Who
or What is God?
(pdf available here)
If
you ask the educated man or woman in the street, or in a church,
what they mean by God, they will probably say something
like this: God is the infinite personal Being who has created
the universe, whom religious people worship and to whom they
pray, and who has the power, when He (or She) so decides, to
intervene in human affairs in response to our prayerful requests.
And so in church we pray for world peace, for the victims of
flood, earthquake, famine, war and other disasters, that the
rulers of the nations may have wisdom and, in a Church of England
service, for the health and well being of the Queen and the
royal family; and we pray privately for ourselves and our own
family and friends, especially those in any special need or
danger. Thus God is seen as an active all-powerful force who
is motivated by a limitless love, tempered by justice, and who
has knowledge and wisdom infinitely surpassing our own. When
our prayers are not answered, this is because God always knows
better than we do, and indeed knows infallibly, what is the
best thing to do or refrain from doing.
I think this
is a fair depiction of the concept of God that operates today
in western society, and has operated for many centuries. It
applies to Jews and Muslims as well as to Christians, and it
applies to atheists as much as to theists. This is the God
whom people wholeheartedly or tentatively believe in, and equally
whom people wholeheartedly or tentatively believe not to exist,
and whom Nietzsche declared to be dead.
This concept
of God can be described as anthropomorphic. That is to say,
God is a being like ourselves in the fundamental respect that
we are both God and ourselves - persons. But whereas
we are finite, created, dependent persons, God is an infinite,
eternal, uncreated and omnipotent Person. Some theologians,
uncomfortable with such an explicitly anthropomorphic characterization,
say that God is not a person, but rather is personal.
But this is a distinction without a difference. We cannot conceive
of a personal being who is not a person. And we know what a
person is only because we are ourselves persons. God, then,
is like us or rather we are like God in this very
basic respect.
I am not going
to bring in here the doctrine of the Trinity, which distinguishes
Christianity theologically from Judaism and Islam, because I
dont think that it makes any practical difference within
Christian worship. Trinitarian language is of course firmly
embedded in our liturgies; but is not prayer itself in practice
invariably addressed to God our heavenly Father? We add through
or in the name of our lord Jesus Christ except
of course in the prayer which he himself taught, the Lords
Prayer, in which we address God directly. But adding we
ask this in the name of does not alter the fact that we
are consciously addressing the heavenly Father. So I am leaving
aside for now the trinitarian complication.
The central aspect
of this prevailing concept of God, on which I want to focus,
is divine activity in the course of nature and of human life.
God can and does perform miracles, in the sense of making things
happen which would not otherwise have happened, and preventing
things from happening which otherwise would have happened. These
interventions are either manifest or much more often
discernable only to the eyes of faith. But it is believed
that God does sometimes intervene in answer to prayer. The Bible,
and church history, and contemporary religious discourse are
full of accounts of such occasions. And prayers of intercession
in church and in private devotion presuppose that God at least
sometimes operates on earth in these ways. Otherwise, what is
the point of those prayers? And how often have we heard in the
media someone telling of their miraculous escape when, for example,
they survived unhurt in a car crash in which the two others
were killed, or even more dramatically how a soldier in war
was saved by wearing a medallion which stopped the bullet that
would have killed him, or how when a family were at their wits
end in some terrible dilemma something unexpectedly happened
to save the situation? Or there was recently the American who
on winning $5 million in the US lottery said, I just praised
God and Jesus. Of course most of those who speak like
this today, in our pervasively secular age, are not using the
word miracle in a religious sense but merely as
an expression of wonder and relief. Likewise Thank God
for that is usually no more than an expression of heartfelt
relief. But seriously devout believers who give God thanks for
a lucky escape, or for recovery from a serious illness, or for
the resolution of some problem, do often believe that they have
experienced a divine intervention on their behalf, a miracle
which confirms and strengthens their faith and evokes gratitude
to God.
It is this serious
and literal use of the idea of divine intervention that concerns
us here. The problem that it raises has led many to atheism.
If, for example, in the car crash case, God intervened to save
only one of the people in the car, who then gave God thanks
for a miraculous delivery, this implies not only that God decided
to save that person, but equally that God decided not
to save the other two. It presupposes that it is, so to speak,
okay from Gods point of view to intervene whenever God
so chooses, and this inevitably poses the question why God intervenes
so seldom, leaving unprotected the great majority of innocent
victims of natural disasters and of human cruelty and neglect?
