clear thinking demands this conclusion in two steps. First, if being is eternal, then the existence of concrete, actual things per se, is also eternal. After all, ‘being as such’ is an abstraction. Well, abstractions cannot exist by themselves, there is no Platonic realm of forms, so abstractions exist as aspects of actual things. So if the abstraction ‘being as such’ is eternally real, that can be because there is always some actual thing expressing that abstract notion of being.

And there can’t just be one actual thing expressing being, there have to be many. Solipsism and pantheism aren’t options, either. You see, ‘being’ considered most generally is either wholly deterministic or partially deterministic. There can’t be any other options. Now, according to determinism, causes completely create their effects, and that means that the effect must already exist in the cause. This is a problem, I think, because if effects already exist in their causes, then everything just plain already exists in the one and only cause. In fact, there is just only one thing. Pantheists, in the East and West, arrive at this very conclusion. Our experience of the world as social becomes an illusion. But philosophy’s job is to explain our experiences, not to dismiss them as illusion. “Illusion” is a synonym for “I don’t know.” Better to drop the deterministic theory than work so hard to ignore the obvious evidence of experience.

So we are left with partial determinism, and partial determinism is the only way I know to explain the social nature of reality. Partial determinism says that causes help produce effects, but the effect to some extent creates itself. This is a good conclusion because it is consistent with the findings of science and human experience generally that the world certainly expresses cause/effect relationships, but that some degree of indeterminism also exists. Things cause one another, things affect one another, but novelty also abounds. But partial determinism implies the presence of many things influencing one another. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead put this point best, saying

The many become one, and are increased by one.

So now we have the idea that being itself is eternal, we have the idea that the term ‘God’ is a label for the idea of an eternal creature, and we have the conclusion that the world is as social as we feel it to be. Now these ideas can provide an argument for the presence in reality of an eternal creature, a God. At least, I think they can; we’ll see!

We experience this social universe as a world filled with value. This experience of value is the fundamental part of our experience of anything. We experience things as having worth, as contributing in some way to the world. People: we feel the profound value of each individual person as almost a compulsion. Perhaps some of us have experienced evil people, but has anyone ever experienced a worthless person? And what of nature, of the animals and plants and stars and sky and clouds and air and wind and rain? The beauty of Earth’s ecosystems seems to speak to us of worth beyond our human worth, of value which supports our value. Indeed, I find this transcendent aspect of ecosystem value to tell me that my experience of any kind of value includes transcendence. When I experience any value, ‘value’ always means “contributing to reality at large.” How parochial, even selfish, of me to feel value any other way! As if a thing’s contributions to my existence should be the final measure of value. As if a thing’s contributions to my farm, my family, my country, and even my people, should be the final measure of value. Look at the stars at night; there they have shined even before the emergence of humanity, before the emergence of Earth, and they will continue to shine for ages beyond our emotional recognition. To speak of a thing’s value is to speak of what it gives to the whole of the Earth, to stars and to galaxies. Whenever we feel the value of the smallest of spring flowers, we receive how that flower feels to the vast, ever-moving universe.

If value is in fact like the drop of water that yet contains the universe, then the experience of value is the experience of local particular things in their connection with what is cosmic. Here we have remember again that Aristotle made a good point against Plato, that the forms could not have their own, independent existence, but as abstractions existed as aspects within particular things. The connection of local things with the real cosmos also cannot be the experience of local particular things with some abstract form of cosmic value. The value of the first flower of spring is not ours to receive because the flower participates in some abstract, cosmic form of value. We receive the particular value felt for that particular spring flower because something just as particular as the flower, yet cosmic in scope, also exists. We experience value as pointing to cosmic contribution because a cosmic, particular thing exists which in fact directly experiences in a comprehensive way. We experience the value of spring’s first flower as transcendent because something transcendent of us, something cosmic and particular, includes both we and the flower.

God is not the giver of eternal life. God is not a superhuman. God is not all-powerful, nor all-knowing, nor the creator of the universe. Philosophy, as far as I know, cannot find such a God. But philosophy I think hints that God is the source of our sense of worth, of the worth of things, all things. It’s not that God gives every existing thing its worth; no, the existence of each thing does that. But when we experience worth as transcendent, as cosmic in scope, as Earth I believe teaches us to do, it is God which so elevates our experiences. There is the flower in spring, there for us with hope for our lives. And, there is the flower in spring, there for the universe including us, and there is God to give to us how that flower looks in its full measure of worth.

So, one philosophical argument for God seems to rest upon a conceptual exploration of our experience of value. But most important is to feel the full value of things. To feel the worth of anyone and of anything to its full measure is the success of religious life. Belief in God is not important for an authentic religious life.

Finally, I offer another poem. It is a poem expressing the activity of God in the world. I feel this activity every day I remember to try. The trick is to show that belief in God is not just about a lot of strong personal feelings, and certainly is never about authority, but is a genuine expression of intelligence. And I just mean genuine, having its place among other genuine expressions. The poem is Sonnet 69 by Pablo Neruda:

Maybe nothingness is to be without your presence,
Without you moving, slicing the noon
Like a blue flower, without you walking
Later through the fog and the cobbles,

Without the light you carry in your hand,
Golden, which maybe others will not see,
Which maybe no one knew was growing
Like the red beginnings of a rose.

In short, without your presence: without your coming
Suddenly, incitingly, to know my life,
Gust of a rosebush, wheat of wind:

Since then I am because you are,
Since then you are, I am, we are,
And through love I will be, you will be, we’ll be.

from 100 Love Sonnets (Cien sonetos de amor) by Pablo Neruda, translated by Stephen Tapscott, University of Texas Press, 1986.