|
This was a question put to a lecture audience made up of some very smart people: Why has every civilization on the planet since the appearance of Homo sapiens found or fabricated gods to fear, appease, obey, negotiate with and worship?
Here's a summary of where I went from there: "God" is a word so blithely used that it has become a clich�. It is derived from the Indo-European term ghu-to'm, which is based on the root ghu-ah that may have meant something like "call out" or "invoke." Interestingly enough, one of the speakable Hebrew words for god is "el-oha," suggesting a calling out to "el," a Hebrew particle or shorthand for "god." The term worked its way down in to Old and Middle English and came out something like guid -- a word that morphed into the adjective "good," but then back again as a noun coupled with the definite article "the," giving us "the good" in modern English. The fact is that the word "god" is a vast canvas upon which people paint whatever they imagine god to be. The word appears everywhere in human discourse. Atheists are obsessed with the word, even as they passionately deny the existence of any such entity. "God" is as pervasive an idea as any in the human experience. Even committed humanists use it as in: "God is what humanity is at its best" or "the best of humanity is what God is." The eminent philosopher-theologian of American Protestantism in the first half of the 20th century, Paul Tillich, coined these terms to account for "god": the Ground and Source of being and the uncreated creator -- this last a pre-emptive strike against the impossible question of who created God. Elie Wiesel, whom I was privileged to interview some years ago, had trouble with the humanist idea of God being the best of man. He had seen, as he said, humanity at what he took to be its worst in the Holocaust. Beyond that he, like other Jews of his generation, sometimes wondered if the God of their fathers had abandoned them. When he told me that, I asked him how it was that many Jews remained observant and still espouse belief in God. His answer floored me: "What? That we are entitled to abandon God even if we think he abandoned us? No. Who am I to say such a thing?" There is the best example I can offer for the persistence of the God idea. It seems to be hard-wired in Homo sapiens. One wonders if it was hard-wired in our even earlier ancestors back up along the evolutionary path. Anthropologists try to help us with that kind of inquiry, but I suspect they might have a hard time distinguishing fear and superstition from a human-divine encounter. That said, there remain millions upon millions of human beings for whom belief in a god is to one degree or another important. They would not be moved by this essay to stop believing, nor is it the purpose of this essay to encourage them to stop. A great many of these people are surely not know-nothings. They include scientists, physicians and scholars across the academic spectrum who are required to use inductive reasoning to reach their hypotheses and to work to disprove them. They can't all be deranged. What does this mean? It means that such people are sometimes convinced absent objective data that the room is not empty even though by all senses it is. They intuit a presence in the room that cannot be apprehended in the usual way, but is there nonetheless. It makes one person alive to an idea previously unthought of. It presents another with a melody or harmony as yet uncomposed or heard by the human ear. Yet another thinks he has heard inside his head words strung together in a way that has never yet appeared as poetry. In each case, what has happened inwardly in a person is an event of sorts. Something has happened. The temptation is to call God the prime mover of that event rather than calling that event God. What stirs one is not a thing. It is a happening in real time. Putting it that way, it may be intellectually acceptable to speak of the stirring rather than the stirrer -- as did William Wordsworth in his poem best know as "Tintern Abbey": A motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought, / And rolls through all things. At the very least, it can be said that -- upon seeing in the night sky stars whose light left them thousands of year ago, or hearing Mozart's Jupiter Symphony or J.S. Bach's monumental Mass in B-Minor, or viewing Rembrandt's "Lucretia" or witnessing a baby say her first word -- one may reasonably conclude that something of great moment is and has been going on in the universe for a very, very long time. Beyond that, all the theologies that have piled up over time are largely beside the point.
| 