Some years ago the atheist philosopher Anthony Flew wrote, Someone
tells us that God loves us as a father loves his children. We
are reassured. But then we see a child dying of inoperable cancer
of the throat. His earthly father is driven frantic in his efforts
to help, but his Heavenly Father reveals no sign of concern.
(Theology and Falsification, reprinted in John Hick,
ed., The Existence of God, p. 227). And given the biblical
and traditional assumption that God does intervene miraculously
whenever God so decides, one can understand why this belief
has led Flew and many others to atheism. It is this implied
picture of God as arbitrary, protecting some but not others,
and thus as deliberately leaving so many in pain, hardship,
misery and peril, that is so repugnant to so many people. If
there is such a Being, why regard Him (or Her) as good and as
worthy of worship, except by the chosen few who benefit from
the special divine interventions?
The problem arises
from the belief that it is, as I put it, okay from Gods
point of view to intervene on earth whenever God chooses. Suppose,
however, that, regardless of whether or not it is within Gods
power to intervene, it is for some good reason not okay
from the divine point of view to do so. Suppose this would be
counter-productive from the point of view of a creative purpose
which requires both human freedom (which is directly or indirectly
the source of much the greater part of human suffering) and
also elements of contingency and unpredictability in the evolution
of the universe. The kind of theodicy sketched in this brief
formula has been developed in a number of works, including my
own Evil and the God of Love (2nd ed., 1977). This does
not require the idea of special divine interventions in the
form of open or covert miracles. However, as we shall see presently,
whilst I think this is a viable position I now want to suggest
going a good deal further.
For a non-intervening
anthropomorphic God, who does not act within human history and
human life, who does not cause things to happen which would
not otherwise have happened and does not prevent things from
happening which would otherwise have happened, seems religiously
unsatisfying to many practicing Christians, a kind of deism
which is little better than atheism.
So we have a
dilemma. Can we find any way through it or beyond it? At this
point I want to suggest enlarging our field of vision
or if we have emerged from the BC (Before Computers) age, extending
our data base - by taking account of the other world religions
as well as our own. After all, the large majority of religious
people in the world are not Christians, and yet their religions
involve forms of life and thought that claim to lead to a transforming
relationship, of limitless value, with an eternal reality that
both transcends, and in the case of the eastern traditions is
also immanent within, us. But Buddhism and Taoism and Confucianism
and some strands of Hinduism do not see that eternal reality
as an infinite Person. Suppose then, as an experiment, we now
use the word God as our western term for the ultimate
reality which some do and others do not believe to be an infinite
person. We then broaden the question, Who or what is God? by
not confining it at the outset to a particular concept of the
religious ultimate. When we do this some prefer not to use the
term God, finding it almost impossible to detach
it in most peoples minds from the notion of an infinite
divine person and use instead such terms as Ultimate Reality,
or the Ultimate, or the Real. But let us for our present purpose
stick with the familiar term God, reminding ourselves
however from time to time that we are not now using it in a
sense restricted to what are called the western monotheisms
although in fact they all originated in the Middle East.
Where do we now
go from there? I suggest that at this point it will be helpful
to take account of an enormously important distinction drawn
by some of the great Christian mystics, as well as by mystics
of the other major traditions. Although the writer who has been
given the derogatory sounding name of Pseudo-Dionysius is largely
unknown outside the history of Christian mysticism, he has in
fact probably been the most influential single individual in
that history. He wrote in the name of Dionysius, the disciple
of St Paul (Acts 17: 34), thus assuming a near apostolic authority,
and he was a major theological influence throughout the thousand
years prior to the Reformation. Thomas Aquinas, for example,
quotes him as an authority some 1700 times. He is generally
believed today to have been a Syrian monk writing around the
year 500, and whether he would have exerted the same immense
influence if this had been known before Erasmus and others became
suspicious of his identity is one of historys fascinating
unanswered questions. But he did exert this immense influence,
and in my opinion it was a very creative influence. For it reinforced
the existing emphasis on the ultimate ineffability of God. I
am not fond of the word ineffable and prefer transcategorial,
meaning beyond the range of our human systems of concepts or
mental categories. Theologians have nearly always taken the
ultimate divine ineffability or transcategoriality for granted,
though usually without taking its implications to their logical
conclusion. Augustine, for example, about a century before Pseudo-Dionysius,
said that God transcends even the mind (On True
Religion, 36: 67), but did not develop this further. But
Dionysius or Denys, to give him a more user-friendly
name makes the divine ineffability central and begins
at least to struggle with its implications. In his central work,
The Mystical Theology, he says in every way he can think
of that God is utterly and totally transcategorial. God is indescribable,
beyond all being and knowledge. God, the ultimate
One, is not soul or mind, nor does it possess imagination,
conviction, speech, or understanding. . . It cannot be spoken
of and it cannot be grasped by understanding . . It does not
live nor is it life. It is not a substance, nor is it eternity
or time. It cannot be grasped by the understanding . . It is
neither one nor oneness, divinity nor goodness . . It is not
sonship or fatherhood . . There is no speaking of it, nor name
nor knowledge of it . . It is beyond assertion and denial.
