Take time before judging God

God has got some bad press lately. As usual, it coincides with human trauma. Much pain and confusion has been directed skyward, as if we were owed a better deal or an explanation at least.

I’m as irreverent as the next bloke, but I somehow reckon we could be missing something here.

A few years ago, my father gave up on life and decided to end it. People naturally ask why and how one deals with such grief. I felt like a sports star being asked, “How do you feel?” after winning the grand final - only at the other extreme. They didn’t seem to want a literal answer - more a faithful confirmation there wasn’t one: “It’s unbelievable” or “I can’t describe it”.

The world was mocking me. For the darkness my old man succumbed to was very much about measured answers in lieu of mystery. What is this all about? Is there a God? His need to know kept chipping away at a gut feel that said things were actually OK. Still, he hated that he couldn’t renovate his circumstances - to the point where he failed to enjoy what he had.

Finally, I think he loathed himself for subduing the very faith he thought religion denied us. Like many other estranged men, he shouldered Nietzsche’s hazardous scepticism: “No! Come back, with all your torments! All the streams of my tears run their course to you. Oh come back, my unknown God. My pain! My last happiness!”

His ruin gave me resolve. It was certainly not a good thing, but I refused to suppose it bad. Why? Because I believed that is what killed him.

He needed the world to be different. Runaway idealism unwittingly severed his connection with something bigger. He couldn’t find his way home to the sheltering authenticity of now. Angry, he then showed God who was in control.

It’s a narrative for our modern dilemma. We disallow an interventionist deity on the grounds it institutionalises human inadequacy and renders us measly meat puppets. How does one grow up by dwelling on a gap between yourself and godly perfection? “Better” must eventually become the enemy of good (as Voltaire put it). Religion is perpetual paternalism - Jesus warning us that “no one comes to the father except through me”.

Unfortunately, secularism seems to embrace a similar ruse. By standing alone we put reality before the concept of a paradise to come. Without obsessing over the destination, democracy and the market can make each moment of this admission-free journey more accessible.

Of course, the closer we get to the freedom of what is, the more likely our over-stimulated thinking will disrupt the ancient questions we tried to leave behind - like where the hell are we going?

Liberalism hasn’t solved anything - just created a frenzied state in which to avoid what really matters. Having cultivated science for our survival, rationalism can tell us nothing of why it is important we survive. Tougher yet: technology affords us more and more time in which to stew upon the apparent unfairness of our predicament.

Without the promise of eternal life, we are left clinging to existence for its own sake - clutching ever more tightly to our possessions. Meanwhile, the fretting splinters our hope of an unconditional trust in each other, without the cultish fellowship of religion. Maybe GK Chesterton was right when he suggested those “who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it”.

Left alone with its mortality, secularism has inevitably begun to yearn for something more. And so it should.

The West, with much success due to separation, now fears integrating faith and democracy. But why? Don’t we want closure; a definitive purpose?

The problem is pride - it’s become more vital than truth. Each side is worried the other will confirm they offer incomplete answers. Without humility, however, each will continue to compromise and thus refuse the ironies upon which they are founded.

Intellect, for example, is a victim of its own brilliance. The implication that subject matter more important than mere bottom-line survival is beyond rational thought is immediately rejected by our arrogant minds. The ego can’t tolerate Pascal’s candour: “Reason cannot decide anything - there is an infinite chaos separating us!”

Supposed faith, on the other hand, fails to cope with hard-wired doubts: “We are led to enquire what it is that, in metaphysics, the sure path of science has not hitherto been found. Shall we suppose that it is impossible to discover it? Why then should nature have visited our reason with restless aspirations after it, as if it were one of our weightiest concerns?"

Surely, Immanuel Kant has a fair point. Who entrusts reason as a defining attribute and then denies us the use of it to understand that which has done the bestowing?

Ironically, all religions have championed, at different times, the absurd notion of an ineffable God. The theological darling of the Catholic Church, Thomas Aquinas, summed it up well in the 13th century: “In the last resort all that man knows of God is to know that he does not know him, since he knows that what God is, surpasses all that we can understand of him”.

If this is right, why do religious types utter anything when it comes to the meaning of tsunamis, suicide and other human tragedy? Wouldn’t a true believer simply accept without justification all events as part of God’s divine plan? Why encourage faithlessness by even hinting at answers to the big questions - it only demeans God and humanity in the process.

Einstein couldn’t consent to the idea of a vindictive God - subtle maybe, but never spiteful. Australia once had a similar outlook with our “She’ll be right, mate” motto and disregard for self-importance.

While losing the battle to live by it, I believe my father still knew deep down - like the rest of us - there is truth in all this.

If so, maybe we should be taking a little more time before judging God. We could instead reflect on the wise words of another man once torn between head and heart: “I do not seek to understand in order to have faith but I have faith in order to understand. For I believe even this: I shall not understand unless I have faith.”