What IS God, anyway?
Is God this thing, or that thing?
I’d like to tackle a very thorny problem. What — precisely — is God?
God as a Single Thing
Humanity tends to imagine God as only a single thing, and we tend to argue over which single thing is the right one. God is a personality only or nature and the universe only. God is a divine mathematician that set the heavens in motion (Galileo’s heroic idea) or God is an invisible spirit force operating everywhere all the time like an unseen hand.
All of these proposals have merit and give rise to arguments over their validity. Some of these arguments run for centuries without conclusion, each camp insisting on their absolute rightness.
God as Multiple Things
I’m not sure why we limit our descriptions of God to just one thing, as opposed to more than one. My guess is that it stems from the limitations of our human experience. For example, have you ever known a person who was both a personality AND an unseen motivating force?
I’d like to propose a different idea, one outside the bounds of our direct experience.
God isn’t this or that. God isn’t an either/or. God is more than one entity, more than one being. And further, God is more than one entity at the same time.
How could this be?
Total Deity
Before answering that question, let’s pause for a second to give some clarity to our terms. As a word, the term God tends to connote personality. God is a person, albeit a divine person.
However, all of reality is more than just personality, even divine personality. It encompasses non-personal things. Things like nature, or the planets or the wonders of the quantum realm, or the starry creations of the cosmos. These seem as if they’ve been touched by divinity, even though they are obviously non-personal.
It would be nice to have a term that encompasses both personal and non-personal levels of reality.
Christianity refers to total divine reality as the I AM, a term used many times in the Bible, and stemming from an older Hebrew term. In the use of the word “I”, you can see the Hebraic and Christian preference for viewing divinity primarily as personality. But we need a term that goes further because our general concept of “I AM” ends where personality ends.
Let’s use the term Total Deity. Total Deity encompasses all of divine personality (God) and all of divine reality that is non-personal (nature or cosmos).
Begging the question
Total Deity is what came before God, before the cosmos, before anything. Today we experience different pieces and levels of reality, but at one point (in the eternally distant past), it was all just one thing.
Saying that God and The Cosmos and all other parts of reality were once a single thing — a kind of All-In-All — begs a question. Actually, it begs a few questions. Why did they split? How did things go from that to what we see today?
Excellent questions. I’ll write more about it in my next post, but the short answer is this. Even though Total Deity was Everything-All-In-One, it was still missing something.
Any guesses as to what that might be?
