The God Paradox – Thinking beyond contradictions

The earliest thinkers of this world were overwhelmed by the Universe. In the absence of theories that explained the workings of the cosmos, they had to resort to concocting Divine beings with sweeping powers. Most of the happenings of the Universe were attributed to supernatural beings and phenomena. These beings were conceived to have mighty powers. Some thinkers felt that these beings to be constantly appeased lest they perpetrate all kinds of untold horrors on lesser mortals like ourselves. So the earliest thinkers conceived religions with mighty Gods and demons. But they also realized that there is a compassionate side to the Universe. We do face adversity but we do have things that easen our hardship. These “benovolent” things were also Gods. Hence Gods in short had two facets – the benovolent side and the malevolent side. Be that as it may, duality was always ingrained in most of these beliefs. There is God and there is the rest of us.

The God necessity

God served a few purposes:

• The logical thirst for knowing who created this world with all its complexity is now quenched.
• God is required to explain morality. Morality is simply a set of actions/beliefs that please God and immorality is just the opposite. This made it easier to come up with cannons of human conduct.
• The notion of God also gave human beings to define a notion of idealism. For many people, God is equated to an ideal, infallible being. By believing in God, we believe that we can approach this ideal. On the material side, this translated to just accomplishments. Want a house? A better job? – Propitiate God.
• One of the biggest offshoots of creating God is the formation of the “priestly class”. Priests are the interceding personalities between God and the rest of humanity. Every society has people who think more than the rest. These are the people who are inventing ideas and theories. These people became the priests in religious societies since they were responsible to conceive of God in the first place.

The above observations make us believe in Voltaire’s adage that if there is no God then it is necessary to invent him because the notion of God fulfils humanity’s basic needs. The extra bonus point is that the priestly class finds this notion to their advantage and goes about perpetuating it.

But is this all there is to God? Isn’t there any truth in this entire concept? Obviously, I am not going to say that there is no God since that would negate the entire purpose behind this blog. I believe that the key to understanding religion is the fact that we all are individuals and hence have our own notions on what constitutes God. Let us take a small aside before we come back to this topic.

How many Upanishads?

This harks back to an answer to a question posed to Bhagwan Ramana Maharshi by a devotee. Someone asked Bhagwan “how many upanishads are there?” We don’t know about the intention of this devotee in asking this question. Maybe it was just idle curiousity. Maybe it was asked with an intent for erudition – if I know how many upanishads are there then I can try reading them all so I can claim I know them all! But whatever the reason was behind the question, Bhagwan gave a somewhat cryptic answer. He asked back the devotee – Do you shave everyday? The devotee was obviously confused by the counter question but he replied “yes i do shave everyday”, still wondering what the intent was. Bhagwan then asked the devotee “How many mirrors do you have to look into for shaving”. Is one mirror sufficient? or do you need multiple mirrors? The devotee observed that one mirror is good enough. Then Bhagwan says that if the intent behind the upanishad is to impart knowledge about the absolute truth(more specifically self knowledge but let us not go there) then how many upanishads are needed? Quite clearly – just one since there can only be one absolute knowledge and hence there should just be one upanishad. So the idea here is not to read a hundred erudite treatises that talk about God but to read the one that you can relate to. However, there are as many upanishads as there are thinkers because each person has his/her own individual way of viewing and thinking about absolute knowledge.

In summary, individuals view God in a myriad different ways and hence the world literature is replete with a multitude of descriptions about God. So Bhagwan’s intent here was that there may be manifold ways of viewing divinity but follow the one that you can relate to. Which brings us back to the topic that we were discussing before we went on this small aside.

God and Individuality

The notion of God is highly individualistic. And this is specially true if we equate God to idealism which is usually the most important purpose for a lot of people. Yes – Genesis of the Universe is important but we are more interested on our conception of the ideal being rather than what the ideal being did sometime in the past.

