Read an Excerpt

God

St. Martin's Press

Mewling and Puking

1

False start. – Why should anyone need to find God?

To this question the Roman Catholic Church has a ready answer of sorts: 'The desire for God is written in the human heart,' it says, 'because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for' (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 27).

Fair enough! Perhaps this is even true, but what does it tell us about God himself? Put in other words the Catholic answer may be rewritten thus:

Human beings want to find God, because they are compelled to do so by God himself. Since they were made in the first place 'by God and for God', God must have created them exactly as he wanted them to be – i.e., suffering from a chronic deficiency of truth and happiness. This deficiency causes them to need their creator, for he alone can provide the truth and happiness that they must have in order to escape the misery of their condition.

If the Catholic answer is to be believed, human beings must all be junkies; they were made to be junkies by their creator, a dope pedlar with a monopolistic grip on all the dope who (worst of all) is invisible and practically impossible to find. In which case, searching for God is best resisted. 'Impossible,' says David Hume; questions about God are 'so interesting, that we cannot restrain our restless enquiry with regard to them even though nothing but doubt, uncertainty and contradiction have, as yet, been the result of our most accurate researches' (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, I).

2

Another false start. – Why does anyone want to find God? Why does anybody want to find anything? 'That which I want to find, when found, will satisfy my need.' That's the rule.

Two questions then:

1. What need do people suppose that finding God will satisfy?

2. Why do people assume that finding God will satisfy that need?

Let us take a believer's answer first. It might go something like this:

God will satisfy my need for ultimate happiness and truth. The happiness will be caused by God's Love shining down upon me and the Truth will be revealed by my unity with him and by my understanding of the unity of all things. And in answer to your second question: I can only assume that these, my needs, will be satisfied because this is what I have been told will happen, since I was a wee thing, fresh from m' nappies. I was told it by my parents, by the teachers at my school and by the priests of my church.

More or less what eleventh-century Archbishop Anselm had in mind when he wrote: 'I do not try to understand in order to believe, I believe so that I may understand.' Believers have been told, by people they trust, that God will satisfy their need for truth and happiness, that is why they want to find God.

But what of the others? What of those who want to find God but have no grounds to believe in him in the first place? What needs do they believe will be satisfied by finding God? In Voltaire's view, 'If God did not exist we would have to invent him.' Why? Because people have a need. Here we go again. What need?

'The need to satisfy my curiosity, that is all,' the agnostic might say. 'So much has been said and written about God, that I am curious to find whether any of it is true. If it is, I would be delighted to discover if he is capable of satisfying all or any of my needs. That is why I want to find God.'

It seems that everyone would like to find God, be it from an impulse of love, an uncertain belief or just idle curiosity. But how does that help us to understand him?

Answer: Not a jot!

3

Two more false starts. – To those who ask 'What was God doing before he made heaven and earth?' comes the stock reply: 'He was preparing hell for people who ask silly questions.' Even Augustine knew this old chestnut in the fourth century and dismissed it as 'facetious', but others may yet wish to pursue the question. What exactly was God up to before he made heaven and earth?

In the scriptures there are two 'In the beginnings'. The first is the famous opening to the book of Genesis: 'In the beginning God created the heaven and earth. And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.' The second 'In the beginning' (which appears only in the Christian Bible) comes from the Gospel of John: 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God.'

For the sake of chronology, the second 'In the beginning' (John's version) is the better place to start, for it seems to be referring to an earlier event than the one described in Genesis. For Genesis describes only as far back as the beginning of the world. God, it says, creates in the first instance a dark, formless, void earth. Nothing is mentioned as to how God gathered the materials for his task, or what, if anything, he was doing before that point.

John's beginning, on the other hand, seems to refer to a different moment at which God and the Word (whoever or whatever that may be) are enjoined in a mystical union. Heaven and earth have not yet been created. So what is John's 'beginning' precisely supposed to be the beginning of? Perhaps it is the beginning of the whole universe, something bigger and older than mere heaven and earth. Modern scientists believe the earth to be at least 5 billion years younger than the universe. But even if John's beginning starts 5 billion years before the beginning described in Genesis, there remains the same unfathomable puzzle: what was God doing before the creation of the universe? John and Genesis are equally unhelpful.

