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Reproduced, with permission, from THE FUTURIST, Published by the World Future Society, 7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450, Bethesda, Maryland 20814 Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a fictional account of a madman who went about the town proclaiming that God is dead. Nietzsche's story is illustrative of a wave of atheism that spread through the intellectual circles of Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but that never caught on in society at large. The idea of the divine demise, however, did not die: A movement by theologians resurrected Nietzsche's thesis in the 1960 s, amidst the other forms of radical thinking that characterized that decade. The cover of Time magazine for April 8, 1966, summarized it best with the boldfaced headline, Is God Dead? Despite the theologians doubts, the next few decades marked a rise of religious fundamentalism among many Christians and Muslims and a return to traditionalist thinking among many Jews.
Today, 96 % of the U. S. population say they believe in God, a slight increase compared with surveys done half a century earlier. If he were to appear today, Nietzsche's madman would still find that he had come too early.
What is the future of God? Will He ever truly die? One difficulty in answering these questions is the word God. It may seem like a simple word, but God doesnt mean the same thing to everybody: Various images and ideas of the deity appear throughout different times and cultures. So the first issue we need to look at is semantic. We need to study the way people have understood God in the past and what they believe today.
Then we can address what concept of God is emerging for future believers. MANY GODS OR ONE GOD? One common theory about the Western image of a single, distinct God is that He arose out of a more ancient era of polytheism. Indeed, the first books of the Bible tell how the Israelite God Yahweh forbids his people to bow down before other gods, suggesting the existence of parallel deities.
In many cultures today, God is not singular: A tribe of deities perform their individual tasks and attract their own followings. Hindus, for example, have never found reason to abandon their pantheon. While polytheism may seem primitive to Westerners, who have been reared with the idea that there can be only one God, it does have certain advantages and may not be merely a less sophisticated predecessor of monotheism. For one thing, if there are many gods, it may be easier to find one whose job description best fits your needs. If you are an artist or an expectant mother, you might be able to seek the assistance of a god specially attuned to your situation and more comforting to you than a god who controls the weather (who might be favored by farmers). More importantly, having a variety of gods who specialize in different aspects of life relieves the single great deity of attending to a multitude of specific concerns.
This is simply the economic principle of the division of labor applied to religion. In addition, polytheism creates more confidence for the petitioner: You are more likely to get an answer from a god with an interest and expertise in your problem than to persuade the great God to become interested in your trivial concern. In Roman Catholicism, praying to saints for their intercessory power saves this advantage without compromising monotheism. The problem with polytheism, however, is that the gods who are interested in specific human concerns generally begin to look and act all too humanly themselves. It requires no stretch to imagine them engaging in the same kinds of self-interested behavior, such as bickering over jurisdiction and illicit love affairs, that we find among humans. They become less divine and less worthy of worship.
By contrast, the problem with monotheism is that God becomes so great and so incomprehensible that He ceases to be available for ordinary human concerns. Thus the great trade-off: A God who is truly God (in the Western sense) isnt of much practical use; a god who is one of many scheming, self-interested gods doesnt inspire much awe. MONOTHEISMS THREE-PRONGED PROBLEM Monotheism also contains another essential problem one with implications for the future. The Western God of the Jewish-Christian-Islamic tradition illustrates the core difficulty in monotheism, a philosophical conundrum that has been called the theodicy problem. It is formulated as a trilemma and can best be illustrated this way: Among the following three statements, it is logically possible to reconcile any two of them, but the agreement of two implies that the third is false. The three statements are: 1.
God is omnipotent. 2. God loves us. 3. Evil exists. In the first instance, if God can do anything (create the universe, for example), and if the universe contains natural and moral evils (hurricanes and Hitlers, for example), then it would seem that God lacks compassion for the victims, especially when these victims are innocent sufferers. Dostoyevsky's character Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov makes this case eloquently when he tells the story of innocent children tortured by cruel soldiers in front of their parents.
How could a loving God allow this? The second case is the acceptance of a loving, concerned God and the existence of evil in the world. This implies that even God cannot find a way to eliminate evil, or at least reserve it as punishment only for those who deserve it. A God who cannot do this is less than omnipotent.
