deconstructing god's existence
Within the evangelical church, people ascertain each other’s religious leanings with very specific theological questions (“Are you Pre-Trib? A-Mill? Do you believe in predestination? Eternal security? What are your thoughts on transubstantiation?”). But out here in gen-pop, if you decide to broach the subject of religion, the go-to question is much more basic:
“Do you believe in God?”
I’m sure it’s not like that everywhere, but growing up in America, that question served as the default religion-o-meter. And when evangelicals deconstruct their Christian faith, that question often moves back to the front of the pack.
“Now that you’ve deconstructed, do you still believe in God?” Some people consider this question the logical next step in their deconstruction. But I wonder, why don’t we deconstruct the question itself?
where does the question “does god exist” come from?
Zooming out from Christianity, if we ask the question, “Why have people historically believed in god or gods?” it’s not hard to imagine the answer. If you were to make a list of 15 gods without looking them up, I would guess that after moving from the gods worshipped in major religions today you’d move on to other ancient, mythological deities such as Amun-Ra (the Egyptian sun god), Zeus (Greek god of the sky), and Thor (Norse god of thunder). The pattern is clear. Even the gods’ identities point to the question to which they serve as the answer:
Where does (blank) come from? The higher power exists in our collective minds as an immaterial explanation of the lower-order material reality.
That leads me to my next point. Not only do most concepts of deity explain the existence of natural realities, but the image of most gods resembles one specific part of creation no matter what they’re responsible for creating. The sun god, the thunder god, the sky god, the fertility goddess all explain their own unique segments of reality, but every single one of them are imagined as glorified humans.
Whether they have lion heads, wolf faces, giant white beards, cow bodies, or triune natures, our gods show up in our concepts of them to be remarkably like us in some way or another. When we envision god, we envision someone who created humans in their image.
But when you think about it that way, doesn’t it seem more likely that we’re the ones who’ve done the creative work here? No, WE didn’t create the universe, but it sure seems like the concept of god we most often consider is someone who has a lot of human attributes and personhood.
An Alien Concept
Set aside that god discussion for awhile. Let’s talk about aliens. If we edit our question about god just a little, you can see what I mean without the sensitivity or sense of blasphemy that comes with questioning god’s existence. “Do you believe in aliens?” People who answer yes . . . how do they conceptualize alien life forms? They’re humanoids, right? Different eyes, longer necks, greener skin, maybe. but they’re typically human-ish. When humans ask the question, “What if (insert higher form of being here) existed,” we fill in the blank with a very human-looking form.
Does the creator of the universe have the same problem? As we look through everything in this universe from the physical phenomena of subatomic particles, light, gravity, water, planets, stars, and black holes, the living beings from microscopic life to plants to vertebrates and invertebrates, why is it that the creator of the universe would fashion the life form with the highest-functioning brain in the creator’s own image? If the creator had and used an infinite spectrum of possibility for everything under the sun, what would be the thinking behind creating one particular thing in the universe to be just like the creator (let alone creating animosity between us)?
it really isn’t about god, is it?
If God exists with a capital G, and God created this entire universe as a backrop for His redemptive love story WITH US (yet another element of human culture that somehow makes its way into the very essence of the cosmos) then humans are super important. Amidst the great big expanse of space and all its immeasurable contents, if we’re the part God really cares about, well, wow.
But isn’t that the question we’re really asking when we explore god’s existence? Aren’t we really looking to explain our own? And isn’t it at least a little surprising that everything in this entire universe amounts to little more than scenery and extras in our star vehicle movie project? I have to say, in this explanation of the universe, we come off as a little self-centered (mostly because we’re imagining ourselves as the literal center of the entire universe, but whatever).
bad sketch artists
I remember when Ted Kaczinski was first apprehended how much funnier the already really sassy crime sketch photo became. The weird thing is, the drawing looks remarkably like him in some ways, but the sunglasses transform the vibe completely. They’re just way too shiny and cool. Anyone searching for the Unabomber using the sketch alone as guidance was never going to find him because they’d be chasing Weird Al Yankovic.
This is how I think we search for the answers to the universe. We’re searching for a creator using a sketch of ourselves.
Have you ever looked for one of your kids’ lost library books? All you have to go on is a title and a mega-vague collective memory of what the book might look like. In my experience, this process has two possible conclusions: 1) Paying the library to replace the book, and 2) Finally spotting the book after having overlooked it ON A BOOKSHELF thirty million times because I was looking for a tall, thick, red picture book when it was actually a short, thin, green chapter book.
When we search for answers in the universe about where all of this comes from and what it all means, it sure seems like humans are looking for answers that look like us. And I truly believe the descriptions we’ve got in our minds, the sketch we’re operating off of, may very well be directing our eyes past the truth.
I don’t know if we’ll ever find all the answers to why we are here, but I think we’ll get a lot closer if we stop looking as if we’re the only important ones in existence. If you want to find the creator of this universe, maybe it’s worth searching for something more than just our own reflections in the sky.