This last statement,
that that to which the term God refers is beyond
assertion and denial is crucial. For Denys is not simply
doing negative theology, saying that God does not have this
or that attribute but, much more radically, that our entire
range of attribute-concepts do not apply to God at all, either
positively or negatively. To apply them to God in Gods
ultimacy is, in modern philosophical terms, a category mistake.
To say, for example, that molecules are not stupid, although
true, is misleading because it assumes that molecules are the
sort of thing of which it makes sense to say that they are either
stupid or not stupid. And to say that God is not one nor
oneness, divinity nor goodness, although true would likewise,
by itself, be deeply misleading because it assumes that God
is the kind of reality to which such qualities could be rightly
or wrongly attributed. We have to take on board the much more
radical concept of a reality which is what it is, but whose
nature lies beyond the scope of our conceptual and linguistic
systems. When we speak about such a reality we are not, then,
speaking about it as it is in itself, totally beyond the range
of our comprehension, but about its impact upon us, the difference
that it makes within the realm of human experience, to which
our concepts and hence our languages do apply.
It is worth stressing
that the divine ineffability does not entail that the ultimate
reality, which we are calling God, is an empty blank, but rather
that Gods inner nature is beyond the range of our human
conceptual resources. This is also, incidentally, what Mahayana
Buddhism intends when it speaks of the Ultimate Reality as Sunyatta,
Emptiness: it is empty of everything that the human mind inevitably
projects in its acts of cognition. Going back to Denys, although
he himself does not make this further qualification, modern
philosophical discussions of ineffability have introduced a
distinction between on the one hand what we can call substantial
attributes, meaning attributes which tell us something positive
about the divine nature, and on the other hand purely formal,
linguistically generated attributes, which do not tell us anything
about the divine nature. Thus that God is ineffable formally
entails that God has the attribute of ineffability. And even
to refer to God at all entails that God has the attribute of
being able to be referred to. But such purely formal attributes
give rise only to trivial truths, trivial in the sense that
they make no difference and do not in any way contradict or
undermine the divine ineffability.
But given divine
ineffability, problems immediately arise for Christian theology.
Denys was, we presume, a devout worshipping Christian monk.
And as well as teaching the total divine transcategoriality,
he also took for granted the main body of Christian doctrine.
Although Denys takes surprisingly little interest in the traditional
dogmas, he does nevertheless take it for granted that God is
a Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and that the Second
Person became incarnate as Jesus Christ. But how can one both
hold that God is totally ineffable and also profess to know
all these substantial truths about God? God cannot both have
no humanly knowable attributes and also have such humanly knowable
attributes as being a Trinity, etc. On the face of it this is
a sheer contradiction. And Denys saw this quite clearly. He
asks, in his book on The Divine Names, How then
can we speak of the divine names [i.e. attributes]? How can
we do this if the Transcendent surpasses all discourse and knowledge,
if it abides beyond the reach of mind and of being, if it encompasses
and circumscribes, embraces and anticipates all things while
itself eluding their grasp and escaping from any perception,
imagination, opinion, name, discourse, apprehension, or understanding?
(593A-B).
And he makes
at least a beginning in answering this question. He has said
that God is self-revealed in the scriptures. But then he goes
on to say that the scriptural language about God is metaphorical.
He does not use the modern term metaphor but a later
Denys, Denys Turner of Cambridge, points out very clearly that
when Dionysius speaks of symbols he means what today we call
metaphors (The Darkness of God, p. 35). Denys - the early
medieval one - says that the Word of God makes use of
poetic imagery (The Celestial Hierarchy, 137A-B),
and he speaks of what scripture has revealed to us in
symbolic and uplifting fashion (121A), and of how the
divine Light makes truth known to us by way of representative
symbols (121B). Further, he says that the function of
the scriptural symbols and poetry is practical, to draw us forward
on our pilgrims progress: By itself [the ineffable
One] generously reveals a firm, transcendent beam, granting
enlightenments proportionate to each being, and thereby draws
sacred minds upward to its permitted contemplation, to participation
and to the state of becoming like it (The Divine Names,
588C-D). Again, God uses scriptural passages in an
uplifting fashion as a way . . . to uplift our mind in a manner
suitable to our nature (The Celestial Hierarchy, 137B).
