God Willing. . .
Is everything that happens the will of God? If so, how can we tell it’s that and not just “stuff happening,” since much of what happens in life appears to be random and accidental?
If everything that happens is not God’s will, then how does anyone or anything ever manage to get around the power of the will of God?
And on what scale does God’s will operate? In the Bible, it’s at the level of history – the movements of armies and peoples, divine interventions coming along at critical moments…
God of History. . . And God of Grocery Shopping?
Today, to gauge by how people talk, it seems to operate on a much more personal level. I don’t hear many people claim that George Bush’s “preemptive war” on Iraq was God’s will; that God was present in a special way at the Bay of Pigs or Watergate; or that God had anything in particular to do with Monica Lewinski’s internship and its repercussions for the Clinton presidency. Yet survivors of car accidents and plane crashes often claim that their personal survival was God’s will. If a loved one recovers or fails to recover from alcoholism or drug addiction, that’s God’s will. Will an upcoming surgery go well? Will I get that job I just interviewed for? God willing…
I don’t know how far this can be taken. Recently someone picked up some milk for me that was spoiled even though it wasn’t past the expiration date yet…
I’d sure like to think that God has better things to do than pick who’s going to get the curdled half gallon at Acme Thursday morning.
To me, God’s will is a meaningful idea that gets at something real; conundrums arise from perspectives on this idea that are unrealistic in some respects.
If everything that happens is not God’s will, then how does anyone or anything ever manage to get around the power of the will of God?
And on what scale does God’s will operate? In the Bible, it’s at the level of history – the movements of armies and peoples, divine interventions coming along at critical moments…
God of History. . . And God of Grocery Shopping?
Today, to gauge by how people talk, it seems to operate on a much more personal level. I don’t hear many people claim that George Bush’s “preemptive war” on Iraq was God’s will; that God was present in a special way at the Bay of Pigs or Watergate; or that God had anything in particular to do with Monica Lewinski’s internship and its repercussions for the Clinton presidency. Yet survivors of car accidents and plane crashes often claim that their personal survival was God’s will. If a loved one recovers or fails to recover from alcoholism or drug addiction, that’s God’s will. Will an upcoming surgery go well? Will I get that job I just interviewed for? God willing…
I don’t know how far this can be taken. Recently someone picked up some milk for me that was spoiled even though it wasn’t past the expiration date yet…
I’d sure like to think that God has better things to do than pick who’s going to get the curdled half gallon at Acme Thursday morning.
To me, God’s will is a meaningful idea that gets at something real; conundrums arise from perspectives on this idea that are unrealistic in some respects.
Posted by Paul at 10:41 PM Permalink
25 Comments:
I have a sense that we perceive the idea of God's "will" as problematic because it seem that we have this irresistible necessity to posit our personal human point of view at the center of things.
If you should watch a painter or artist in the process of creation, his actions to a child for instance could seem to be without purpose: slapping blobs of blue over the canvas in a slap dash manner, rubbing, scrapping, and washing, - how are these movements related to a landscape scene? How do blobs of blue paint become sky?
nice to see you're still challenging the blog world...
love, peace & all that...
aren't we all god and what we want deep inside is what happening...everything is an illusion ...
yet we suffer.....its not will of god..its rather you know from your sufferings you will arise as a new person..
This poses an immediate issue on christain morality and eternal punishment in hell...
I think God is a little more intangiable than a personal being that takes an interest in the grass growing and the daily affairs of man. I also believe that the will of god has no direct bearing on our lives, more like the greek gods of old more a representation of something.
The God myth is meaningful only in a context of time, place and group or individual. My belief in angels (who may intervene on someone's behalf in some way) is also a myth but one that makes sense on a local level.
I give credence to angel-myth and not God-myth because I see interventionist power as distributed and not centralised. There are localised pockets of order in a world of chaos.
And yet, on the global level, there is the Gaia hypothesis: that Mother Earth is resilient and we have not yet poisoned the air or ocean completely. Yes, I believe in the Gaia myth. Will she eliminate man and restore equilibrium that way, with the rest of creation? Or will she eliminate civilisation's ugliness, so that we shall live on a human scale, eating our local fruit, keeping our soil pure, valuing our neighbours, telling one another tales in the evenings, without the dumb obedience to mass manipulation?
