Skip to main content

Gods

Submitted by Ken Watts on Wed, 10/07/2009 - 17:53

I FOUND MYSELF THINKING ABOUT GOD this morning.

Not, as you might expect from an atheist, about the non-existence of God, or about how stupid people who believe in God are, or about how much trouble the idea of God causes.

Quite the contrary, in fact. I was thinking that there are many ways in which God actually exists.

Or, to put it another way, I was thinking that the whole, woolly, modern idea of God is really a kind of conflation, combining different things—each of which is very real—under a single name.

Or, to put it yet a third way, I was thinking that there is actually more than one God, and that our problem is not so much theism as monotheism.

Let me explain.

I'll start with a personal anecdote.

When I was still very much a believer, struggling every day to live out the theology which I had been taught, I used to go for a walk each morning.

One of these mornings, before I left the house, I had a conversation with one of my children which left me with the vague feeling that they might be upset about something.

I went on my walk, and about three blocks away I came to an intersection with a stop light.

Halfway across the street, I was suddenly aware of what I would have called at the time a "leading" or "conviction" that God wanted me to return to the house and deal with my child's upset.

This conviction was very strong, and I had the distinct impression that it was a direct order from God, that it was coming from "outside" of me. My religious self felt a responsibility to obey this impulse, and that, if I didn't, something awful would happen.

But there was another part of me which questioned the whole experience. I knew, perfectly well, that the conversation I had had did not indicate anything serious, and I more than half suspected that this "conviction" was merely a slightly compulsive reaction to a normal parental worry.

In the end I finished my walk. When I returned home I talked to my child again about our earlier conversation, discovered that I had misunderstood part of it, and that there never had been any problem at all.

My spiritual counselor at the time, a Benedictine Monk, saw this episode as a spiritual triumph on my part, and told me I had "killed the Buddha". I think he was very wise.

Later, but before I left religion for good, I looked back on this incident as a moment when I learned to discern the difference between a false god, built out of my own worries and compulsions, and the deeper, inner voice of the true god, who spoke to me through my own reality contact and common sense.

Of course after I left religion I ceased to think of either as a god at all.

I bring up this story in order to suggest that both of those "gods" were real, in some way.

That is, the experience of that compulsion, of that inner conviction, was a real experience.

My worldview, my religious training, caused me not only to classify it as the voice of a god, but as the voice of the same god I was learning about in seminary.

I actually had no reason to interpret that experience as the intervention of a supernatural being in my life, and, in fact, there turned out to be very good reason to doubt that explanation.

But that doesn't mean that the experience, the thing itself, wasn't real.

Next time, what this experience has
to do with some classic arguments
for the existence of God.