Is God a ‘person’?
Today’s Post
Last week we saw how an outline of the nature of the fundamental principle of existence could be derived from the writings of Richard Dawkins, well-known atheist. In keeping with Dawkins’ secular worldview, we saw how this outline offered an excellent start to addressing God through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’. Based on this brief outline, a working definition of God emerged:
“God is the sum total of all the forces by which the universe unfolds in such a way that all the entities that emerge in its evolution (from quarks to the human person) each have the potential to become more complex when unified with other entities.”
With Dawkins’ outline of the fundamental aspects of God, this working definition, and the principles of reinterpretation that we have developed, this week we will address reinterpretation of the traditional Christian concept of God as ‘person’.
‘Person-ness”
The concept of the ‘person’ is somewhat unique to the West. It is related to the fundamental Jewish concept of time as seen as flowing from a beginning to an end, unlike the cyclical and recursive concept of time as found in the East. It also sees personal growth as the process of becoming not only ‘whole’, but distinctively so, as opposed to the Eastern concept of human destiny fulfilled in the loss of identity as merged into the ‘cosmic all’. This Western concept of ‘person-ness’ is one into which the idea of evolution fits readily, which leads to the religion-friendly idea of emergent complexity.
The idea of the human person emerging from the evolutionary phenomenon of neurological development is also unique to the West. While there is still much disagreement on how (or even whether) the person, with his unique mind, is separate from random neurological firings in the brain, the idea of the ‘person’ is well accepted. At the level of empirical biology, however, the distinction is difficult to quantify.
Nonetheless, Western society has proceeded along the path that however the neurons work, the effect is still a ‘person’, and recognized as such in the laws which govern the societies which have emerged in the West. While materialists can still claim that consciousness results from random neurological activity and that the basis for our consciousness is ‘just molecular interactions’, very few Westerners doubt the uniqueness of each human person.
Further, this concept of the person as unique provides a strong benefit to Western civilization. While perhaps rooted in the Jewish beliefs which underpin those of Christianity, the Western concept of ‘the person’ nonetheless underpins the other unique Western development: that of science. The evolution of language and use of both brain hemispheres led to the Greek rise of ‘left brain’ thinking (empirical, analytical) from the legacy modes of the ‘right brain’ (instinct and intuition), thus laying the groundwork for science.
As Jonathan Sacks sees it, when the two great threads of Greece and Jerusalem came together in Christianity, this framework evolved from a way of thinking to a disciplined facet of human endeavor. As many contemporary thinkers have observed, it is this connection between the uniqueness of the person (and the associated concepts of freedom) and the power of empirical thinking that account for the unique successes of the West. As Teilhard asserts, (and Johan Norberg thoroughly documents in his book, “Progress”):
“…from one end of the world to the other, all the peoples, to remain human or to become more so, are inexorably led to formulate the hopes and problems of the modern earth in the very same terms in which the West has formulated them.”
Not surprisingly, the uniqueness of the person is reflected in Western religion. Further, while the many different expressions of the three major monotheistic religions might disagree on the specifics, they all agree that persons are somehow uniquely connected to God, and that therefore God is in some way a ‘person’ who saves and damns, rewards and punishes, and provides guidance for life.
Our working definition (above) and our outline of the attributes of God from the last post, however, do not explicitly reflect such an aspect of the Ground of Being.
Does this mean that from our point of view God is not a person?
‘Person-ness’ and God
The earliest human societies were all painfully aware of the forces in their environment which they could neither explain or control, such as weather, earthquakes, predators and sickness. They commonly attributed these forces to the work of intelligent beings, gods, as being in control of all these mysterious phenomena. Most of them imagined these gods as being human-like, but with much greater power. In the earliest societies, the many aspects of their mysterious environment were personified, even given names.
As society evolved, and humans grouped themselves into increasingly larger units, from families, to clans, to cities, to states, their emerging ruling hierarchies resulted in kings, sultans and other ‘heads of state’. Many societies evolved their understanding of the gods in similar ways, resulting in an ‘anthropomorphism’ of the gods: “like us but more powerful”.
When Jewish belief moved from a pantheistic understanding of ‘the gods’ to belief in a single god, the person-like aspect of this god was preserved. As Christianity began to emerge, it took with it the concept of God as ‘a person’. The writings of thinkers from Irenaeus through Augustine to Aquinas identify the attributes (as well as the gender) of God as personal. ‘He’ is omniscient (knows everything), omnipotent (all powerful) but still judgmental, and capable of jealousy and anger.
Such characteristics invite contradictory interpretations. If God gets angry or jealous, generally considered negative human behaviors, how can ‘he’ be said to be ‘good’? If he is all powerful, how can he permit evil? If he knows everything in advance, then the future is predetermined and how can human freedom be possible?
On the other hand, if God is not a person, in what way can humans be considered as ‘made in his image’? How is it possible to have a relationship with ‘him’ if ‘he himself’ is not a person?
So, with all that, Richard Dawkins’ question remains unanswered.
The Next Post
Next week we will begin to address these questions. Are our starting definition and list of attributes for the Ground of Being antithetical to the time-honored Western concept of God as ‘person’, or can the long development of the unfolding cosmos somehow be understood as compatible with our human personness?