Universal God

What do you picture when you hear the word 'God'? I'm not talking about any one particular faith or religious following. I mean the abstract notion of God. What is the nature of this grand supernatural being that goes by many names and ostensibly created the universe when he had nothing else to do? How does he work? The popularly accepted idea is exactly that: a great bearded man in the sky who created the universe on a whim. However, there is another metaphysical vision of 'God' that bears consideration.

In order to curb any confusion, I will be using the philosophic concept of ‘God’ to refer to our conventional understanding of him. In this case, he is omnipotent. That is; he is an all knowing, all powerful, all good entity. Now, those are some relatively broad terms. So, let's narrow them down.

First, let's look at the term "all good". It's held both theologically and philosophically that God is good, in that, he is opposed to evil. This idea features significantly in Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy. In his work, Descartes argued that God doesn't necessarily exist by virtue of himself. It is possible that instead of God existing, we are being misled into believing that the world exists. We are being fooled by an all-malevolent demon. Think of the exact opposite of an all good God. This "Cartesian Demon" is always deceiving us all of the time. However, Descartes used this idea as a springboard for his biggest revelation. He reasoned that that there was one thing the deceiver was not able to make us doubt and that is our ability to doubt our own existence. This reasonably leads us to believe in our own existence because, if we have doubt, then we are thinking. If we are thinking, then we exist. The demon, being absolutely malevolent, could not allow such a situation to occur. Therefore a good God exists. Now, this is an abridged version of Descartes' theories, but it's an excellent example of what philosophers mean by "all good" in reference to the technical term 'God'.

"All knowing" is exactly what it sounds like. God by its own nature has knowledge of everything that exists in all times and places. Think of the entirety of God's knowledge as contained in an infinite encyclopedia. In this case, God has all knowledge of the universe, including all that of himself. A counter-argument is often brought up here pointing to the idea of free will. The concept of God doesn’t exclude the concept of free will. There are systems in the universe that limit our abilities every day (physics, logic, etc.). We make our free decisions based within these structures. I cannot choose to suddenly be omnipotent by virtue of free will because that is not contained within my nature as a human being. In this way, God simply has full knowledge of all possible outcomes in all possible scenarios and makes judgments based on this knowledge. In this way, God is all knowing.

"All powerful" is much easier to explain. If God were all powerful, then there is simply nothing he could not do, should he choose to. The will of God triumphs over all. There is a school of thought that says there exists two kinds of being: "necessary" and "contingent". Contingent beings exist by virtue of something else. A daughter exists by virtue of her parents, etc. This easily leads to an infinite regress of existence between parents and children. Think of the old cliché of the chicken and the egg. Theology solves this ancestral regress with the foundational approach of creationism. There exists a point where beings stop being contingent on one another and become contingent on the supernatural creative hand of God. Adam and Eve were contingent on God’s creation. So, what is God contingent on? Many would say that God is not contingent on anything else. He exists by virtue of his own will. This is what we would call a “necessary” being. This is the essence of the proposal that God is all powerful.

Now we have a strong concept of what makes up the idea of God. However, something is still missing. There's an inference behind the whole of our notion of God that has cornered us into a specific image of him and his nature. This is the idea that he is a ‘he’, that he has a personality. We've been trained through formal theology to picture God as a single omnipotent entity, a great bearded man in the sky lording over all things great and small. We are limited in our understanding as humans. So, we equate this infinite being with ourselves because, we are the only comparison available to make. Unfortunately, this idea brings with it all manner of personifications. Consider the classic atheistic argument:

1. If God were all knowing, all powerful, and all good he would not allow evil to exist.
2. Evil exists.
3. Therefore, God does not exist.

One response to this is to point to the balance of good and evil. Without evil, there can be no good or appreciation of good. Both this argument and its response imply a personification onto the idea of God that I think shouldn't belong.

Both the atheistic argument and the theological response above infer that God is a single entity with a rational mind. Thinking about him in that way provides too much breeding ground for concepts of fallibility and infallibility, divine choice, and interpretations of his will. Let’s set aside all notions of God having a personality for a moment. This allows us to look at the notion of 'God' without losing the previously decided basics of its nature. We can keep the omnipotent character of ‘God’ and all that entails. Losing the single personality also allows us to drop the image of God as a particular being.

Here’s where I might lose some of you, but please stick with me. What if God were more than one thing? What if ‘God’ were all things? This is not to mean the classic Sunday school “God is all around us” suggestion, but rather the idea that God IS everything around us. Baruch Spinoza was one philosopher who offered such an abstract concept of God. He saw ‘God’ as a sort of natural system governing the universe. God in this sense is not just the rocks and the trees, but the guiding force behind everything. God is the nature of the choice between right and wrong. God is the coalition of natural forces that forms hurricanes. God is the chaos and order in the universe both external and internal to the human being. We created ‘God’ as much as it exists external to us. God is the Universe and everything in it. That’s not to say that the two concepts (God and the universe) share the exact same qualities. They are the same thing. In this way, the universe is all knowing because everything that exists, exists within it. By the same token, the universe is all powerful. The only notion we may have to give up is the idea of it being all good. However, if we look back to Descartes, God was good because it created rather than deceived and destroyed. The same holds up here.

As a special request to some of you who read this, I don’t wish for you to dismiss this idea as some appeal to the previously established Paganism or Wicca or anything along those lines. Those ideas still worship some form of external supernatural being(s) that run the universe. The metaphysical exercise I’m presenting here is a systematic approach to the universe. As such, there are no beings to worship, no systems to obey. ‘God’ is the universe around us, the beings within it, the systems ruling it and the changes we make to it. When we remove the notion of God’s personality, we take away the apparent virtues of love and understanding that so many have latched on to in the traditional mono- and poly-theistic religions. However, if one looks back to the universe’s capacity for goodness, they will see that the mere fact of their existence infers a great, if not the greatest, gift having already been given.