How does God exist?

When I was training for the Uniting Church ministry there was gossip doing the rounds that there was a student who did not even believe in God. While most of my fellow students brought with them a belief in God as supernatural agent, I came from a background of scientific atheism. My adherence to the church did not include the God that my fellow students thought was the centre of faith.

This may remind some readers of that episode of Yes Prime Minister in which Jim Hacker complains that some of the candidates for the episcopacy did not believe in God, a sign that the Anglican church has become so compromised in its drive to appeal to all as to have abandoned the One to whom it was answerable.

Liberal Protestantism has a reputation for abandoning anything it sees as a barrier to the man in the street darkening its portals. Thus talk about morality in church is abandoned because it is seen as a turn off in an increasingly liberated society.

It is often the case that the creeds are not said in church, that the Eucharist is but a symbol or a memorial meal, the miracles are rationalised away and any sharp confrontation between the preacher and the congregation is avoided at all costs. Such is the desperate state of the church that fears for its life in direct contradiction to the gospel message.

In this case God is abandoned and replaced with the spiritual journey and all is peace and light except for the fact that one could die of boredom, there being so little meat left on the bones of the faith.

At the other end of the spectrum are the fundamentalist or so called Evangelical Christians who have no doubt about their belief in God. This came home to me after attending two talks given by the Christian Union at my university. My criticism of these talks was that although both speakers had good things to say, both had done their research, there was a point in the talk at which God was simply parachuted into the room without explanation or warrant. The assumption was that we were all Christians and we thus all believed in this God. That is just what Christians do.

This group would rage against limp Liberal Protestantism saying that it had sold out the essence of faith in order to gain adherents from secular society. In this I am on their side, but what worries me is that critical theological thinking only goes so far and then cops out when it comes to the question as to how God exists. There is an element of double book keeping here.

While the Word of God in scripture is celebrated and is at the centre of preaching and teaching, often to the shame of liberalism, there exists in the mind of the believer another God above the scriptures. There is a dualism here that mirrors the also strongly held dualism of body and soul.

While Evangelical Christians, as their name suggests, cling to the Word of God found in the Bible, this word is understood to point to its speaker, the real God as supernatural agent. This is very much like the relation found in Islam between God and the Koran. God is transcendent to the world and dictates his law to the Prophet who writes it in the book. The book then becomes holy as it is the direct word of God.

This scheme, when it is applied to the Bible, is vulnerable to the findings of biblical criticism that has discovered the people and communities behind the texts. The words in the Bible are actually human words derived from a reflection on human experience. They do this in many diverse ways, from psalms and songs to histories and legends and finally to gospels and the letters of the early church. Biblical criticism has exposed the chaps and maps of the Bible. There is not one divine voice here but many human voices all of which point to human truth.

This precipitates a crisis in the modern understanding of God as supernatural agent who exists apart from the world. The philosophers of the 18th and 19th century, especially Nietzsche, understood this and further cemented the basis for modern atheism. This is the god that Nietzsche’s madman declared dead and in doing so performed a great service to the church.

It has become clear that this god has no place in the serious study of theology because he cannot be an object of study. Rather, the proper object of study is the God revealed in the pages of the Bible, not in terms of a supernatural agent who hovers over scripture but whose life giving Word is found in scripture.

Theology finds itself in a peculiar predicament in that it must talk about the Word of God but cannot speak about the speaker of that Word. We are privy to God’s address to us but not to God Himself. This is the one who is protected from human speculation by the first commandment that we must have no images of Him and by numerous texts that warn that to see God is to die.

This understanding comes into practice when the preacher is a disciplined exegete. Sermons are born out of meditation on biblical texts and it is undisciplined to evoke God apart from these texts. Thus God is to be found in the text and in the sermon and in the sacrament as a real presence that informs, comforts and confronts.

The reason that Evangelicals have such a low view of the Eucharist is that they do not understand that God is in the bread and the wine when it is distributed among the believing community and in the sermon when it is faithful to the biblical text. This has a long history in Protestantism which distanced itself from what it saw as superstitious, if not magical in medieval sacramental theology.

The reason that Evangelicals do not take the Eucharist seriously is that God is elsewhere. He may be the conversational partner in private prayer but he is not “enthroned on the praises of Israel” or present in the worship of the church.

