Where is this God about whom so many prattle? Those who claim to know and those who claim to know not are both in error.
For millennia questions about the existence of god would not have been questions anyone would have understood. From the time that the human specie began to think about gods, they were all out there in the trees, the rocks, the water, the wind. At some point the gods were conceived to be in some non-material place, but always nearby, watching and controlling, requiring appeasement, sustenance, pleasure.
Then along comes Ankhnaten (various spellings) and the primary God is "out there". Where? Beyond the dome of heaven. (The dome of heaven was held up on four pillars in the directions of the four winds. It had windows that openned to let in rain, lights hung from it and two big lights traversed from east to west.) Even Moses didn't really change this. There were still many gods. He just announced that Yahweh was the greatest of the gods and that Israel would "have no gods before" Yahweh.
Throughout most of Israelite/Hebrew history, the people believed in multiple gods, but eventually the Hebrews gave up that idea and decided that there was only one God and all the others were idols.
The location and realm of that one God has changed and diminished over the years as Galileo and an ever increasing horde of scientists encroached on the body of misinformation about the physical world. The earth became round, not flat. It became one of many bodies in space. The time of its origin began to be pushed back. The animals, plants and other life forms were found to have existed for millenia and into pre-history.
In the end, any talk of a God "out there" is very speculative. If such a god put natural law into action and thereby created the moral being (Whether human or chimpanzee) he/she/it did so by the mechanism of the big bang. We have good experimental evidence of what happened after a few milliseconds after the big bang. The Large Hadron Collider was supposed to bring us within microseconds, but there have been major "glitches" with the supercooled magnets. Still, those look to be resolved within a couple months and we will get more information.
The point of this is, even if we get within micro-seconds, we cannot go beyond the Big Bang. Nothing can pass beyond the Big Bang. Therefore we cannot know anything about God as an entity. (Besides the obvious logical problems with that.) Beyond that, any God we discern, being non-personal, would be very unsatisfactory from a spiritual perspective.
I don't believe that we can demonstrate either the existence or the non-existence of such a God.
Another part of the problem of the quest for an objective, transcendent god, is the semantic one. What does the word "god" mean? Words don't really have their own meaning. With all due respect to makers of dictionaries, different people mean different things by the same words. Each of us carries a mental image of the referent for a word (Or perhaps several for some words.) and those referents are different. Let us take a mundane example. You and I look at a map of the town. A stream runs through the town and the map shows a bridge crossing that stream. You look at the map and make a decision to drive to the bridge and then cross it to the other side. When we arrive we find that the bridge is really a one-way bridge. To cross the stream from our side requires that we go several blocks further to a second bridge which is one-way in our direction. The map is not the territory, to quote Alfred Korzybski, the father of General Semantics.
Words and language are only a map to the territory, they are not the actuality. So the word "god" can have--does have--different meanings for each person. At another level, the word "god" is a metaphor by which people have, throughout history, attempted to share their experience of the spiritual which, by every definition, is beyond words and definition. Whatever that word means, it is clear that it cannot mean something or someone "out there." There may be a good use for the word but it is not the traditional theistic meaning. (Of course, it may be that the word has become so contaminated with the "out there" meaning that it may no longer be a useful word. This may be the reason so many people refuse or are reluctant to use it.)
So we come then to the question, "If God is not, what is the subject of 'spirituality'?"
The answer to that is, I think, the one Albert Camus poses in "The Myth of Sisyphus"; given the absurdity of life, there is no purpose to living. Why not just commit suicide and avoid the pain, struggle and difficulty of living. In the end we will become ill, or deteriorate and die. Life is a terminal diagnosis. Are the few moments of joy worth the cost of continuing? Camus' answer is that it depends. If life is absurd, any purpose for it must be one you existentially create for your life. If you choose to do so, that purpose can make living worthwhile and be a reason not to commit suicide. Sisyphus found his purpose in thumbing his nose at the gods and not surrendering his spirit. Yes he had to push the rock up the hill, but he did it magnificently and that became his purpose. (I know, the gods didn't give him the option of suicide.)
