I’ve been writing lately about images of God that don’t work for a lot of people, ways of understanding this thing some call “God” which turn people off, send them away, lead them to say, “I don’t believe in God.” As I said at the beginning of this series, the woman who trained me as a chaplain all those years ago taught me a great response: “Tell me about this God you don’t believe in. I probably don’t believe in that God either.”
When I was studying philosophy I learned a definition of God that I’ve always liked: “that than which no greater can be conceived.” This goes back to Anselm of Canbterbury in the 1700s, and is an example of an ontological way of thinking about God. In his book Discourse on the Existence of God he argued that God exists as an idea in people’s minds. Yet one aspect of this ‘God’ is that God is Supreme, the Greatest, the Ultimate. Anselm put it like this: “God is that than which no greater can exist.”
So, we start by acknowleding that there is an idea of God, yet a “God” that actually exists would be greater than one which only exists in the mind. This means, according to this argument, that God must exist, because, by definition, there can be nothing greater than God, and a God that exists is greater than a God that is only imagined.
Whether this line of thinking proves to you that “God exists,” I want to use it to try to show those who say they don’t believe in God that if God exists, the God they don’t believe probably isn’t God anyway.
Let’s say that you think God is the God of only a certain people or a certain place. Well, a God who is God to all people and in all places would be greater, so this more expansive vision has to be true because “God is that than which no greater can be conceived.” Right? How about if you think that God is focused exclusively on our faults and failures, and has plans for our eternal punishment? I’d say that a God who loves us for our strengths and our weaknesses both, and who takes pleasure in our successes more than our failures is a greater God. Anselm’s ontological argument would say that my God — the loving God — must be the real God because it is greater than your angry and punishing one.
This works even in a counter-intuitive way about the issue of omnipotence. You might think that the expansive, God-can-do-anything, understanding of omnipotence would be greater than my philosophy professor’s seemingly more limited one, God-can-do-anything-that-can-be-done. You’d be wrong. Because the omni-omnipotent God, if you will, is capable of ending suffering, yet doesn’t. And even if you say that God permits — or even causes! — suffering so as to teach us and help us to grow, that’s a pretty mean God who created things in such a way that that’s the only means of teaching us. The more limited God, then, who can only grieve at the deaths of the innocent, comfort the survivors, and try to inspire people to help turns out to actually be greater than the God who could have prevented the disaster in the first place but for some inscrutable reason did not.
Do you see how this works?
You can try it! If you’ve turned your back on the very idea of “God,” I’d encourage you to do this little exercise. Write down the description of this God you don’t believe in. Then try to imagine a God that is better than that — more loving, more inspiring, more inclusive, more healing, more inviting, more ... Many people who’ve done this have told me that they couldn’t get past the conviction that “the God they don’t believe” in is what people mean when they talk about God. What good is it, then, to imagine something that isn’t real?
This could bring us back to Anselm’s original argument, couldn’t it? If you can imagine a God that is truly greater, is “more” than the God you were taught about and which you’ve now rejected, if you can get an idea of such a God in your mind, then such a God actually existing would be even greater still. So if God is “that than which no greater can be conceived,” then your idea come to life, as it were, must be God. Simply, that God you’ve imagined must be.
In a spirit of curiosity and exploration ... give it a try. Next week I’ll try to explain why I’ve been spending so much time writing about God in the first place.
Pax tecum,
RevWik
