HE WHO IS PERSONAL
One of the harder things to grasp for most people when they finally get to the classical philosophical understandings of God is how God is personal. Indeed, the danger with trying to “dumb down” the more sophisticated arguments is that another form of misunderstanding comes about. This misunderstanding is related to the original misunderstanding, that which mistakes God for an object in the universe to be found, but is a more subtle form, and betrays a prejudice about the world we often have, based on the narrowness of the naturalism many of us take as default: We believe the world is impersonal. Personhood is something ascribed to humans exclusively, and many depictions of non-human personhood are simply approximations and transplants of our personhood.
This is understandable, as there are, to our experience as modern persons at least, no other creatures like humans. This is changing somewhat with research into animal cognition, but this hasn’t crossed over into the “inanimate” world (the word “inanimate” even betraying this mind-set). The universe to us is mostly empty spectacle, we don’t see the stars and think living beings anymore. We see balls of fire in a pointless universe. We are insignificant, pieces of meaty robots. We might as well not exist. It is a type of nihilism that can give a deep existential crisis if we think about it enough (Thank technology for our endless and pointless distractions, right?).
This crosses over into talk about God, when one (finally) understands at least a bit of the philosophical depictions of ultimate reality. Because the universe is impersonal, God, who is the source of being for this universe, has to be impersonal. Therefore, even if God is, God isn’t the personal God of the great theistic faiths, they just anthropomorphise a reality to fit human prejudices.
The main failure of this idea, which is itself guilty of what it ascribes to the great faiths, is a failure of introspection. The idea doesn’t take into account what those philosophical definitions mean for the human person itself. The persons thinking this still think of themselves detached observers of a universe outside themselves, detached from the reality of God. The idea itself plays to human prejudices. It sees the human as the neutral centre, with God and the universe “out there”. What understanding of the reality of God does for us is to take seriously not just what everything else is, but what we are. The meaty gene programmed robot is called into question and the reality of consciousness takes on a whole new meaning for us. To realize God is to reject our naturalism, and therefore take consciousness seriously, because the ability to glimpse (or at least be mindful of) the reality of God is something profound in itself and helps us realize that if God is the source of existence of all things, consciousness included, then why not ascribe consciousness to God? If God is revealed in the material, why not the immaterial? If we can construct buildings that depict (and take you on) a figural journey to the divine, why can’t we construct mental “structures” in the mind to the same effect? In fact, physical buildings are often images of the mental ones, and one’s inner life is to be structured so that the buildings mirror the mental and spiritual journey into the Divine. Consciousness then becomes one of the most important indicators of God out there, for without it we are not, and meaning has no rest in what we call nature. Consciousness is what reveals nature to us, consciousness reveals God to us, or we can say God reveals Godself in the very existence of conscious beings. It is a sign of our unity with divinity.
In this vision, where God is the very act of consciousness, the infinite wellspring of it, nature is alive. The stars sing and the rocks cry out. Their very existence is praise, it is a calling out to the divine: “Here I am!”
God calls, God gives existence, and everything that exists is the answer, including us. Far from the accusation, and yet true to it, we aren’t ascribing to the Divine what it is not, it is Divine that ascribes to us who we are, and we are alive, we along with everything that is. It is a mistake to think that religious thought ascribes to humans the “rule” over nature as a display of raw power and uniqueness over against an inert nature. Many religions actually think man a lowly servant, and truly, in a sense, we are lowly servants, humble before a splendor we could never fully comprehend. Christian thought however, also sees man as the “microcosm” of nature, as an Icon of nature, and as nature is God’s glory, man is the very glory of God, a glory only revealed in our lowliness. The form of the servant who sees and marvels at the splendor that gave us life and wonder is the form of God, the revelation of God. This is not a call to tyrannical exploitation, but to worship, because the rule of man is to worship, to be what it is: a response of “Amen” to God’s call of: “Let there be…”