Big Picture God
God Resigns as Micromanager
From Susie Q at Susie Q’s Place http://nanasrocker.blogspot.com/ - her comment to my “God Willing” post:
"I don't think God's will involves a detailed blueprint for our lives. Perhaps God is goal oriented in a very broad sense and leaves the action plans up to us as individuals.”
To me it seems that whether God is viewed as Other or as All, either way a “big picture” God, so to speak, looks more realistic than God as micromanager. Our world certainly doesn’t look like the enactment of a plan that was laid out in detail ahead of time. It has strong elements of spontaneity, adaptation, and chance.
I’m inclined to think that if people who view God as the micromanager of our lives were to examine their perspective on this closely, they might find more motivation than reason behind their point of view. If so, the motive could be worthwhile to consider. It’s a perspective that puts them at risk for terrible disappointment or outrage if they or a loved one should suffer the kind of terrible misfortune that can potentially happen to any of us as contingent beings.
God Gets Personal – Or Impersonal
I’d add that a Big Picture God is consistent with viewing God as a personal, caring Deity as well as with understanding God as All. Christianity’s traditional understanding of Jesus is an example. God the Father allows the person of Jesus to suffer and die precisely for the sake of the big picture. The fact that God lets this take place isn’t taken to indicate that the Father didn’t personally care for Jesus as a human being.
That said, it happens that citing this particular example for present purposes raises what might be taken as a paradox or problem concerning the manner in which the New Testament portrays the unfolding of the events involved with Jesus’ life and death.
From Susie Q at Susie Q’s Place http://nanasrocker.blogspot.com/ - her comment to my “God Willing” post:
"I don't think God's will involves a detailed blueprint for our lives. Perhaps God is goal oriented in a very broad sense and leaves the action plans up to us as individuals.”
To me it seems that whether God is viewed as Other or as All, either way a “big picture” God, so to speak, looks more realistic than God as micromanager. Our world certainly doesn’t look like the enactment of a plan that was laid out in detail ahead of time. It has strong elements of spontaneity, adaptation, and chance.
I’m inclined to think that if people who view God as the micromanager of our lives were to examine their perspective on this closely, they might find more motivation than reason behind their point of view. If so, the motive could be worthwhile to consider. It’s a perspective that puts them at risk for terrible disappointment or outrage if they or a loved one should suffer the kind of terrible misfortune that can potentially happen to any of us as contingent beings.
God Gets Personal – Or Impersonal
I’d add that a Big Picture God is consistent with viewing God as a personal, caring Deity as well as with understanding God as All. Christianity’s traditional understanding of Jesus is an example. God the Father allows the person of Jesus to suffer and die precisely for the sake of the big picture. The fact that God lets this take place isn’t taken to indicate that the Father didn’t personally care for Jesus as a human being.
That said, it happens that citing this particular example for present purposes raises what might be taken as a paradox or problem concerning the manner in which the New Testament portrays the unfolding of the events involved with Jesus’ life and death.
Posted by Paul at 9:59 PM Permalink
24 Comments:
That might explain why 10 Million Children under the age of 5, die each year due to poverty, hunger, easily preventable diseases, and illnesses.
I'm missing the picture.
Please don't toss the Free Will Frisbee at me.
I know the Satan is the ruler of this world and has blinded the minds of unbelievers answer.
Although the word God is powerful, it’s steeped in belief connotations. For example, Pauline, your comment shows your understandable assumption that it necessarily refers to an entity other and apart from reality or being itself – a Something or Someone with a higher intelligence that made the world.
Many if not most people would maintain that not only the connotations but the denotation of the word God necessarily involves belief. Yet all I discuss in OF is experience. Doesn’t matter if you’re an atheist or believe in a highly anthropomorphic concept of God. I define and develop an experience-based concept that's specific without carrying, however downplayed, belief-based connotations (the way, for example, that “higher power” does). The way that I develop the idea of God invites believers to retain their beliefs – as their own add-ons, so to speak, to how I use the word – and yet focus on their direct experiences. And it invites atheists to reject any or all religious beliefs that they find unbelievable while doing the same thing: directing their attention to experience itself.
