There are so many interesting, age-old debates about this. Some people maintain a sort of positivism (“God is love” “God is this”, “God is that”, etc). I am not so sure that this is where I am philosophically. I suppose I don’t know where I am, and only hints of where I am not.
How do
you decide what to believe about God? Well…why does it have to be like that?
A linguist of some level of notoriety (his name escapes me right now) who has worked for many years in the Brazilian Amazon with a specific tribe has had the experience of coming to “disbelieve” in God through his fieldwork. You see, one of the largest linguistics institutes in America is the SIL (Summer Institute of Linguistics), which is the linguistic research arm of an Evangelical Protestant missionary organization. Traditionally it has been priests and other religious men who have done the work of learning and transcribing the minority languages of the world since such work is necessary to preach the gospel. I suppose SIL sees itself as continuing in that tradition. Anyway, so this linguist is affiliated with SIL on his first few trips out into the Amazon. Ostensibly there to do “linguistic research”, but also for converts, one of the first things he does is sets about learning appropriate religious vocabulary and preaching to the tribe. I have no idea of the success he had, but it must not have been much, because the people were completely baffled by this idea of God. They heard the story of God as it is told in the Bible and asked, “Okay, we’re willing to believe in this stuff, but…where is He? Where is this ‘God’ who does all this great stuff for us?”
Apparently after years of this sort of question, the linguist in question began to doubt his own faith. If you don’t know that God is anywhere…well…then how do you know that God is anywhere? My atheistically-minded colleagues love this story, and I do too, but for an entirely different reason than they do.
Think about it for a minute or two…How did the Amazonians decide what to believe about God? DID they decide? They had been given this story by a missionary linguist, but their own way of knowing could not determine its veracity. They did not reject God or embrace God, only wondered how they could know Him, which I assume is the question that religion is supposed to answer in the first place! It’s a paradox, that’s for sure. We are humans, we have questions, and we have religions and faiths to guide us. Yet they can only take us so far, because the most certain knowlege of God is in the experience of Him (the “seeing”, for the Amazonians). The Bible is, after all, a record of things experienced.
I don’t know that I honestly have any better way of knowing what I believe about God than the Amazonians did. Yes, I know, the Catechism, Tradition, Scripture…I certainly have MORE ways of knowing what I
should believe, but I don’t know that they lead me to be able to say anything terribly conclusive about what God is or isn’t. I think it is rather obvious that religion can’t answer these questions, because we’re all here on Earth, poking away to ideas much larger than ourselves. Whatever or whoever God is or isn’t, I have to believe that God is perfect in all His attributes, whatever they may be (and on this point I would agree with the EO way of reasoning that it is best to say that God isn’t X, Y, Z, because it is much harder to say what He is, and it does seem rather limiting).
Do you see now, Mick?! Do you see now why He has said that He is “I AM”? Because if you are a human and you think about these things for long enough, that is basically what you are left with. Also, it gives you a headache.
God
is.
