I think the fundamental mistake theologically-minded people make regarding a higher power is that they liken God’s mind to their own minds. The more religious among us assume, for example, that God is in control of the universe. Many of us believe that God has drawn a vast and indescribably complex central plan. We believe that if we can discover what that plan is and adhere to it, we’ll be able to solve our problems. We conceive of God as an old Soviet statesman who developed a centrally planned economy and micromanaged each one of its separate parts. We assume a divine plan in which every single moment of each day is accounted for, like the teeth in a series of interlocking gears of an intricate clock.
Those who lean toward scientific explanations make similar assumptions. They suppose that the universe is constructed in such a way that there is a logical and consistent set of rules which underlay physical reality. These same reductionist thinkers claim that life arose by accident and that it has no inherent or ultimate meaning. Yet ironically, they believe that matter and energy contain inherent order and make a certain kind of sense. They assume that physical laws control the outworkings of the universe. Those who believe in mathematics rather than God might assume that that if we can just divine the Grand Unified Theory which makes the cosmos tick, we can solve our problems rationally, instead of through faith in God. So, whatever our belief, the assumption is that there’s a centralized plan, or design, with which we can come into harmony.
What if God doesn’t plan? What if central control doesn’t exist in whatever created the physical world? For those of us who believe, maybe God doesn’t work like that at all. Maybe God isn’t in any more control than we are. After all, we spiritually-inclined are taught to surrender, to accept, to go with the flow. Why would the God-force teach us to do something it wasn’t already doing itself? Maybe God flows like a river flows. Perhaps God blows like the wind blows.
And for the materialistically-minded, what if there is no mathematical plan, no divinable design? After all, if mindless processes – governed or at least influenced by randomness and probability – gave rise to the ordered cosmos we see, then how can we place our faith in an ordered universe implicitly underlain by mathematics? If it’s all mindless and random, then our logical minds can’t possibly understand it. What if this assumption of the universe’s amenability to logical consistency is a fallacy existing within the human brain, which is itself a product of the physical universe? What if the mind imposed the fallacy of order on the material world in an attempt to understand it in the same way that we attempt to interpret a dream when we wake?
In each case – the theological and the purely logical – what if there is no plan and no control? What if there is no way to comprehend physical reality? Neither the river nor the wind intends its direction.
And maybe natural law is like the wind, obeying few parameters, operating outside the bounds of any central plan. And though the wind does influence the shapes of mountains while it carves them into natural spires, there’s no master law to the wind. Maybe God’s choices are as arbitrary as the decisions of a cat. Perhaps probability isn’t probable, and randomness by virtue of its very nature, cannot be understood. If, as the reductionists posit, there’s no reason to it all, then reason itself is suspect.
Yet, even if is there is no central controller in the universe, whether that planner is mindless law or a mindful Creator, the end result hasn’t been chaos, has it? The end result is that, well, God makes a cat, and the natural laws give rise to a tree, and, either God or scientific principle or both being responsible for the end results, there’s still a human standing here and a mountain standing there and a river flowing, and the wind blowing.
Go figure. Or not.
© 2024 by Michael C. Just