When I was asked to be interviewed for that radio show, I was encouraged to learn that today’s interfaith movement strives to include and speak to atheists. I thought I was the only one out there wanting to do that! Very encouraging from the standpoint of someone not out to convert anybody to anything. What I hope to do is help give readers a sharper sense of certain things we have in common that could potentially count for a whole lot in terms of human motivation and action on this planet if more of us were to become more acutely aware of them.
I sincerely hope, by the end of the book, that believers will conclude that I’m a believer and atheists will be convinced that I’m an atheist. That means I will have done my job when it comes to directing people’s attention away from belief systems and toward lived experience where it comes to addressing the things that matter most to anyone who really cares about the larger world.
I agree with every point that each of you make. To me, they suggest that both of you have had experience of love, faith, God, and finding yourselves called toward fully owning up to lives that, like all our lives, finally don’t belong to us in a proprietary sense. There is a greater claim.
Some of those who use the word God most know least about its meaning. Some of those who use it least have begun to know what they’re talking about – which, I’d say, is the best that any of us can do.
My comment was/is that I agree with Pauline. Why posit attributes on a deity, or posit a deity at all?
But, then again, this likely just underlies a personal preference to embrace the mystery first hand as much as possible.
And you comments are spot on Paul. That to a large degree, it's just that the word "God" is steeped in an earlier tradition that I no longer apply. I've since traded it in for another, "Tao", with the simple understanding from the Tao Te Ching...
The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.
The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.
The converse is also true - those who believe God doesn't exist or make him so distant that he will have no real effect on their lives can be just as motivated in their beliefs - keeping disappoinment and outrage at bay.
In any relationship, the more engaged and intimate you are with the other, the greater the risk of being hurt. The people who make God distant or non-existent perhaps are afraid of being hurt ... just a thought. Having said that, I don't see God as a micro-manager.
My disbelief in a God (deity or first cause) comes from lack of both proof and direct experience. My belief in the fact that life exists is rooted in the fact I'm in the midst of it. I was raised a Catholic, had "God" (the deity) looking over my shoulder and writing things down until I was seven and decided that just couldn't be true because if God was, as claimed, all knowing and all powerful he wouldn't need to be writing stuff down.
I spent years researching and studying various religions and philosophies, tried many of them, and finally gave up on all of them. Ritual often bores me, repetitive prayers (asking, always asking) frustrate me, and believing in something I cannot find any evidence of stymies me. I have been loved and I have been hurt but I see no need to ascribe my coping with either to a deity.
There may be some force so majestic, so encompassing, so ever-changing that I will never know it with my human mind. I may never call that force by name, nor can I assign to one now any personal concern for my well-being. It is, I am, and that is enough for now.
I will have to read your book, Paul, and see where I am then.
Now an example a house burns down, mum, dad and big brother escape un harmed, baby sister is tragicaly burned to death. The community gathers round the family, rebuilds a home is completely generous, a horrible action leading to a positive actions... Here in lies the problem of the greater good god.
Allows an evil action not exactly a deed of an Onmi B being, not discussing problem of evil...
Next question, If God allows bad things to happen to get an over all good.. What happens when bad things stop happening? Would god be required to take part in burning down houses in order to boost public concern?
Would a remote, uncaring god be deserving of our worship or adoration. POssibly a sense of ego centricity and narcism involved in the opening paragraph? WHy would a God care for the life of one individual, but not annother?
Too many problems, all coming back to this you need to accept either god is limited, not Omni Benevolent, or Indifferent.
I like that quotation too. It has parallels in the Bible.
CRYSTAL: There are, for sure, motives behind all our thoughts, actions, and words. Motive for me divides essentially into fear, on the one hand, which, for the most part, is negative; and positive or love-based motivation on the other. When the motive is fear, it seems to me the results are less likely to be constructive or true.
