1. Why bother to think about God?
Most people have no interest whatsoever in religion, and that’s
because they’ve got no interest in God. If someone doing a survey
asked them whether they ‘believed in God’, many would probably say
that they did - but there would be few if any differences in their
lives compared to those who were bold enough to deny the existence of
God. For almost everyone in our society the subject of God is
completely and utterly irrelevant, and this is an enormous pity.
The most basic religious question is ‘Does God exist?’ Are there any
reasonable grounds for thinking that he/she/it might exist? And if so,
is there anything to suggest what he/she/it might be like? Although
these are potentially the most important questions that anyone can
ask, they generally don’t get asked. And this is largely because so
many of the claims made by Christians are so odd and so open to
ridicule that most thinking people simply shake their heads and walk
away! Are they wrong to do this? Is religion in general, and the
question of God in particular, simply a throw-back? How can any of us
decide which ideas are worth bothering with and which aren’t? There’s
so much religious nonsense around that we need some means of sorting
it all out.
It’s generally assumed that ‘belief in God’ is the only way into
Christianity: if you can manage to ‘believe in God’ then Christianity
is a possibility for you; if you can’t, it isn’t. And although that’s
a bit hard on those who would like to be part of the Church but can’t
manage the belief bit, most religious insiders wouldn’t see the
problem. They can believe - so surely everyone could, if they really
tried? (there’s almost an implication that people’s lack of belief is
due to either stupidity or wilfulness). And this is where it usually
all stops: with those inside and those outside.
The problem for many outsiders is that God is often talked about in
terms that appear to be ridiculous. He (and it’s usually a ‘he’) is
thought of as a sort of invisible super-person, who made everything,
and who now keeps an eye on it all. Sometimes he’s thought of as
having a body, sometimes he’s thought of without a body. Sometimes
he’s thought of as living in a particular place, (heaven), sometimes
he’s thought of as being all around us, and sometimes he’s thought of
as both at the same time. The whole idea begins to creak quite a lot
as soon as it’s looked at for more than a couple of minutes, which is
presumably why it usually isn’t.
The heart of the God-problem is that God is traditionally thought of
as a being of some sort. If we think along those lines then he/she/it
must presumably ‘exist’ just as other beings or things (like people or
chairs) ‘exist’. But because there are all sorts of ways of
‘existing’, there are all sorts of ways of understanding the word
‘God’: God as the ‘Ground-of-our-Being’; or God as an Ultimate Symbol
or philosophical ideal, to be thought of, not in a woodenly-literal
way, but through imagination, using music, art and poetry.
There are so many ways of ‘believing in God’, and if religion is to be
a live option for far more people, Christians need to be a great deal
bolder and more generous in their explorations and interpretations of
the idea of God. Belief is a personal response to a set of data, and
when faced with the same set of data, one person may conclude one
thing, whilst another person may conclude something completely
different. To say, in effect, to someone that unless they are able to
get their minds around some particular version of God they can’t take
religion seriously is arrogant, unimaginative exclusivism. If God is
thought of, say, as a philosophical ideal, and if this acts as a
ladder up which religious outsiders can climb, or a bridge across
which they can pass, or a door through which they can go and find a
religious home in the Church, that is truly wonderful and should be
welcomed by more orthodox believers. After all, the idea or image of
God that we use is only a tool, only a means to an end: if seen as
anything else, it has become an idol.
Some may find it surprising that such views of God are possible, if
the only version of religion they know is the one heard in Sunday
School. In all other areas of human thought we allow (indeed expect)
development: the understanding of physics of the primary school child
is very different to that of the university student. But because
adolescence usually marks the end of religious education (if in fact
it ever got started) people get stuck in a sort of time warp. The good
news is that there is religious life after Sunday School; the bad news
is that we have to work at it!
Perhaps the best starting point for a sceptic is not to ‘try and
believe in God’ but to recognise that all of us have depths in
ourselves, which yearn for the profound and the glorious, and are not
fed by the banal or the superficial. They are what is reached when we
respond to music or art or poetry - or religion, which is a way of
organising our search for what is most real or significant. Although
many thoughtful and sensitive people are able to do without religion,
they could hardly do without any sense of profundity in their lives.
Another way that the sceptic could be helped is by inviting her to
look at the various ways in which the word ‘God’ is used. Instead of
focusing on the existence of an object, this requires her to get
involved with the life of a faith community. If its activities
(reflecting, singing, praying, reading, thinking, discussing) draw her
into the community, then she can truly be said to have ‘come to
faith’, without ever trying to ‘believe that God exists’ in some
objective sense. Believing in God might be said to be ‘falling in love
with life’; afterwards, nothing seems the same again.
Churches need to become places where people gather, not to reinforce
their certainties about a being called ‘God’, but to share in the
experience of exploring ways of trying to satisfy their mutual
spiritual hunger. The future for organised religion is bleak, unless
we work at re-imagining and re-creating the idea of God (the
God-symbol, if you like) so that it really does speak to the spiritual
needs of our time.
Tony Windross, Vicar of St Peter's, Sheringham.
Why bother
A fuller treatment of this topic, plus 36 others, can be found in ‘The Thoughtful Guide to Faith’
also written by Tony Windross, published by John Hunt (2004) and available from all good bookshops at £9-99.