Finally, one can believe in the omnipotence of God and His loving compassion, but then some explanation is required for the evil and suffering we see around us. It may be that suffering is a test from God (but surely an omnipotent God would know the outcome of such a test before it were given), or that suffering is used by God for greater purposes (but then Gods methods would seem either malevolent or inadequate). Or perhaps there really is no evil. We think of suffering and death, especially of the innocent, as evil, but perhaps in the larger scheme of things these are really good things that we cannot understand.
Gods ways are not our ways, says the Bible. The omnipotent, all-merciful God created the world this way because it is the best of all possible worlds. (Voltaire develops this theme in Candide, where Pang loss rationalizes his way to such a conclusion, whatever the situation. ) Since the existence of evil seems empirically evident, this last approach requires great faith. SOLVING THE THEODICY PROBLEM Is it possible to incorporate all three statements into a coherent concept of God? Attempts to accomplish this task have occupied philosophers and theologians ever since the emergence of monotheism, but always with questionable success.
The solutions advocated by each epoch of thinkers are generally based on the philosophical assumptions of their culture, but these assumptions may not be ours. The ancient Zoroastrians, for example, introduced the notion of Satan-like spirits emanating from the one great God; these spirits are responsible for evil in the world. Somehow, for the Zoroastrians, this compromises neither Gods essential goodness nor His omnipotence. A similar myth found widely in the Western tradition is that only good spirits were created by God, but some of these freely chose evil, the metaphysical origin of which is not addressed. Medieval thinkers provided a solution that more or less follows the third resolution of the trilemma (that evil has some divine purpose unknowable to humans), but this solution has not been highly regarded since the Enlightenment. FUTURE CONCEPTS OF GOD Speculating about what concept of God future believers will formulate requires a look at some of the fundamental concepts underlying contemporary thought.
These concepts might give us clues about what new solutions may become plausible. The rejection of the traditional God by nineteenth- and early twentieth century thinkers, such as Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud, was influenced by a change in fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality. The ideals of freedom and self-government obviated the need for the traditional supreme ruler God. Today, a new set of ideas that may influence concepts of God are entering popular consciousness. Two major concepts to imbue modern thinking come from science: the ideas of evolution in biology and of relativity in physics. We can call these the Darwinian and Einsteinian insights, although they extend well beyond the theories of Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein.
A fundamental idea behind evolution is that all things are constantly changing, that nothing stays the same. For some, this idea sparks the need to reaffirm an image of God who is unchanging and eternal. But this would make God an exception to the metaphysical principles that govern all of reality. In other words, it would place God outside the margins of understandability and availability. A God who is outside of time and change is a God who cannot intervene in history. Such a God would be useless, and believers in this God would be hard-pressed to draw a practical distinction between their belief and that of atheists.
A better solution, one more in keeping with the Darwinian insight, would be a temporal and changing God, listening to prayers and responding appropriately. Curiously, such a God could still be omnipotent, at least according to one interpretation: that God is all-powerful not in an absolute sense, but in a relative sense. God is as powerful today as He can possibly be, but He can (and does) exceed His own power at every point in the future. In other words, like us, God is changing, growing, evolving. He is always more than He was and will always be more than He is.
And at every moment, this changing God is omnipotent. Note also the second, or Einsteinian, insight here. Gods power and Gods love are relative to the requirements of the current cosmic situation, and God, at any given moment in time, is limited to the exigencies of that situation. Divine immanence is stressed over divine transcendence. As the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead put it, It is as true to say that the World is immanent in God as that God is immanent in the World. GOD AS EVERYTHING Whitehead developed a notion of the consequent nature of God that encompasses all of reality, every puff of trivial existence.
A similar idea of God and His relation to the world can be found in a grand synthesis developed by the French Jesuit thinker, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, for whom God is all in all, the final cause of reality, overcoming all evil and drawing all things into his ultimate Self. This image of God is in some ways similar to the Eastern (especially Hindu) idea of pantheism, which literally means that God is all. Every bit of matter and energy is a part of God; every event is a manifestation of divine Being. God is these things, not a cause of them and not separate from them. God is material because reality is material; God is in time because reality is in time.