If someone views their personal wealth, health, status, success or other good fortune as resulting from God’s special treatment or blessing of them, I strongly suspect a fear-based motive. A world view in which those who suffer are out of favor with God and those who materially prosper do so through God’s blessing is unrealistic.
As to disbelief/belief or the particular concept of God that a person may hold, it seems to me that the motives behind a person reaching any of these conclusions could be either positive or negative. I can imagine the path to unbelief that you suggest but feel certain that there are other paths as well.
Viewing God as not a person or even as particularly person-like I think would rarely mean perceiving God as distant/uninvolved from inside the perspective of someone with that outlook; however, I can see how it could look that way from the point of view of someone who sees God as person or person-like.
PAULIINE: Crystal might have in mind someone who’d actually like to turn to belief but never looks closely at this option from fear of being let down if they were to look at it and find it unfounded. So the person remains, say, noncommittal – an agnostic.
That will be great if you read the book – Homoescapeons too, hope he checks back to this thread. There will be further information about it on this site in the coming months and there’s already a brief contact form on my homepage for anyone who’d like to be notified when it becomes available.
While I think most believers will readily find things there that add to their appreciation and understanding of faith’s experiential dimension, in some ways I’m more interested in how atheists and agnostics will respond. But it’s going to be much harder for me to get the book into their hands just because of my subject matter!
AIDAN and RIMSHOT: Thanks for checking in, will catch up soon, probably tomorrow --
Avoid the mis-direction of your faith and "Choose ye this day whom you will serve. As for me and my house, we will serve The Lord Jesus Christ". I hope to see you in heaven. Receive Christ as your Lord and Savior, and put your trust in Him. Nothing else will do.
I am really sorry that some "religion" mis-guided your belief. God is not into religion, that stuff is man made. Chrch of God, Church of Christ, Babtist, Methodist, Catholic, etc... The real meat and potatoes comes from your heart and His Heart. Jesus Christ was a real man like us, and He felt pain, loneliness, frustration, and eventually an agonizing death. History has proven Jesus is real, and His disciples were so in love with him that they all died horrible deaths for standing for what He came to teach us. He does love us all, but this world is full of people who make choices that reap the wrong harvest. We do live in a messed up world, no question about it, but Jesus told this was all going to happen long before it did so we would know His words were true.
I will not try to convince you or anyone else who does not want to believe, but at some point, everyone has to decide in their own heart if they are willing to take the chance of going into eternity not knowing for sure if they were right or not. Why take the chance? All Jesus wants is for you to accept His death as your payment for sin. Not a bunch of legalistic regulations and cerimonies to go through. Like I said, the world has made religion, Jesus is the freedom we all need from religion.
There is nothing eiasier than accepting Jesus, and then you can be sure you are going to heaven. The other way could be wrong, and then you can't change your mind after you die. Jesus is a sure salvation, not a religion.
O yeah... and He isn't writing down anything but your name in the Lamb's book of life. He loves you enough that He died for you.
AIDAN: If I’ve got you on this, sounds like you don’t see God as micromanager; and you also don’t see God as providing a more general direction to life either.
On general direction, one thing that occurs to me is that our perception of whether there’s a general direction might depend partly on how far we step back. Who knows what’s going on inside the entire universe – or, according to many cosmologists, perhaps universes?
Your example of good coming out of evil is a great one – a consideration that’s likely to cross anyone’s mind who thinks about these things for long. It points in many possible directions and sets up a number of difficulties of the kind you cite where God is conceived as micromanaging events. And it’s a bridge I needed to cross in writing Original Faith…
I think this is the best I can do in the space of a comments thread! It would make for an interesting topic for a blog post, or a few of them.
The choices you outline for God as limited, not benevolent, or indifferent when one looks at events in the world strike me as on target, especially when God is viewed as radically Other – an Entity existing apart from creation. Note, however, that God as limited doesn’t require the view that God’s a failure, so to speak. That is, perhaps God is limited in the sense that God can’t – sort of like a magician pulling stuff out of a hat – do anything God wants at any time. You could say that God may have to go through a process to realize the will of God. (“Process theology” addresses this.)
