LETTING GOD GO

A SMALL CHILD WAS DRAWING AT SUNDAY SCHOOL, as a sweet story goes. 'What are you drawing?', says the teacher. 'I am drawing God' is the reply. 'But no one knows what God looks like.', the teacher remonstrates. 'When I am finished,' retorts the child proudly, 'every one will.'. So, sorry... no pictures.

I love that story. Almost as much as I love the story of the dyslectic chap who became an atheist exclaiming, 'There is no doG!'.

My last blog posting raised a little interest and I am looking forward to more replies.

Now to begin but but let me say at the outset, letting God go is not the end of being religious, if religion is what guides us and orders our choices.

Before I, and possibly you also, give God the sack, we could ask ourselves if God is, where might that be?

When I was growing up, God was in heaven but also, in some sense, everywhere. My illustrated Bible had pictures of God in the clouds. In many ways, the evolution of the idea of god in the life of the child who learns to think eventually as a adult mirrors the evolution or history of God, so far as we can surmise it, in the growing up of the human race. I came to believe that Heaven was 'up there' while 'down there' was an unpleasant place known as Hell. I also had the notion of Purgatory, where sinners might be purged of their sins before going on and up to Heaven.

I did not come to know this in the same sense of how I came to know the world around me. In my mother's womb, I knew very little, almost nothing, while my brain grew from just a few cells to the point where it was just big enough to permit, with a little squeezing, my head to pass through her birth canal. Even at that point, quite a bit of important cerebral machinery was missing. I refer to the fore-brain that begins to grow some eighteen months after birth and keeps on growing for several years more. With a full size brain we could never survive birth.

I went from knowing nothing about the world by dint of a lot of work done in my brain making sense of all the information I was getting through my ears, the sense of motion of my limbs, my eyes, and other senses. For the first two years or so, my knowledge of the world was very rudimentary and not much different from the knowledge of other mammalian young. In my head, I was making increasingly educated guesses about how the world worked and getting continual feedback about how good were those guesses. This is the stuff of the psychology of cognitive development, possibly one of the most fascinating realms of psychology (which I taught for five years when I was an academic).

When I began to use language, I entered another world entirely. I could ask my parents questions about the nature of the world. Older siblings were a great help too. From then on, knowledge of the world multiplied and grew exponentially. In my brain, the knowledge construction went on at a furious pace, old neural networks being broken down and new ones replacing them.

But this new knowledge came not from personal experience, as formerly, but in the context of language and culture. What others 'knew' was passed on to me.

Wait for it...

Here is where the concept of God occurs, this is where God is, in the world of story, history, myth, belief and opinion. This is a hard pill to swallow. We would like to have it that God is in the sense that we know a tree is, or a rock. With careful thought, we will see that we cannot maintain this view. It is quite possible to imagine a culture where the concept of God is completely absent. Would such a culture be barbaric and cruel, being so bereft of God? Not necessarily and certainly we can say that having a concept of God has not prevented us from lapsing in awful barbarisms.

I suppose that this is where you will get pretty mad at me. Already I have had one email saying I cannot sack God. Well, let's see.

God, or gods, as a concept has been around for a long time, perhaps as long as humans have had enough language to form abstract ideas. There is at least one book entitled, 'A History of God'.

There are living fossil cultures that tell us how humans first thought about God or gods. In the Australian Aboriginal Dream Time stories (these folk came to Australia between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago) there are stories of how super large creatures formed important geographical features. I love the one that tells how the Flinders Ranges, in the North of my home State of South Australia came to be. From the air, these look like impressions made in the earth by the fingers of one's hands. The totem for this land is the Snake ( a very large snake) who lived at the beginning of time. His snaking about formed the finger-like impressions. He also drank all the water (the country is very dry and arid); this gave him quite a belly ache and he took refuge beneath the land to get over it. The rumblings of his belly still shake the land occasionally (it is still somewhat volcanic). A great story, one that is passed on in much greater detail as part of the Aboriginal initiation rites. At this stage, such stories about the gods gave a sort of explanation of how things came to be as they are, like why it rains and thunders and how the seasons change.

Such stories predate writing but were in force still when the Greeks began to write stories. About three thousand years ago, some of them were included in the Old Testament. Notice that a child, growing up, could not derive such stories from the understanding that came through senses. Only when we learned language could we begin to receive this knowledge, slowly acquired as humanity grew and matured over hundreds of years.

It has been said that language is to the human mind as air to the birds and water to the fish and other denizens of the sea. We live and move in it, totally accepting it, but unaware to the huge, unfathomable extent that it has formed us. God is in the talk about God, in our thought about God. If he/she/it is somewhere else, we can never know of it.