When I translate this into my own terms I hear Denys saying
that in the scriptures we speak about God in true myths, that
is to say, descriptions which are not literally true but which
nevertheless have the effect of evoking in us an appropriate
dispositional response to the ultimate subject-matter of the
myths. He does not however go beyond the scriptural ascriptions
to apply the same principle to Christian doctrines. If he had
he would have been in tune with the teaching of the Buddha,
a thousand years earlier, that the function of religious doctrines
is to help us onward at particular stages of our spiritual journey
and that when they have served their purpose they are to be
left behind.
But whilst Denys
makes a good start indeed in the context of his time
he was an extremely bold and original thinker, - there is another
aspect of the religious life which his writings do not cover,
namely religious experience. I do not mean at this point the
ultimate ineffable unity with the divine of which he does speaks,
but more ordinary religious experience the worshippers
occasional sense of Gods presence, or sense of being in
Gods presence, the occasional vivid I-Thou experience
in prayer, the sense of divine presence through the liturgy
or in some moments of daily life, the transformed consciousness
sometimes found through meditation or, moving up a notch, the
mystical visions and auditions reported in all ages. But without
moving up that notch, religious experience, particularly the
sense of being in Gods presence, and the transformed consciousness
reached in meditation, is central to the religious life. Without
it, religion would consist simply in human, all-too-human institutions.
Within these institutions there has usually also been space
for the inner reality of religious experience and its transforming
influence in human life. But if there were only the institutions,
devoid of the experiential aspect of the religious life, the
religions would be simply cultural frameworks and exercises
of social control which have done at least as much harm as good
in the course of human history.
So given the
centrality of religious experience, who or what is it that is
being experienced? If it is the experience of the loving presence
of the heavenly Father of Jesus teaching, this is clearly
not the ineffable Ultimate Reality of which Denys has been speaking.
What, then, is the relation between that ultimate reality and
the available God of the Bible and of Christian worship? This
is the question which Pseudo-Dionysius does not tackle.
Nor do subsequent
medieval theologians. Aquinas, for example, declares that by
its immensity, the divine substance surpasses every form that
our intellect reaches (S..c.G. 1:14,3), and that
The first cause surpasses human understanding and speech
(De Causis, 6). He tries to bridge the gap between Gods
ineffability and our doctrines about God with his use of analogy.
But this does not really help. For although we know, according
to Aquinas, that God possesses the divine analogues of human
goodness, wisdom, etc, we do not have the faintest idea what
these divine analogues are. Although we know what it is for
a human to be good and wise, we have no conception of what it
is for God to be analogically good or analogically wise. Indeed,
according to Aquinas, the divine nature is absolutely simple,
not made up of a number of distinct attributes (S.T.,
I/I, Q. 3, art 7). So such attributes as goodness, wisdom, and
love are constructs which arise at the human level as a result
of the divine impact upon us, but are not reflections on the
human scale of the same attributes in God. Because of the ultimate
divine simplicity, which is only divided up into distinct attributes
in the human mind, these so-called divine attributes refer to
the impact of Gods presence on us, expressed in our human
categories of thought.
Now let us come
down through the centuries from Pseudo-Dionysius to another
original genius, the 13th and 14th century mystic Meister Eckhart.
Eckhart was profoundly influenced by Denys, whom he quotes as
speaking of the unknown God above all gods (Sermon
39), echoed in Paul Tillichs the God above the god
of theism. Eckhart himself distinguishes between the utterly
transcategorial Godhead (Gottheit, deitas) and the worshipped
God (Gott, deus). God and the Godhead, he
says, are as different from each other as heaven and earth
(Sermon 27). It is clear that by God, in distinction from the
Godhead, he means the God of the Bible and of Christian devotion.
He says, God acts. The Godhead does not (Sermon
27). Further, he sees very clearly the implication that the
known and describable God of Christian experience and worship
exists only in relation to the experiencing and worshipping
community. For before there were creatures, he says,
God was not god, but, rather, he was what he was. When
creatures came to be . ., then God was no longer God as he is
in himself, but god as he is with creatures (Sermon 28),
so that before there were creatures God was not God
(Sermon 52) , i.e. not the humanly known God. Eckhart does not
of course mean that with the creation of humanity the Godhead
ceased to exist, but that there then also came to be the humanly
experienced God of Christian worship.