RIMSHOT: Does any particular thing stand out as especially confusing? People are tossing out a lot of possibilities here!
BRETT: Thanks for your summary of your interpretation of Christianity. As for this blog, I deliberately conduct it in an even handed manner so that people with different points of view, including yours, can discuss these matters in a mutually respectful atmosphere with people who don’t necessarily share their viewpoint.
I think this is a good thing in an era where people tend to talk only to the like minded and often misunderstand or even demonize others.
As to my views, they’re in my book and stated both clearly and emphatically.
JF McGRATH: That’s very well put. Thanks and hope others will take a look at your comment.
I guess i am looking at life as an absolutist, i can work the maths of the universe i just need to know the why. God to me is just part of the universe just a functional aspect, (assuming existence).
My ideas of limitation come down to Judaeo Christain ideas of god, all powerful, all knowing etc... And limited in terms of "sterotypical" God.
With theology i tend to get off topic easily, there are so many tangents from the simple idea of a big picture god.
RIMSHOT: Gotcha, and thanks for taking the time to look. One thing that may not be so common here is the diversity of commentators, which I try to get on purpose instead of all people who think the same way.
If you click on other parts of the site besides the blog, like the bio, it might help give a better idea of where I'm coming from.
For myself, I tend to think there’s a degree of choice in our lives too even though I know of no way to prove this one way or the other. It just “feels” that way, which I realize is no proof. Also, it’s clear that some people, due to circumstance, have a narrower range of options than others.
I’d add that I see randomness or chance as another factor that creates indeterminacy in the details.
I also like what you said about speaking to atheists and agnostics. I think about this a lot myself because I read a lot of stuff written by scientists who "diss" those who believe in God. Yet they talk about their experiences of awe and wonder. I want to cry out--"Has it occurred to you that that might BE God!!"
Last thing--an interesting bit of trivia. My Whitehead professor told me that Whitehead referred to his philosophy as a cosmology and not a metaphysics because, he said that, if there are multiple universes, a metaphysics would apply to all of them. A cosmology applies only to one.
All the best,
Karin
p.s. Having trouble with the comment feature. Sorry if you get multiple copies!
KARIN: While there are some scientists who are scornful of religion, my sense of it is that what I'd call scientism is more prevalent among science buffs than scientists. Many scientists fortunately seem to have a good sense of what their field of study does and doesn't address.
"…Whitehead referred to his philosophy as a cosmology and not a metaphysics because, he said that, if there are multiple universes, a metaphysics would apply to all of them. A cosmology applies only to one."
Well then, he's more humble than I thought. Seems he was present only at the foundation of THIS world, lol...
I can see it might be fun to argue with you about the merits of Whitehead if I hadn't read him like 25 years ago! The only thing I specifically remember is everything “prehends” everything else…
Re: scientists, don't get me wrong. I think there are lots of level-headed scientists out there. But I think that in scientific circles, there's a general sense that what is "real" is only the empirical. I think experiences of the divine/mystical/sacred/God are a very important dimension of reality that inform the way we see the world, including a lot of scientists. Yet a lot of people look first or only to science for guidance on ethical or moral matters. Those answers aren't implied in science. Religion and ethics are two areas of "genius" (Holmes Rolston's word) that help us think about what it means to lead quality lives.
I was thinking more about very naive scientistic views like reductionism or, like you mention, looking to science for moral guidance and, say, turning Darwinism into "social Darwinism." My impression - I guess mainly, as I think of it, from blogs - is that there are more science buffs than scientists who take such notions seriously.
Empiricism as a world view strikes me as at least more coherent - less distorted - although I think it's naive too in the sense, like you say, of pronouncing "unreal" anything science doesn't happen to be able to address. So it's a clearer-eyed view than what I'd call scientism, but it's only looking in the direction it wants to!
Post a Comment