4

Blind idler. – In the mid-nineteenth century Kersey Graves, a 'weak atheist' from Richmond, Indiana, attempted to figure what God was doing before the creation of heaven and earth by digging for clues in the Genesis story itself. This, a process of extrapolation, bore pleasantly ludicrous fruit. He wrote:

We are told that God created the light (Gen. 1:3), the conclusion is forced upon us that, prior to that period, he had spent an eternity in darkness. And it has been discovered that all beings originating in a state of darkness, or living in that condition, were formed without eyes, as is proved by blind fishes being found in dark caves. Hence the thought is suggested, that God, prior to the era of creation was perfectly blind.

And on he goes, taking each verse at the opening of Genesis to its logical conclusion:

'God saw the light that it was good' (Gen. 1:4). Hence we must infer that God had just recovered his blindness, and that he had never before discovered that light was good. Of course it was good to be delivered from eternal darkness; 'And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night' (Gen. 1:5). And to whom did he call them? as no living being was in existence until several days afterwards. Hence there was no need of calling them anything; and, as we are told Adam named everything, he could as easily have found names for these as for other things. (The Bible of Bibles, 15:5–7)

So God was blind before he created the world, was he? But what was this blind God doing? Freethinkers have an answer for that too: if Christianity taught that God created the whole universe ex nihilo (out of nothing) then 'there was nothing for God to do, and nothing for him to do it with, hence he must have spent an eternity in idleness, a blind, solitary monarch without a kingdom' (ibid.).

5

The answer is revealed to God. – Augustine hated the idea that God was loafing about in idleness before the creation. The mere suggestion was repugnant to his creed, since idleness has never been a good thing to Christians and God is by definition the very essence of all that is good. One day, Augustine told God the truth about what was happening before the creation, revealing to him in an extraordinary book called Confessions, that there was no beginning before the creation of heaven and earth since time itself did not exist. The argument ran like this:

Those who cannot understand why You were idle through countless ages should wake up and pay attention, because the thing they cannot understand is a fiction. How would countless ages have passed if You had not made them, since You are the author and creator of all ages? What times would there have been if they had not been created by You? How could they have passed without ever having been? Therefore, since all times are Your work, if there was any time before You made heaven and earth, why is it said that You were idle, not at work? Since You had made time itself; times would not pass before You had made them. (Confessions, 11:12)

6

Small time correction. – How could Augustine be so sure that God had not created time long before he created anything else? This would have allowed him to loll around for eons before bothering himself with the problems of a created heaven and earth.

Such a scenario did not occur to Augustine who predictably failed to understand the nature of time when he argued that God, 'author and creator of all ages', had made it. Predictably? Yes, because Augustine admitted himself that time confused him terribly. 'What is time?' he pondered:

Who can explain it easily and briefly, or even when he wants to speak of it, comprehend it in his thought? Yet is there anything we mention in our talking that is so well known and familiar? So what then is time? If no one asks me, I know, if they ask and I try to explain, I do not know. (Confessions, 11:14)

Augustine, wake up and pay attention! Time can be easily explained as an effect caused by the existence of things. If things exist, so by necessity, does time, it is a symptom of the existence of things. If only one thing existed in the whole universe (a cosmological singularity, let's say) then time would not exist, for in such a condition, there would be no sense of 'before and after' or 'duration' (the only ways by which time can be measured). As soon as more than one thing comes into being, so does time.

If God (as Augustine maintained) created time, he must have done so inadvertently, as time would have been the unavoidable by-product of the things he created. However, if God (as is so often stated) is 'One' there is a possibility that, if he alone existed before the creation, time did not. So Augustine might have got it right – by accident!

7

Walk on the wild side. – 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made' (John 1:1–3). Any reader who is not too mesmerised by the music of these words might be wondering what this famous passage really means. Why should God, right at the beginning of things, be with a word? And what exactly is it, this word? Is it spoken? Is it written? How could a mere word have 'made all things'? John goes on to explain: 'He was in the world, and the world was made by him and the world knew him not ... And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth' (John 1:10, 14). So John is talking about Jesus, is he? Jesus is the Word. Why then does he insist on calling him the Word?

The answer is not as complicated as it might seem. Ancient Israelites, like many ancient peoples, were obsessed with names, believing that they conferred power on those who held them, divine names especially so. God's name was so powerful that it could be used to invoke magic. This is how one Gnostic name for God, Abracadabra, came to be used centuries later to pull rabbits out of hats. Whether or not the Word was the same as God's secret name is not certain, though it may well have been. What is certain is that God was believed to have created the world by the power of this Word alone, a word which became so important to ancient minds that, before long, it had gained an independence from God, somehow without violating the central tenet of Jewish monotheism that God was 'One and all alone'. When the Christians decided that Jesus was divine they had to find 'natural' ways of explaining his divinity that would fit comfortably within existing monotheistic dogma. Being divine entailed immortality for one thing. The resurrection might help to explain how Jesus lives for ever, but it was also necessary to show that Jesus, like God, had always existed from the beginning of time and did not simply spring into being, ex nihilo, on Christmas day in the year 1.