This distinction
between the ultimate divine reality and its humanly thinkable
and experienceable form (or forms) is also found within each
of the other great traditions. To refer to these very briefly,
Advaitic Hinduism distinguishes between nirguna Brahman,
which is the totally formless or transcategorical
Ultimate Reality, and saguna Brahman, which is that same
reality as manifested within human experience as the realm of
worshipped gods and goddesses. The trikaya doctrine of
Mayahana Buddhism distinguishes between the utterly transcategorial
dharmakaya and its manifestation in the realm of the
heavenly Buddhas (the nirmanakaya), one or other of whom
becomes incarnate on earth from time to time. The Jewish mystics
of the Zoharic and Lurianic Kabbala distinguished between Eyn
Sof, the Infinite, and the God of the scriptures. The Sufi
mystics of Islam distinguished between the ineffable ultimate
reality, Al-Haqq, usually translated as the Real, and
the revealed God of the Quran. Thus al-Arabi says, God
is absolute or restricted as He pleases; and the God of religious
beliefs is subject to limitations, for He is the God contained
in the heart of His servants. But the absolute God is not contained
in anything . . . Thus, He is not known [as Allah] until
we are known (The Bezels of Wisdom, 92).
Now I want to
suggest that this generic distinction within the mystical strand
of religion worldwide between, on the one hand, the transcategorial
or if you prefer the older term, the ineffable
Godhead or the Real and, on the other hand, the form or forms
in which that ultimate reality is manifested within our human
conceptual frameworks and modes of experience, makes possible
a religious interpretation of the data of the history of religions.
Suppose that,
as is in fact the case, I participate in some small degree in
the very wide and varied realm of religious experience. And
suppose that, as is again the case, I hold the basic religious
faith that this is not purely imaginative projection, but that
whilst clearly employing my own conceptual and imaginative resources,
it is at the same time also a response to the presence to me
of a transcendent reality. I then notice that others within
the same, in my case, Christian tradition also report moments
of religious experience, though often taking different forms.
And I then notice that people within the other religious traditions
likewise report a yet wider range of such experiences. Applying
a kind of philosophical Golden Rule, it would be unreasonable
not to grant to religious experience within other traditions
what I affirm of it within my own tradition. And so I have to
take account of the worldwide varieties of religious experience.
I now have the two-level picture of the ultimate ineffable Real,
or the Godhead, being responded to in this range of different
forms of religious experience, the differences between them
arising from our different culturally formed conceptual systems
and imaginative repertoires, and very importantly
our different kinds of spiritual practice.
The basic principle
that we are aware of anything, not as it is in itself unobserved,
but always and necessarily as it appears to beings with our
particular cognitive equipment, was brilliantly stated by Aquinas
when he said that Things known are in the knower according
to the mode of the knower (S.T., II/II, Q. 1, art.
2). And in the case of religious awareness, the mode of the
knower differs significantly from religion to religion. And
so my hypothesis is that the ultimate reality of which the religions
speak, and which we refer to as God, is being differently conceived,
and therefore differently experienced, and therefore differently
responded to in historical forms of life within the different
religious traditions.
What does this
mean for the different, and often conflicting, belief-systems
of the religions? It means that they are descriptions of different
manifestations of the Ultimate; and as such they do not conflict
with one another. They each arise from some immensely powerful
moment or period of religious experience, notably the Buddhas
experience of enlightenment under the Bo tree at Bodh Gaya,
Jesus sense of the presence of the heavenly Father, Muhammads
experience of hearing the words that became the Quran,
and also the experiences of Vedic sages, of Hebrew prophets,
of Taoist sages. But these experiences are always formed in
the terms available to that individual or community at that
time and are then further elaborated within the resulting new
religious movements. This process of elaboration is one of philosophical
or theological construction. Christian experience of the presence
of God, for example, at least in the early days and again since
the 13th-14th century rediscovery of the centrality of the divine
love, is the sense of a greater, much more momentously important,
much more profoundly loving, personal presence than that of
ones fellow humans. But that this higher presence is eternal,
is omnipotent, is omniscient, is the creator of the universe,
is infinite in goodness and love is not, because it cannot be,
given in the experience itself. In sense perception we can see
as far as our horizon but cannot see how much further the world
stretches beyond it, and so likewise we can experience a high
degree of goodness or of love but cannot experience that it
reaches beyond this to infinity. That God has these infinite
qualities, and likewise that God is a divine Trinity, can only
be an inference, or a theory, or a supposedly revealed truth,
but not an experienced fact. And so Jesus himself will have
understood the experienced loving and demanding presence to
be the God of his Jewish tradition, and specifically of that
aspect of the tradition that emphasized the divine goodness
and love, as well as justice and power. But as his teaching
about the heavenly Father was further elaborated, and indeed
transformed, within the expanding gentile church, it grew into
the philosophical conception of God as an infinite co-equal
trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And so what we inherit
today is a complex totality in which religious experience and
philosophical speculation embodied in theological doctrine have
interacted over the centuries and have to a certain degree fused.