We might like to say it is all up to man. But our responsibility is limited. We are not gods, just blundering animals who have learned more power than we know how to use. We will always need to pray and be helped by some intangible protector.
It seems to me that an objectified understanding of what God is may account not only for many problems with logic, but also could be behind religion in its fanatical and utterly irreligious aspects. Not that an externalized view of God must or usually leads to religious extremism - but for those so predisposed for psychological reasons, I think it does.
God, in my view, is best conceptualized - and, more importantly, experienced - as compassing our understanding of God rather than the other way around.
Your question is "easy", but for easy question it is very difficult to answer or there is no answer. Sometimes our heart says one thing and our mind different? Who is right?
Maybe reincarnation is worth to study. I don't know.
I noticed that I often say - I don't know. I thought that - older -smarder, but rather not.
Each day I ask God to make my day perfect and I say- but not my will will be, yet Your Wolition let will be.
Thanks for this post, for opportunity to think more perspective.
God is flexible and creative in his dealings with us. His plan is not a detailed blueprint, but rather a broad intention. In one place Sanders compares God’s work to jazz: it is like “a melody with a good deal of improvisation.” ..... [God] has chosen to create creatures whose decisions are unpredictable—creatures with “libertarian freedom” .... God values not freedom for its own sake, but freedom for the sake of relationship. The implications of all this are surprising. First, it means that God takes risks ...
KRYSTYNA: “Thy will be done…” The Lord’s Prayer is my favorite spoken prayer. So simple but such resonance.
I hadn’t thought of it like that before. You could say that the book I wrote is what happened as my heart and mind became reconciled. Thanks – I like that way of looking at it.
CRYSTAL: I think he’s going in the right direction – but I resent that jazz analogy! Thought that was my idea! Wait, I forget… that may have ended up getting edited out of OF, so maybe it’s OK, lol…
When one has complete faith in the Almighty..then there are no ifs and buts.
A good post.
God bless.
What's right for each of us? A question that pokes at us all the time. We make choices all the time. If we see ourselves as separate from God, then we face the alignment problem; is our choice consistent with the will of God? If we see ourselves one with God, the alignment problem disappears. So, are we separate or one with the divine in whatever way we see the divine or holy?
Thought-provoking, Paul. Thank you.
SUSIEQ: I’ll base my post after that on yours… You guys…
SURJIT: Thanks for stopping by. Sounds like you’re referring to acceptance of God’s will? I agree – there’s nothing else to be done. I’d add that this acceptance includes acceptance of being called to do our level best. It’s acceptance of our work, our “yoke,” our “burden made light even when heavy” to elaborate a bit on scripture – as well as acceptance that we have limited control over the outcome of our efforts.
I don't see "God" as an interventionist up there somewhere over the rainbow orchestrating every nuance, act, deed, situation and circumstance in everyone's life all over the world.
I've seen where the answer, "it's God's will" has been deeply hurtful and discompassionate towards people undergoing grief and tragedy.
Yet, to many it's incredibly comforting and I can understand that too. I see the draw. The pull. To believe that stuff just happens, to believe in randomness is a very scary thing.
"It was written" muttered the tribesman.
As seen on the TV commercials for Staples, God is our 'easy button'.
When we have no idea why something BAD happened, we humans can press the easy button and chalk it up to the capricious nature of God (West) or the equally unpredictable self regulating Karmic System (East).
The beauty of the whole scheme is that it is impossible to disprove because it isn't based on anything other than ideas. What lawyers term as judgement free.
Humans need to explain tragic events because our brains cannot function in a vacuum...which by the way Nature seems to adore not abhor.
All three of the monotheistic masters of the universe that evolved out of the minds of the war mongering, macho-misogynistic, tribes of the harsh, Middle Eastern, desert...(gasp)...
are oddly enough, like their creators:
jealous and veangeful fellows who do not hesitate to exact their pound of flesh for those who trespass against him/them.
The purveyors of Biblical Theological Institutions might just as well remove the Ecclesiastes 9:11 passage about Time and Chance hapeneth to them all...if that was true then the rest of the Book isn't? Right?
That's too simple isn't it? I shouldn't be so 'Occam'mistic.
"Randomness is a scary thing" - that sounds right to me. A powerful motive...
