How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [18]
Vince Sarich, another anthropologist, feels that the God Question “may be one of those I have tended to term a ‘wrong question’; that is, one that wrongly assumes there is an answer in a form defined by the question.” In what way is it the wrong question? “Gods that live only in people’s heads are far more powerful than those that live ‘somewhere out there’ for the simple reasons that (1) there aren’t any of the latter variety around, and (2) the ones in our heads actually affect our lives and, of course, the lives of those we interact with and everything else we touch.” Therefore, Sarich concludes, “the whole God Question—atheist, agnostic, theist, whatever—is irrelevant.” How so?
What difference does it, or can it, make? Who cares? Who should care? Indeed, who even should care about anyone else’s answer to that particular question? That answer will in no sense begin to define what feelings you will have in any particular situation, nor even more important, what actions you will take on behalf of those feelings. The fact is that you will have, indeed you must have, a belief system that has moral and ethical dimensions, while you may, or may not justify that belief system, implicitly or explicitly, in terms of a God or gods. I believe that gods exist to the extent that people believe in them. I believe that we created gods, not the other way around. But that doesn’t make God any less “real.” Indeed, it makes God all the more powerful. So, yes, I believe in, and, maybe, to some extent fear, the God in your head, and all the gods in the heads of believers. They are real, omnipresent, and something approaching omnipotent.
This is what makes the God Question one of the most potent we can ask ourselves, because whether God really exists or not is, on one level, not as important as the diverse answers offered from the thousands of religions and billions of people around the world. To an anthropologist these differences are scientifically interesting in trying to understand the cultural causes of the diversity of belief. But from a believer’s perspective, the differences are emotionally significant because they tell us something about our personal values and commitments.
An even more extreme position with regard to the God question is that of Paul Tillich: “The question of the existence of God can be neither asked nor answered. If asked, it is a question about that which by its very nature is above existence, and therefore the answer—whether negative or affirmative—implicitly denies the nature of God. It is as atheistic to affirm the existence of God as it is to deny it. God is being-itself, not a being.” The God question cannot even be asked.
THE FAITH OF THE FLATLANDERS
One problem with arguing God through a series of logical definitions and syllogisms is the impossibility of finding spiritual or emotional comfort in such a rational process. For most people God is not found in the sixth place after the decimal point. Another problem is the impossibility of comprehending something that is, by definition, incomprehensible. Whatever God is, if there is a God, He would be so wholly Other that no corporeal, time-bound, three-dimensional, nonomniscient, nonomnipotent, nonomnipresent being like us could possibly conceive of an incorporeal, timeless, dimensionless, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent being like God. It would be like a two-dimensional creature trying to grasp the meaning of three-dimensionality, an analogy a nineteenth-century Shakespeare scholar named Edwin Abbott put into narrative form in the splendid 1884 mathematical tale, Flatland. The story powerfully illuminates the insolubility of God’s existence and why faith instead of reason, religion instead of science, is the proper domain of God.
A human being trying