The Western counterpart of pantheism, as expressed by Whitehead and Teilhard, for example, can better be called pantheism, which means that God is all, yet more than all. Like pantheism, it identifies God with the totality of reality, but it also asserts that God is more than the sum total of everything. It is based upon the notion that the whole is actually more than the sum of its parts, just as a person is more than the sum of his cells or organs. In other words, the whole (God) is more than the sum of His parts (all the elements of reality), yet He is made up of these parts. MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU While few Americans would call themselves pantheists or pantheists, I am convinced that this general way of thinking about God will become more widespread in the future. Pantheism and pantheism accord with many important themes in contemporary thought.
One often hears the word force in discussions about God. May the force be with you is how Obi-Wan Kenobi blesses Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars film. For many, the problems inherent in the trilemma do not require them to abandon belief in God, but the problems do cause people to reconsider the traditional concept of God. The result is an impersonal God, one who becomes the force we experience underlying all of reality.
This force is dynamic, changing. It is relative to, and perhaps one with, events as they happen. Is this not what fervent Christians mean when they describe the work of the Holy Spirit? Likewise, one often hears believers speak about the presence of God. God is everywhere, in everything. No one can escape the presence of God.
By this believers generally mean that God is present in the area that surrounds things, but that He is distinct from physical things. However, this belief in Gods separateness is problematic, because these believers dont think of God as merely being in the spaces; they think of Him as immanent. God is in you, they may say. This idea isnt far from pantheism or pantheism. In other words, the presence of God, a concept widely used by Jews, Christians, and Muslims, can easily change to a God that is identifiable with everything, the totality of reality, the universe in its ever-changing, relative state. The presence of God is the force behind change and the unity of the evolving universe itself.
SAVING GOD Such a concept of God already resonates with many believers and may become more acceptable as they ponder exactly what happens when God interacts with them. Is it not through time and nature, according to their belief, that God manifests His power (force) to them? Such an idea also resonates with atheists and agnostics who might loathe the word God, but would agree that the universe is the sole field of action. So why all the fuss over a word? Such a concept would surely find support among new-age thinkers, who have borrowed heavily from the Hindu pantheistic philosophers for their world view of spirituality and interconnectedness. Finally, it would resonate most powerfully with environmentalists atheist and theist alike who would find that identifying God with nature encourages a profound respect for the nature of which we are a part.
To be sure, I have simplified this image of God egregiously. My purpose here is not to work out the philosophical and theological difficulties (and there are many! ) inherent in this image, but to suggest that it is likely to be acceptable to a wide variety of future believers. It seems to me that in our culture it is harder to wrap our brain around an absolute God than a relative one; that a totally separate God is less appealing than an immanent one; and that an eternal God is not as religiously useful as a changing, evolving one. In other words, the absolute, transcendent, changeless image of God inherited from our ancestors may well be dead, or at least in its last throes.
But most people are loathe to embrace atheism. Instead, they will save God by re conceptualizing Him. In the twenty-first century, Nietzsche's madman will still come too early. ADDED MATERIAL ABOUT THE AUTHOR Robert B. Miller, a frequent contributor to THE FUTURIST, teaches philosophy at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey. The author of two books and numerous articles, he holds a doctorate from Fordham University.
His address is Philosophy Department, Brookdale Community College, 765 Newman Springs Road, Lincroft, New Jersey 07738. Telephone 1 - 732 - 224 - 2918; e-mail Gods creation of Adam, as depicted by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. ED CARLIN / ARCHIVE PHOTOS A picture of God? According to some beliefs, yes: God is all the matter and energy in the universe.
Equating God with nature may appeal to environmentalists, even those who would call themselves atheists, the author argues. FOR FURTHER READING A History of God by Karen Armstrong (Knopf, 1994). The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche edited by Oscar Levy (Macmillan, 1924). God: A Biography by Jack Miles (Knopf, 1995). Belief by the Numbers by Russell Short, The New York Times Magazine (December 7, 1997).
Le Milieu David by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Fontana Books, 1957). Process and Reality by Alfred North Whitehead (Macmillan, 1929).
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