The gospel master-stroke was to identify Jesus with the Word. It was a daring, indeed brilliant, manoeuvre, for by making Jesus and the Word one and the same, Jesus' divinity was settled without compromising God's essential unity.

There was only one small problem though, which, by sweeping under the carpet, John hoped would disappear. What John does not reveal to his readers is that the Word already has a name. It is not Jesus, Christ, Immanuel, or anything like that; the Word is not even a male, for he is a she, and her name is Sophia.

8

Choosing her name. – In Greek, Sophia means wisdom and, yes, God's eponymous friend was wise – by some accounts at least. English translations of the Bible call her Wisdom with a capital W, but this is not a becoming name. In French her name would be Sagesse, Hokma in Hebrew, Klokhet in Swedish and Weisheit in German. Not one of these is pretty. We shall stick with Sophia.

9

Who is Sophia? What is she? – The relationship between God and Sophia has never been entirely clear. She asks to be called a 'sister' (Prov. 7:4), a term which bizarrely can be used in the Bible to denote sister, wife or lover; she is described as the perfect wife (Prov. 31:10), God's helper (Prov. 3:19), and more worthy of desire than precious jewels (Prov. 8:11). In the book of Proverbs Sophia reveals that God 'possessed her' and compares herself 'as one brought up with him', implying a simultaneous relationship of mistress and sister. She says:

God possessed me when his purpose first unfolded. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, before the earth came into being. When there were no depths I was brought forth; before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I born. When he prepared the heavens I was there. When he established the clouds above, when he strengthened the fountains of the deep. When he assigned the boundaries of the sea, when he laid the foundations of the earth, I was by his side, the master craftsman, as one brought up with him. And I was his daily delight rejoicing always before him. (Prov. 8:22–31)

Did God create her, then, or did she come into being with God at the same time?

There seem to be a hundred answers to this. Once she claimed to have 'issued forth from the mouth of the Most High and covered the earth like a mist.' (Sir. 24:3). Coming forth from someone's mouth suggests gestation and birth, however irregular. Was Sophia God's daughter then? The apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon describes her as a filial puff from the divine lungs:

For she is the breath of the power of God, and a pure influence flowing from the glory of the Almighty: therefore can no defiled thing fall into her. For she is the brightness of the everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God, and the image of his goodness. (Wisd. of Sol. 7:25–6)

In the Hellenistic Synagogal Prayers of the second to third century CE Sophia is emphatically described as God's daughter (Hell. Syn. Pr. 4:38) who plays a major part in the process of creation, confirming that she was also 'the Word' by which God ordered the creation in the first place. 'How magnified are your works, O Lord! You made everything with Sophia, for just as she was not exhausted in the bringing forth of different races, neither has she neglected to make for each a different providence' (Hell. Syn. Pr. 3:16). In Jesus ben Sirach's book of Ecclesiasticus (Sir.) Sophia describes her throne as a 'a pillar of cloud', the very same form into which God transformed himself when appearing to Moses (Exod. 13.21). Was God impersonating Sophia's throne? Or is Sophia's enigmatic relationship to God that of a cat to its master's lap? God and Sophia are extremely close yet their relationship remains frustratingly opaque. Let us call them 'companions' and leave it at that.

10

Sophia's profession. – Sophia wanted to be a teacher, she wanted to act as an intermediary between God and all people on earth. Her chosen subject was 'the knowledge of things divine and human, and of their causes' (4 Macc. 1:15). Previously she had worked as a prophet (Prov. 1:20–33) but it is to the teaching profession that her heart naturally inclined. Failing to find employment in a regular school, she tried to muster pupils for herself by shouting at passers-by from the roadside:

Is she not calling you? Is Sophia not raising her voice? On the heights overlooking the road, at the crossways, she takes her stand: by the gates at the entrance to the city, on the access-roads she cries out 'I am calling to you all people, my words are addressed to all humanity. Simpletons learn how to behave. Fools come to your senses. Listen, I have something important to tell you, when I speak I am always right. My mouth speaks only the truth for evil is abhorrent to my lips.' (Prov. 8:1–7)

---

Excerpted from God by Alexander Waugh. Copyright © 2002 Alexander Waugh. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---