What this entry describes has been the most helpful (to me) advance in my thinking in the past ten years. Perhaps it will be helpful to you. Or perhaps it will be more fuel for your grave doubts as to whether I'm a Christian at all. (I started a thread along these lines at the Christianity Board, whereupon one of the usual suspects cited a Bible verse and dismissed my "wordly definitions," whereupon I abandoned the effort. I really should know better.)
We all have some mental image of God. It's unavoidable. We can't pray to an amorphous blob (which would be a mental image in its own right!). Whether we define God in Trinitarian terms or non-Trinitarian terms, we all have some mental image. It may be anthropomorphic (human-like) or something like the ineffable being of light reported by Near-Death Experiencers.
This is surely why many of us relate mostly to Jesus. He's a human image of the divine. We can get our minds around Him, even the resurrected Him who is now in Heaven. The Holy Spirit, not so much.
We also have some mental image of God's supernatural realm – Heaven and Hell, angels and demons – and how it relates to the reality we inhabit. More difficult to picture is God's existence in eternity before any act of creation.
I, at least, found these mental images distracting and unhelpful. Rather than enhancing my faith, they muddled it. I knew they were nothing more than my own mental constructs. I wondered if there was some way to think about God and His creation that was more satisfying – deeper, perhaps. One that made more sense.
God, of course, doesn't have to make sense to me. Whatever He may be, He's the Wholly Transcendent Eternal Other. That's understood. But if there is a way of thinking about Him that is more satisfying, more conducive to faith, and isn't contrary to Christian doctrine – well, why not?
The immediate cause of this blog entry was a thread on the Christianity Board about whether God has wings as some Bible verses describe. This led to a surprising amount of discussion and, it seemed to me, confusion. (I seemed to be the only one who found it comical, a feeling I often have on the forums.)
The very question "Does God have wings?" is contrary to the fundamental concept of Divine Simplicity.
Here's a description of Divine Simplicity from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Divine simplicity is central to the classical Western concept of God. Simplicity denies any physical or metaphysical composition in the divine being. This means God is the divine nature itself and has no accidents (properties that are not necessary) accruing to his nature. There are no real divisions or distinctions in this nature. Thus, the entirety of God is whatever is attributed to him. Divine simplicity is the hallmark of God’s utter transcendence of all else, ensuring the divine nature to be beyond the reach of ordinary categories and distinctions, or at least their ordinary application.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it this way:
According to the classical theism of Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas and their adherents, God is radically unlike creatures and cannot be adequately understood in ways appropriate to them. God is simple in that God transcends every form of complexity and composition familiar to the discursive intellect. One consequence is that the simple God lacks parts.
Even the Wikipedia entry is pretty good:
The general idea can be stated in this way: The being of God is identical to the "attributes" of God. Characteristics such as omnipresence, goodness, truth, eternity, etc., are identical to God's being, not qualities that make up that being as a collection, nor abstract entities inhering in God as in a substance; in other words, one can say that in God both essence and existence are one and the same.
Divine simplicity - Wikipedia
) But the God of Christianity is personal.The Bible tells us that God is Spirit (John 4:24), Light (1 John 1:5) and Love (1 John 4:8). These are all consistent with Divine Simplicity. They are what God is, not what He does or has. God's famous response to Moses, "I AM that I AM" (or "I will be what I will be"), Exodus 3:14, is entirely consistent with Divine Simplicity. I'm not this or that, I simply AM.
The Bible also says that God has wings and other anthropomorphic (man-like or animal-like) features and attributes. Such anthropomorphisms are metaphorical and not consistent with Divine Simplicity.
What can we do with this notion of Divine Simplicity that may enhance our understanding of God and His creation?
One notion that appeals to me is Idealism, God as Pure Consciousness or Mind. This is the breakthrough in my thinking that has been so helpful to me, much more so than any mere mental image has ever been.
The basic philosophical concepts for the ultimate nature of reality are Materialism (all is matter, which is fundamentally atheistic since it leaves no room for a supernatural realm), Dualism (mind and matter are distinct, which is the position most Christians hold) and Idealism (all is mind – the opposite of Materialism). Each has varieties and permutations, but those are the basic options.
Idealism goes back at least to Plato, was popularized by Bishop Berkeley in the 18th century, and has received much attention in recent years as scientists struggle to make sense of consciousness and the mysteries of quantum physics. In peer-reviewed articles across multiple disciplines of science, Bernardo Kastrup argues that Idealism is actually the best fit with all the evidence. Here is his website: Bernardo Kastrup, PhD, PhD.
In books like The Idea of the World, Kastrup suggests that our universe, material as it may seem to us, is actually a mental construct of a Master Consciousness (in Christian terms, God). We all collectively experience this mental construct in the same way.
But we – individual humans - are also mental constructs of this Master Consciousness. We exist within the master construct but each have our inner world of perceptions, feelings, emotions and thoughts, as well as our free will. The same would be true of the spiritual realm and its inhabitants. All are mental construct of God.
This, then, would be the ontology of God and every aspect of His creation: God is Mind and every aspect of His creation, natural and supernatural alike, is His mental construct. (Ontology basically means "the nature of being," what something really is at its most fundamental essence. The so-called Ontological Proof of God's existence argues that the most perfect being we can imagine must necessarily exist. Anselm: Ontological Argument for the God’s Existence | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)
This makes a great deal of sense to me. It's consistent with many other Christian doctrines, including Divine Simplicity. God created ex nihilo, from nothing, merely by speaking the creation into existence – bingo, a perfect match. God's has foreknowledge of everything – bingo. God is able to know our thoughts and hear every prayer – bingo. Miracles - bingo. God is able to bring this creation to an end in an instant and establish a new creation in the twinkling of an eye – bingo. I really see no Christian doctrine that is inherently inconsistent with Idealism.
Is it biblical? Well, it certainly isn't unbiblical. Do I insist it's true? No, it could be far off-base. But there is certainly some deep mystery to the ontology of God, His creation and how He relates to it, and I've found Idealism (and specifically Kastrup's version) to be a very helpful way to think about this mystery - far more helpful to me than the usual mental images.
