Understanding God

The most complicated concept requires the most complicated analogy

St. Augustine of Hippo said that “If you understand God, it’s not God you understand.” What he meant is that the nature of what is described as God in the Christian Bible is beyond human comprehension. And that is also why we understand God, as much as we are able to, as a personality.

Relationships

I think of Neil deGrasse Tyson or Carl Sagan in awe of some celestial structure remarking at the inspiring and complicated nature of it. Pointing to it as that which we should be in awe of as opposed to some book and old rituals and myths. And that is a powerful argument. There are a lot of things we know about the universe and can see that should inspire awe. We should continue to reach for them.

But it’s also important to understand this:

The thing we are using to see and comprehend that awe inspiring universe is more complicated than that we are in awe of.

We create a sense of awe by observing that thing and creating a relationship with it. It projects its nature towards us and we recognize the beauty of it and express that recognition by describing it as beautiful.

“This world is empty to him alone who does not understand how to direct his libido towards objects, and to render them alive and beautiful for himself, for Beauty does not indeed lie in things, but in the feeling that we give to them. That which compels us to create a substitute for ourselves is not the external lack of objects, but our incapacity to lovingly include a thing outside of ourselves.” — Carl Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious, pg. 193

Coming across this line I started to put together a way to see why God has to be, for us, a personality.

When we see that beautiful object, it becomes beautiful because it is a feeling we “give to them.” It is not beautiful on its own. Nothing is. Beauty is something we recognize and there is no beauty without an observer. The object still exists, but there is nothing with which to create a relationship that includes the recognition of its nature outside of humanity.

Human beings do that with everything. We create relationships with everything and everyone. Even in passing, we relate to someone on the street when recognizing their existence and accommodating our manners. A relationship does not have to be something deep and unending, it can be fleeting and shallow. But it is always there in everything we recognize.

Non human objects still have relationships with each other, but it is not a conscious recognition of each other. Material objects interact with each other through their natures. Rocks collide, planets do too. Planets also create gravity fields that affect each other and so do stars. Stars create solar systems and interact with the planets and anything in their gravitational pull, and so on for all objects in existence.

All of those interactions are how the nature of those objects relate to each other. They are all relationships.

So to understand the nature of the cosmos, what it is, was and will be, we have to understand all of the relationships between all of what it contains. Every single object.

But how on earth can we even attempt to understand not only the objects, but their relationships to each other, when we cannot even fathom the number of objects much less the number and type of interactions they have, and will be having?

The Most Complicated Analogy

Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku has remarked that the human brain is the most complicated object in the known universe. It contains about one hundred billion neurons, each having thousands of connections. Nothing has as many connections and overlapping interactions as our brains. And what does the most complicated thing in the universe produce? Personality.

If personality is the most complicated product in the universe, then using it to describe the nature of the cosmos is the best and most accurate analogy we have.

Now I do not for one second think that ancient people who wrote of gods or wrote of God thought it through like this. They likely just did what made sense to them and did not think they had to explain it.

It’s important not to project our ideas of how things should work back in time to people who thought incredibly differently. We have to get inside their heads and allow them some space to be who they were. And that is something I think — ironically from people who love to talk about empathy — almost nobody does.

Coming up With Reasons

In a Western world hell bent on reason, we use reason to understand concepts that arose in ways we do not understand. But it is not necessary for a good process to arise from reason, as long as we can look back at it and see that it’s reasonable. We used to call that common sense.

People like to think they are reasonable and that everything they do arises from reason, but the reality is that we use reason as a way to look back and rationalize our actions. And I find the idea that we use the most complicated product in our universe as an analogy for that which is so complicated to be beyond our comprehension, quite reasonable.

That entire amalgam of relationships is incredibly complicated. To understand it as best we can, we use an analogy between the most complicated thing we have to the most complicated concept we have and call that God.

I Am What I Am

God said to Moses, “I am who I am.This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you.’” — Exodus 3:14

This phrase has a discussion around it that has lasted several millennia. The original Hebrew phrase has no tense, so it can and might mean I am who I am, I was who I was, and I will be who I will be. This opens up an understanding of what God calls Himself to be the nature of being and becoming. Or, everything that is, was, and will be, to include the relationships between all of those things, including us.

Understanding the Biblical God in this way has been incredibly helpful for me. Reading the stories directly through the Bible or during Jordan Peterson’s books and seminars and understanding that God is the relationships created between all things makes a lot more sense than the limited concept of being a person. Or like lazy atheists like to say, a “sky daddy.”

But in order to understand, you have to want to understand.

In all fairness, literalists or “fundamentalists” have given them plenty of ammunition. Maybe it’s time to step away from such facile descriptions of what is sacred and give ourselves the respect we deserve.

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” — Paul, 1 Corinthians 13:11 [italics mine]