Hence, any religion or theory that attempts to present a Unified theory of God must embrace individual beliefs about divinity. It has to recognize that God exists in different forms in different minds. There is no such thing as “crude beliefs” because everyone attempts to define God in their own unique fashion. These definitions may be materialistic, mental, spiritual or even atheistic. A religion has to accommodate all of these beliefs – yes even if they are atheistic beliefs!

Theories about God

We will talk about some prevalent theories of God. This list is obviously not even close to being comprehensive but would hopefully give some food for thought.

Monotheism, Polytheism etc.

Monotheists believe that there is just one single God whereas polytheists assert that there are multiple Gods or sometimes multiple manifestations of the same divinity. At the outset, it seems that these two views are exact contradictions of each other. But let us pause for a second. A monotheist thinks that HIS God is the only God around while the polytheist acknowledges that there may be other Gods besides the one he is currently worshipping. A monotheist may acknowledge the existence of beings who are superior to human beings but are still not Gods (for instance, prophets) but he says that there can only be one God. In typical, computer literature fashion, let us call this God the FOO GOD. The monotheist asserts that only the FOO God exists and it is blasphemous to say otherwise. The polytheist believes that multiple Foo Gods exist. Now, quite clearly if both these people are “normal” human beings like the rest of us, they havent seen God. So the monotheist’s assertion about one God may sometimes be trivialized as “semantic quibbling”. What I am saying is that as far as the monotheist is concerned, if a God is spotted somewhere it has to be the Foo God since no other God exists. But what is in a name? Since God is omniscient and omnipresent the same Foo God can manifest as “Bar God” to someone else depending on his belief. Hence the monotheist is more like a person who insists on calling “God” the same no matter how different he may look.

On the other hand, a polytheist sees the underlying unity between different manifestations of God. In that context, the polytheist is actually a monotheist since he does recognize that irrespective of what form God takes, he is the same.

Atheists and Agnostics

An agnostic is not committed to an opinion about God. He will assert that God may exist or may not exist but this belief does not make a difference to him as a person. On the other hand, the atheist thinks that God’s existence creates more confusion in the minds of people and hence chooses to say that he does not exist.

Obviously, just because these categories of people ignore the existence of God in their lives, does not make them bad people. They still have their opinions about what constitutes ideal behavior. They may not look for such ideal behavior to be exhibited by supernatural beings (such as Gods or spirits) but they can very well still believe that ideal behavior is desirable in human beings. Hence such people are not in anyway less divine than the so called “believers”. Often, we find extremely individualistic and highly idealistic people among the Atheists and the Agnostics.

The Animists, Pantheists etc.

Animists see God in seemingly “inanimate” objects (such as a stone, a blade of grass, a sacred cow etc.) These beliefs are viewed by many as crude because their practioners view these objects as God rather than look for the creator behind them. How can God exist in such earthy things?? But many so called animist religions spring from the recognition about the unity of living things. Many animist religions endow sacrosanctity to objects or things that are important. For instance, many communities consider cattle as sacred since they are important possessions and need to be protected. A sacred stone is not necessarily a crude belief. What makes the christian cross sacred? Why are temple idols sacred? It is hard to visualize God. Hence these beliefs harness our devotion towards things that we can see rather than the infinite. This does not necessarily mean that God exists in the image. It only means that we are devoted to the image and thence to God.

Pantheism springs out of the belief in an abstract God. Abstract God is a very powerful concept indeed. It is by no means crude. Many people in this world for instance may not believe in an omniscient God but there are very few indeed who don’t trust Universal laws. (such as the Law of Gravity for instance) What makes these laws so powerful? Why are these laws even present? Pantheism is an all encompassing belief that maintains that all these laws are God.

Conclusion

This article has become much bigger than I originally intended. But I did want to cover several beliefs here and see how they represent our feeble approach towards understanding the infinite.

Any religion, worth its salt, should encompass all these beliefs and accept them all. That would be the new Universal religion indeed.