Take time before judging God

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.”