Spirituality, it seems, is that process of creating a purpose for your life. Paul Tillich, one of the great Christian theologians of the 20th century had a key idea that is quite congruent with this. He spoke of finding a "Ground of Being," for your life--which he identified as God. He derived the ground of being, God, primarily from Christian revelation, but he also took much of it from existential philosophy, e.g., Kierkegaard, Camus, Sartre. Tillich was writing in the 1940's and 1950's and could not yet escape from conventional, traditional neo-orthodoxy. Others have pursued this in further direction.
Today we have Christian theology that is even more cognizant of new thought. Particularly "Process Theology" (Built initially around the thinking of Alfred North Whitehead but carried now by John Cobb and others.)
What this makes of spirituality and religion is something different from the past. Spirituality is to be seen in the behavior that it engenders. Do not tell me of your beliefs or your "spirituality" without showing me the results in your behavior. And I will apply that same standard to myself. This is really not all new. The Buddha preached this, but even before him, Jesus did so. And even before Jesus, Amos, Hosea, Micah and Isaiah said it also. Even before them, it was embedded in the Torah.
So what about "god?" Surprising myself, I find I am quite able to use the word "god", in prayer and in words, but not because my prayer calls upon some "out there" god to fill in and accomplish what I cannot. Rather, my prayer has something to do with instilling in my unconscious, the will to do what is moral and good and to oppose what is "evil" and not good; in other words, to "love my neighbor as myself". I look to the reports of Jesus, among others, his teaching and behavior, for inspiration in this without suggesting that only he could so inspire.
Struggling to find words to share my spiritual experience and aware of the perils of language, I have begun speaking of myself as a non-theistic (No "out there" god), heterodox (Orthodoxy is almost always wrong), Presbyterian (The milieu in which I have learned and grown), Zen (My personal spiritual meditative practice) follower of Jesus, the Jewish spiritual master.
For millennia questions about the existence of god would not have been questions anyone would have understood. From the time that the human specie began to think about gods, they were all out there in the trees, the rocks, the water, the wind. At some point the gods were conceived to be in some non-material place, but always nearby, watching and controlling, requiring appeasement, sustenance, pleasure.
Then along comes Ankhnaten (various spellings) and the primary God is "out there". Where? Beyond the dome of heaven. (The dome of heaven was held up on four pillars in the directions of the four winds. It had windows that openned to let in rain, lights hung from it and two big lights traversed from east to west.) Even Moses didn't really change this. There were still many gods. He just announced that Yahweh was the greatest of the gods and that Israel would "have no gods before" Yahweh.
Throughout most of Israelite/Hebrew history, the people believed in multiple gods, but eventually the Hebrews gave up that idea and decided that there was only one God and all the others were idols.
The location and realm of that one God has changed and diminished over the years as Galileo and an ever increasing horde of scientists encroached on the body of misinformation about the physical world. The earth became round, not flat. It became one of many bodies in space. The time of its origin began to be pushed back. The animals, plants and other life forms were found to have existed for millenia and into pre-history.
In the end, any talk of a God "out there" is very speculative. If such a god put natural law into action and thereby created the moral being (Whether human or chimpanzee) he/she/it did so by the mechanism of the big bang. We have good experimental evidence of what happened after a few milliseconds after the big bang. The Large Hadron Collider was supposed to bring us within microseconds, but there have been major "glitches" with the supercooled magnets. Still, those look to be resolved within a couple months and we will get more information.
The point of this is, even if we get within micro-seconds, we cannot go beyond the Big Bang. Nothing can pass beyond the Big Bang. Therefore we cannot know anything about God as an entity. (Besides the obvious logical problems with that.) Beyond that, any God we discern, being non-personal, would be very unsatisfactory from a spiritual perspective.
I don't believe that we can demonstrate either the existence or the non-existence of such a God.