GOATMAN: Sounds like it even "made sense" to the guy getting shot then...?
HOMOESCAPEONS, good to see you. On Ecclesiastes and the Bible's "wisdom literature" generally - I've had that reaction too... who let that stuff in there, anyway? It's different. I'm glad they did, a lot of good stuff there.
I see the dark side of religion too. Do you see any positive aspects? Or to put it another way: if you took out all the unworthy motives and acts that have been involved in religion (I'd add that religion isn't the only field that's had some bad outcomes and bad actors...), do you see anything left?
Maybe a parallel: I wouldn't want to identify science and technology exclusively with Hitler and company's experiments in concentration camps, the dropping of the atom bomb, or falsified research findings.
That being said I believe that there are both charming (good) and tedious (Bad) people here on earth. Some can regulate their behavior and some cannot.
Being agnostic has it's problems because the 3 pounds of grey matter holding my ears apart demands some sort of explanation as to HOW it all started. On the other hand it also allows me the luxury of understanding that from all of the evidence that we have managed to collect to date, we understand the mechanics but the Mechanic is either out to lunch, quit, or on vacation. In any case our vehicle is in desperate need of servicing!
As Flanders would say,
"It's a dilly of a Pickle!"
That sure is a good question: How did it all start? Or, pretty much a variant of same: What's it all doing here?
I don't honestly see how "God did it" can be a satisfactory answer. It just throws the question back a step: OK... then what's God doing here?
To say "God always existed" - well, you could as logically assert that "being always existed."
"Always" is itself a time-bound construct. If there's anything to string theory, it's just one dimension that this universe happens to express. And there may be multiple universes and other dimensions in addition to the three of space and one of time that we know about...
So frankly I'm not hearing a compelling answer to the question you raise from any quarter, and would chalk up religious "answers" in the column in which religion can do a disservice. I suppose it's a service to someone who wants a definite answer?
But I don't know... Religion often talks about mysteries like the virgin birth, three persons in one... What would be so objectionable about honestly admitting that precisely what we're doing here remains a mystery?
Rhetorical question, I don't believe you'd find it objectionable -
This is a very interesting observation. I like how you framed this up. If we are to believe in free will, then, our free will, choices we make create the reality that we experience. I have a difficult time thinking that a God is watching over every aspect of everyones life.
We are connected to a source and that source is there for us, however does not dictate that we should live or die, be healthy or sick, etc.
Do you see this as including "dictating that we should live or die, be healthy or sick, etc." Probably not. If so, it would strike me as a great overstatement. While our decisions partly create the reality we experience, the decisions of others as well as random/unforeseen events do too - consider, as one of an almost infinite number of examples, the citizens of Iraq today or the fact that George Bush became president.
The former didn't choose for us to invade their country with inadequate preparation and plunge it into chaos. The latter sure didn't pull himself up by the bootstraps...
There are a gajillion personal rather than political examples. Children with leukemia, for example, don't choose to create an experience of leukemia. Someone killed by a drunk driver... etc. etc.
It would be great if bad things happened only to people who make unfortunate choices - comforting to think that, as long as we keep making wise choices, nothing unfortunate can happen to us.
You may not have meant that at all, but it could be taken as a perspective possibly implied in your comment. And I certainly have run into people who take this view - and I notice they never seem to be quadraplegics, or brain injured people, or dying, or recovering from rape. So I think it's a view of the world that only works as long as nothing really unfortunate happens to have happened to a person. It gives a feeling of safety or even invulnerability.
If something bad does happen, few people are willing to blame themselves for being raped, coming down with a disease, etc.
The fundamental problem with this view of how the world operates, imo, is that it's unrealistic.
I am myself confused on the topic..butthe discussion here seems very interersting.Well my take on the topic is ambivert...some time I feel..God is definatly there...the mastermind behind all this ...but he is so intelligent that he had made the system such that..he need not intervevene always...he has made a superb machine where each action is detremind within the system itself and not energiesed by any external input....I mean the "law of karma"...you get what you do....but at the same time, inumerable times when I myself feel that basic tenet failing in my own eyes.....and its at those moment that I too start asking where is God?
But maybe God is not all powerful in a manner that's analagous to a magician who seems to be able to pull anything whatsoever at will from out of his hat...
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