I’ve been musing on Divinity, lately. This post is meant for either people who believe in God (or some form of Divinity) and people who relate to the Divine. (It’s actually possible to be an agnostic or even an atheist and still relate to Divinity, believe it or not, but that’s a subject for another post.) The type of Wicca that I practice is monist, meaning that we conceive of all deities as one. When I speak of “God,” from my perspective, I’m referring to one Being, transcendent of gender, of Whom all deities are emanations.
I’ve never liked the king / father metaphor for God. The west is so full of such metaphors that it seems normal. It’s common in the west to think of God as a father-king in the sky.
Under this conception, He’s a strong ruler, loving and wise, but also stern. He demands obedience. If you violate His laws, you will know His wrath. His laws cannot be questioned, because He is perfectly good. Yet, despite His omnipotence and omniscience, He will not make His laws clear to us. Surely, an omniscient and omnipotent being would communicate more clearly than providing laws to a tribal elder of one particular ethnic group, via a burning bush, thousands of years ago. Surely, He could do better than to allow so many versions of scripture to exist (the Torah, the New Testament of the Bible, the Quran, the Book of Mormon, and the Zorastrian Avesta, to name a few), not to mention all the variants (the Roman Catholic, Easter Orthadox, and Protestant versions of the Bible, for example).
Under this conception of God, there is one, right, true, and only thing to do. We are given free will only to be told that we must obey. If I thought that were true, I’d pray to God to make me a robot, programmed to follow His laws, because I wouldn’t want to have free will, if I can’t choose from among multiple ways to be good. That wouldn’t be true freedom. I believe that free will empowers artists to create whatever’s in their heart. Free will means we can choose, not to follow a single set of rules, but rather to be whoever we want to be, so long as we’re basically good people. That implies a wide range of possibilities for how we could exercise our free will and still be good. I believe a perfectly good God would grant that kind of freedom and not punish us for following our hearts, so long as we’re basically within the bounds of goodness.
Now, all this is not in any way a Criticism of the Abrahamic religions. I know that theologians in these religions struggle with these very questions. Nevertheless, I think I understand Divinity somewhat differently. Rather than conceiving of the Divine as a father / king, I understand Divinity as a resource. Let me explain.
I don’t know whether I believe in a Creator. The Neoplatonist Sallustius, in his book “On the Gods and the World,” asked how we know that the universe is not eternal. In other words, how do we know it was ever created or will ever be destroyed? Today, we know from physics about the Big Bang, but we also know that physicists have created some theories, such as the Multiverse Hypothesis and the Big Crunch Hypothesis, to explain where the Big Bang exploded out of. So, it’s possible that the entire cosmos is eternal, and that our universe is just one aspect of it. In that case, the Big Bang only created our universe, not the entire cosmos.
I also tend to think of God as being embedded in the cosmos, rather than residing beyond it. If we posit a Creator, we wonder where He was when He created. However, a God embedded in the cosmos does not need to be located. It is everywhere. It has always been and will always be. In a sense, the cosmos is in a constant state of being created all the time. Creation is not something that happened at the beginning of time, because there is no beginning. Rather, I wonder if every change that occurs to the Cosmos is part of the eternal unfolding of it.
This view of God makes more sense to me. It doesn’t require some place outside of the cosmos where God crafted everything. It doesn’t beg the question what was God doing before He made the cosmos. (I realize that, in the Abrahmic religions, too, this father / king / creator God is not always understood so simply, and that some theologians understand God as being transcendent, and, therefore, not needing to be located in space and time prior to creation. Still and all, I think my conception is a bit different from theirs.) My God is less of a ruling God. God, as craftsman, is owner and, therefore, master of His creation. However, God as an essence, suffuse throughout the cosmos, is more of a resource, like gold.
God is mysterious. It has not given us rules to follow, because It is not here to rule us. It has moral answers, which we must mine, if we are to make use of them. The God as ruler model also begs the question: why is there evil in the universe? Now, human evil could be explained by free will. God, under the traditional model, gave humanity free will, but expects humanity to obey His rules. Human evil is inevitable, because of this. But what about the suffering caused by nature? That might be a test of humanity, meant to temper and strengthen us, some say. Okay, fine, but what about animals who have suffered for millions of years before we human beings came along? Why would God allow them to suffer? If God is conceived of as craftsman, ruler, and father of the universe, and of us, this conception begs these questions.
But consider God as a resource. Why is there suffering in nature, even to non-humans? That’s just the way the universe is. God isn’t so much all-powerful as a Being from Whom all power derives; not so much all-knowing as a Being from Whom all knowledge derives. It may not be able to stop suffering, because It does not act within space and time. It is transcendent and, therefore, in capable of agency. It is Divine, not because It is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good in the sense of an active agent, but rather because all power, knowledge, and goodness shines out from It. It does nothing, but is the source of everything! How might suffering be decreased, then? That’s something we could learn from God, through contemplation, meditation, ceremony, and divine ecstasy.
By studying God’s nature, using spiritual practices, such as mediation or ceremony, we can learn how to be good, how to reduce suffering in the world, what each of our places are in the universe, how to live our lives well, and so forth.
You might ask, “why would we want to do this, though, if we know we won’t be punished if we don’t?” My response is to wonder whether we would only seek the answers to these things if we were afraid of punishment. I want good because the world would be a better place if everyone were good. I desire to live in a good world, so I see that I must must do my part. Once we realize that, we need no other motivation. We can, thence, access God as a resource by which we accomplish making our world better.