In the other great traditions the same process has taken place,
in each case taking its own distinctive forms. For religious
experience always has to take some specific form, and the forms
developed within a given tradition work, so to speak,
for people within that tradition but not, in many cases, for
people formed by a different tradition.
There also emerges
here an answer to the question, Why should we think that there
is an ultimate transcendent reality, the Real or the Godhead,
in distinction from the experienced personal Gods and impersonal
Absolutes of the different traditions? For surely if it is the
case that not only our own Christian experience, but also the
different forms of experience within the other great religious
traditions, are indeed responsive and not purely projective,
it is not surprising that within human awareness many different
God-figures have formed. Phenomenologically - that is, as describable,
- the Holy Trinity is different from the Allah of Islam, which
is different from the Adonai, the Lord, of rabbinic Judaism,
which is different again from the Vishnu and the Shiva of theistic
Hinduism, and even more different from the non-personal Tao,
or Dharma, or Brahman. All these are, in Kantian language, divine
phenenoma in distinction from the divine noumenon of which they
are its appearances to humanity. Thus we need I am suggesting
- a two level model, with the experienced realities in relation
to which the religious life is lived as manifestations of an
ultimate reality beyond them.
Let me offer
a couple of analogies to illustrate this. The suns light
is refracted by the earths atmosphere into the spectrum
of the different colours of the rainbow. Perhaps the ultimate
light of the universal divine presence is refracted by our different
human religious cultures into the spectrum of the different
world faiths. Or, in the words of the medieval Sufi thinker,
Jalaluldin Rumi, The lamps are different but the Light
is the same: it comes from Beyond.
And concerning
the different, and indeed often conflicting, belief systems
of the religions: our earth is a three-dimensional globe. But
when you map it on a two dimensional surface, such as a piece
of paper, you have to distort it. You cannot get three dimensions
into two without distortion. And there are a variety of projections
used by cartographers which are different systematic ways of
distorting the earths curvature to represent it on a flat
surface. But if a map made in one projection is correct it does
not follow that maps made in other projections are incorrect.
If they are properly made they are all correct, and yet they
all distort. Perhaps our different theologies, both within the
same religion and between different religions, are human maps
of the infinite divine reality made in different projections,
i.e. different conceptual systems. These all necessarily distort,
since that infinite reality as it is in itself cannot be represented
in our finite human terms. But perhaps all are equally useful
in enabling us make our journey through life.
But finally,
let us return to the point at which we started, namely prayer,
particularly petitionary prayer, prayer for other people. In
my opinion it is an observable fact that such prayer does sometimes
work. I do not however see this as a matter of our
asking an omnipotent God to intervene miraculously on earth
and of his then acting accordingly. I see it rather as depending
upon a mental field or network, below the level of normal consciousness,
within which we are all connected and through which our thoughts,
and even more our emotions, are all the time affecting one another.
These influences are usually largely filtered out by the mechanism
that preserves our individual autonomy. But when in prayer,
or what Buddhists call loving-kindness meditation, we concentrate
upon some particular individual who is in a distressed state
of anxiety, fear, anger, dispair, etc., concretely visualizing
a better possibility for them, this can have a positive effect.
Even in the case of bodily distress our thought may affect the
patients mind and sometimes through this his or her bodily
state. And I would suggest outrageously, from the point
of view of the contemporary secular mindset that quite
possibly the thou of whom we are sometimes aware in prayer is
a reality, but is what the eastern religions call a deva,
a god in distinction from God, or in western terms an angel.
So here is a
large-scale hypothesis which constitutes a religious, as distinguished
from a naturalistic, interpretation of religion. And like all
such hypotheses, it presents itself for consideration and invites
others who find it inadequate to offer a better hypothesis.
© John Hick,
2001