When the Old Testament prophet stands in the midst of the community and brackets his speech with “Thus says the Lord” it is counted that the Lord has spoken even though that word comes from the mouth of a human being. The prophetic word is not a case of God being channelled through the prophet but of the prophet speaking a truthful and confronting word to the people. As the Word of God it creates life for the people.

This Word is pure event and cannot be tied to any species of being. Biblical language about God does not always reflect this because our relationship with God is set within the context of our relationship with other persons. God is not a cache of knowledge or a theory or a force or a sentiment, He is a conversational partner. Thus we find in the Bible language which portrays God as having a “strong right arm”. But this does not mean that God is an actual person as we know other persons.

It is apparent that belief in God has a multitude of meanings. The first Christians in the Roman Empire were accused of being atheists because they refused allegiance to the gods of the empire. It seems to me that contemporary Christians can also call themselves atheists in a sense in that they do not believe in God as supernatural agent but in the God we see nailed to the cross. Again, God is pure event.

The silence that follows the cry from the cross; “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’ convicts God as a personal being as absent. Similar cries of those in the open and floundering boat, that remain unanswered, bear witness that there is no one out their, no one knows we are here.

In this sense naturalistic scientists are correct, the physical universe is cold and uncaring. “We cannot view life as a saga with a meaning intended for us, because to do so would be to “assume that the universe is governed by forces which are essentially of the same order as the promptings of the human heart”. To do so is to be narcissistic and self indulgent and to be out of touch with what is.

The argument of protest atheism is that believers are deluded because they do not see the world as it is. They are weak because they attempt to cushion the human reality of death and tragedy. This is cogent criticism.

But this does not empty faith in God, it is just a different God to that constructed in the modern age. Far from being a means by which obstacles to faith may be removed, Christian atheism consists in a retrieval of the God of the Bible who is identified in the events of the particular nation Israel and in the life and death of a particular man Jesus. This is no apologetic but a rediscovery of the radical nature of biblical theology.

It has been the error of the modern age, and some of the Medieval, that the otherness of God consists in Him being immaterial, ghostly, supernatural. However, the Bible describes the otherness of God not in terms of the material or immaterial but in terms of consciousness.

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isa 55:8,9 NRSV)

While we must affirm that God is not tied into nature, His otherness comes not from the mode of His being as opposed to the world we see around us but from the interpretation of event and story “that produces otherness that nevertheless belongs to itself”. Behind the Word of God there is a human word. “There is no inhumanness in God.”

The modern person finds run-of-the-mill theological language inflated, it claims too much and invokes a supernatural realm that is, since the rise of natural science, unbelievable. It is no wonder that my scientific colleagues get nervous when I want to talk about theology. They live in a properly disenchanted world in one sense in that they may investigate nature without the problem of inhabiting spirit.

The scientific mind has become exclusively naturalistic; the rainbow is seen as Newton saw it, the refraction of the components of white light. So when we see a rainbow we think of physical mechanism and not the covenant with Noah. This is a disenchanted world. Adherents to this world, like Dawkins (nicely nailed by Terry Eaglton) and Dennett, will produce no great work of art, not because one is a biologist and the other a philosopher, but because their world is flat.

The increasing detail of scientific knowledge fails to ignite the spirit, tell us who we are or trace a hopeful trajectory. The disenchantment of the world has led to the disenchantment of life. We hope now in new technology to ease our burden and extend our lives. Our trust is in progress.

The re-enchantment of life is possible through biblical story, legend and poetry woven as they are from human history and celebrated in the worship of the Church. Christian worship can be astonishing and can be at the centre of life as long as it is saved from the double entry book keeping that places God somewhere else and from the deadening naturalism of the scientists.

While biblical narrative is often derived from actual historical event (Jesus “suffered under Pontius Pilate”) it is also figurative. We do not have to believe that the miracles actually happened for them to confront us with truth. We do not have to believe that the resurrection of Jesus consisted of a resuscitation to understand its centrality for us.

The way should be open for modern men and women to become believers, there is no essential conflict as regards the nature of the physical world. The real reason for our lack of faith lies where it has always lain, in our hardness of heart, in our desire to create and control our own lives. As long as we persist in these, faith will be far from us even though the barriers that scientists have erected have long since fallen over.