Another part of the problem of the quest for an objective, transcendent god, is the semantic one. What does the word "god" mean? Words don't really have their own meaning. With all due respect to makers of dictionaries, different people mean different things by the same words. Each of us carries a mental image of the referent for a word (Or perhaps several for some words.) and those referents are different. Let us take a mundane example. You and I look at a map of the town. A stream runs through the town and the map shows a bridge crossing that stream. You look at the map and make a decision to drive to the bridge and then cross it to the other side. When we arrive we find that the bridge is really a one-way bridge. To cross the stream from our side requires that we go several blocks further to a second bridge which is one-way in our direction. The map is not the territory, to quote Alfred Korzybski, the father of General Semantics.
Words and language are only a map to the territory, they are not the actuality. So the word "god" can have--does have--different meanings for each person. At another level, the word "god" is a metaphor by which people have, throughout history, attempted to share their experience of the spiritual which, by every definition, is beyond words and definition. Whatever that word means, it is clear that it cannot mean something or someone "out there." There may be a good use for the word but it is not the traditional theistic meaning. (Of course, it may be that the word has become so contaminated with the "out there" meaning that it may no longer be a useful word. This may be the reason so many people refuse or are reluctant to use it.)
So we come then to the question, "If God is not, what is the subject of 'spirituality'?"
The answer to that is, I think, the one Albert Camus poses in "The Myth of Sisyphus"; given the absurdity of life, there is no purpose to living. Why not just commit suicide and avoid the pain, struggle and difficulty of living. In the end we will become ill, or deteriorate and die. Life is a terminal diagnosis. Are the few moments of joy worth the cost of continuing? Camus' answer is that it depends. If life is absurd, any purpose for it must be one you existentially create for your life. If you choose to do so, that purpose can make living worthwhile and be a reason not to commit suicide. Sisyphus found his purpose in thumbing his nose at the gods and not surrendering his spirit. Yes he had to push the rock up the hill, but he did it magnificently and that became his purpose. (I know, the gods didn't give him the option of suicide.)
Spirituality, it seems, is that process of creating a purpose for your life. Paul Tillich, one of the great Christian theologians of the 20th century had a key idea that is quite congruent with this. He spoke of finding a "Ground of Being," for your life--which he identified as God. He derived the ground of being, God, primarily from Christian revelation, but he also took much of it from existential philosophy, e.g., Kierkegaard, Camus, Sartre. Tillich was writing in the 1940's and 1950's and could not yet escape from conventional, traditional neo-orthodoxy. Others have pursued this in further direction.
Today we have Christian theology that is even more cognizant of new thought. Particularly "Process Theology" (Built initially around the thinking of Alfred North Whitehead but carried now by John Cobb and others.)
What this makes of spirituality and religion is something different from the past. Spirituality is to be seen in the behavior that it engenders. Do not tell me of your beliefs or your "spirituality" without showing me the results in your behavior. And I will apply that same standard to myself. This is really not all new. The Buddha preached this, but even before him, Jesus did so. And even before Jesus, Amos, Hosea, Micah and Isaiah said it also. Even before them, it was embedded in the Torah.
So what about "god?" Surprising myself, I find I am quite able to use the word "god", in prayer and in words, but not because my prayer calls upon some "out there" god to fill in and accomplish what I cannot. Rather, my prayer has something to do with instilling in my unconscious, the will to do what is moral and good and to oppose what is "evil" and not good; in other words, to "love my neighbor as myself". I look to the reports of Jesus, among others, his teaching and behavior, for inspiration in this without suggesting that only he could so inspire.
Struggling to find words to share my spiritual experience and aware of the perils of language, I have begun speaking of myself as a non-theistic (No "out there" god), heterodox (Orthodoxy is almost always wrong), Presbyterian (The milieu in which I have learned and grown), Zen (My personal spiritual meditative practice) follower of Jesus, the Jewish spiritual master.
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