Identity crisis: except it's God's identity, and we're the ones having it
A lot of people start with a definition like God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and everywhere. Great, this is a propositional definition. But having a axiomatic definition like that should rub you the wrong way. If you have such a definition, God will be too distant to make any kind of meaningful impact in your life, especially if you’re a scientist, a writer, or an inventor.
Let’s instead start with “God exists.” This is our first axiom. Jordan Peterson would throw a fit at such a definition. God? What do you mean by God?
What I want to explore is an operational definition. If the definition doesn’t matter to you on a personal level, what good is it?
If God is “all-knowing,” this seems useful. But you might be talking about the universe and all the information within it. No need for the supernatural. The universe and it’s laws are everywhere. And the universe is the ultimate arbiter, so it’s all powerful. The common propositional definition might as well be another way to say God is the universe. Many people are happy with this definition. But why have two words when one will do? Just say the universe is your God.
When religious people debate with atheists, they forget the beauty and utility of what they’re proposing. They’ll instead argue how silly it is that the universe created itself. And then atheists will retort and ask, “who created the creator?” You know how this goes.
But let’s try a different approach. Let’s not use God as the reason for why we have something instead of nothing. Instead, let’s use God as a placeholder for the reason. As reasons are discovered, God retreats; He’s harder to find. Why is God male? I’ll leave the explanation my pronoun usage for another post.
Instead of having a “god of the gaps” as a reason to look no further, instead we say “god” as a way to refer to the gaps we find. We cannot approach God without closing in on these gaps. In this way, to turn away from God, would be to look at all the unknowns in the universe and to refuse to engage with them. And to turn to God would be to look at the unknowns and slowly unwrap them. No matter how far we get, we will always have another “why?” in the chain of whys. God, then, is always with us as long as there are things we don’t know.
You might already use the definition of God I’m describing. Einstein said “God does not place dice.” You might say, “the first mover does not play dice.” We use the word “god” loosely all the time. Someone might ask, “Did Jeffery Epstein kill himself?” And you might say, “only God knows.” Being an atheist doesn’t make it any harder to understand what is being said.
To be more specific, when we say “god”, what we’re really doing is aiming in the direction of an ultimate unified answer. We don’t know where exactly we’re aiming because that would require knowing more than we do. And so we say “god” as a placeholder. We leave the definition itself open to later revision.
We do the same thing with the word “love.” When you say “I love you,” we know what that means, but that doesn’t make it any easier to provide a definition. For example, if you have an answer to the question “why do you love me?,” then we know it can’t be love. For it to be love, it has to transcend reason. The moment someone has a definition for what it means to love, then a person can simply live in accordance with that definition. But that’s not love. We have another word for that: “duty”.
Both “love” and “God” aim at eternity in their respective ways. And Christians will even say that “God is love.” People will die for love. They will sacrifice for love. Imagine a couple falling in love, having kids, then their kids having kids, and so on. Love like this has an impact on the future that is hard to fully comprehend. A great great grandchild of yours hundreds of years in the future will smile, and it will be your smile, or your lover’s smile. Maybe it’s the same smile that your lover first noticed in you. But a step in the direction of this kind of love is a step toward eternity. And so when a couple breaks up, it’s not just the end of something small, it’s an entire future that doesn’t happen, an entire set of dominos that never fall.
With God being something like the unknown, you’re aiming at an infinite well of knowledge. The closer you get to God, the further He recedes.
But now here comes the twist…
In the story of the garden of Eden, Eve also had a gap in knowledge. She didn’t know what would happen if she ate the forbidden fruit. She was told what would happen, but that’s not the same thing as knowing. You can’t know without running an experiment, can you? A true scientist is not satisfied with unverifiable knowledge. It’s not enough to be told, you need to run the experiment to see. And not only once, you need to eat the apple multiple times, because without repeatability you cannot verify that it was the apple that kills, or if that one time was a coincidence.
I hope you can see the problem. In that story, knowledge is evil. God says don’t eat the fruit. And it’s the serpent that says they will be like gods if they do. Pursuit of knowledge is equated with becoming god-like rather than getting to know God. But it’s also linked with death. And once they knew, they became aware of their own nudity—a very odd series of events. So from this point of view, it would be odd to say that pursuing the unknown is always a good thing to do.
Is it good to know? It’s complicated. If you read the garden story again, you might notice that the serpent doesn’t lie, and that the gap is opened because of Eve’s overabundance of caution. God never said she couldn’t touch the fruit. God merely said she couldn’t eat it. But Eve remembered that even touching it was wrong. She said as much to the serpent. And the serpent replied, “you shall not surely die”—a truth!
And there’s this question now, if you want to reach God, is science the way to do it? The Adam and Eve story seems clearly against knowledge. What should we make of this?
In some sense, knowledge really is a curse. Say you have a website selling strawberries online, but you rank really low on Google. Say I know how that algorithm works. Suppose I tell you. You use that knowledge to rank at the top. Now your site gets traffic, but it’s not the same as it would be if you never gamed the system. It may merely prolong the inevitable. Getting ranked artificially high could mean more sales in the short term. But if the fundamental product is no good, you’re ultimately pouring your efforts into a dead end.
The same goes for anything. If you know what love is, then you can fake it better. If anything, knowledge is a psychopath’s best friend. It’s demonic. It puffs up. It pollutes.
So what is God? And what does it mean to follow Him? We can’t box God into a definition. A definition can’t possibly do God justice. But without one, how do we know we’re talking about the same thing when we say “god”?
Kant made a distinction between the phenomena, and the noumena. The phenomena is what you see. It’s always the surface. The underlying invisible reality is the noumena. If God is real, he would have to exist out there in the noumena. Maybe God is the noumena. But in order to experience God, there would still have to be some kind of phenomena that we can access.
Between what we see and what we don’t is a gap—again, the gap. One of the best representations of it is the Hebrew aleph, pronounced as a glottal stop. It’s the non-sound in the middle when you say “Uh oh”. Fitting, because that’s the situation we’re in with God. If only God came down to help resolve this. But if God did come down, we’d be debating if it really was God or if what we were seeing was mere phenomena, while the noumenous reality remained hidden.
One answer is to say that God is a direction. If you don’t know where to go, you go toward God, because it’s worth pursuing forever. Another answer is that God is somehow tied up with emptiness itself. God is the lump in your throat before you’re about to give an important speech. God is the word at the tip of your tongue before you find it. God is the thing that is before a thing comes into being—something like that.
Whatever God is, God has to be big. If you can start to dissect God like an insect, you’re not talking about God. It’s not enough to say that God is big. If I give you a definition and I can’t quite finish it, God is in that part where words escape me. That’s big. So big that language fails you. You have to reach into the hyperbolic and still fall short. Whatever definition of God you have, if you aren’t moved to tears by it, what you’re talking about isn’t God, or even in the direction of God.