God Talk – Modern Thought and Ancient Feeling

September 17, 1978
Lakeland

God Talk – Modern Thought and Ancient Feeling

An article in the NYT in July by Robert Jastrow, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute, begins, “When an astronomer writes about God, his colleagues assume he is either over the hill or going bonkers.” There is some likeness in that to a Unitarian Universalist minister who talks about God, because 70% of Unitarian Universalists call themselves humanists. Usually this means that they would think of themselves as agnostics, atheists, or sometimes pantheists.

Jastrow’s article dealt with the current prevailing view among astronomers and physicists that the Universe had a beginning with one Big Bang about 20 billion years ago. As Jastrow writes, “In the searing heat of that first moment, all the evidence needed for a scientific study of the cause of the great explosion was melted down and destroyed....”

“Consider the enormity of the problem. Science has proven that the universe exploded into being at a certain moment. It asks, what cause produced this effect? Who or what put the matter and energy into the universe? Was the universe created out of nothing, or was it gathered together out of pre-existent materials? And science cannot answer these questions, because according to the astronomers, in the first moments of existence the universe was compressed to an extraordinary degree, and consumed by the heat of a fire beyond human imagination. The shock of that first instant must have destroyed every particle of evidence that could have yielded a clue to the cause of the great explosion. An entire world rich in structure and history may have existed before our universe appeared, but if it did, science cannot tell what kind of world it was. A sound explanation may exist for the explosive birth of our universe, but if it does, science cannot find out what the explanation is. The scientist’s pursuit of the past ends in the moment of creation....”

“Now we would like to pursue that inquiry farther back in time, but the barrier seems insurmountable. It is not a matter of another year, another decade of work, another measurement, or another theory. At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has sealed the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

And the theologians have been writing God talk for centuries. There is something in most people that leads them to believe that if there is creation, there must have been a Creator who is eternal. Most surveys disclose that more than 90% of the American people believe in God. To further define what these 90% believe God to be, how they would define, classify she/he/it who is the Creator, would baffle the discipline of statistics.

I seldom use the word, God, publicly for this very reason. God is a word. God is a word which has many distinctions in meaning. I neither want another person to assume that my God is the same as his/hers, nor do I want to repeat my ensuing remarks each time the question is raised. Few people have the patience that I hope you will have for the next 15 or 20 minutes. I try, ordinarily, not to be like the person who, when asked what time it is, begins with a prolegomena about the history of watchmaking, then a technical discussion of the springs, gears, and hands, the electronics of digital timepieces, and then, after all that, says it is 11 o’clock.

Last week I said that a quote from the Christian mystic Jacob Boehme started me on this attempt to talk about God, along with the article by Robert Jastrow:

“For according to the outward man (woman) we are in this world, and according to the inward man (woman) we are in the inward world ... since then we are generated out of both worlds, we speak in two languages and we must be understood also by two languages.”

Admittedly what I say is probably a failing attempt to express outwardly what my feelings are, what my hunch is or my intuition. Faust said,

“The same thing in all places,
All hearts that beat beneath the heavenly day –
Each in its language – say:
Then why not I, in mine, as well?”

We live in a universe of constant creativity, I believe. Greater marvel still, we are conscious of this creativity which is immersed in cosmic mystery.

The gods that have been named and worshiped have origins born of human needs, wishes, aspirations, and vanities. “The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” the “Father of our Lord, Jesus Christ,” the clockmaker God of the Deists, these and others are deities that stir my interest, but do not lead me to worship. All popular and well-described gods are created by cultures and therefore limited by those cultures. In my time, I have been captivated by Gandhi’s aphorism that once he believed that God was Truth but came to believe that Truth was God. But such a theology becomes a tumbleweed too when one recognizes that Truth is relative to knowledge, time, place, culture, circumstance, semantics – subject to the same qualifications we can make about all other gods.

But I believe that behind all the veils of our roles and goals and illusory perceptions there is a creativity of such stunning force and magnitude that indeed one could speak the word, “God” with awe and reverence were it not that all the half-god sand culture gods have robbed the title of its mystery, majesty, and depth. Important to me is that I am part of this creative center, enlivened and articulated by it; and that to it I shall return. I like the way Alan Watts phrased it in THE BOOK, “We do not come into this world; we come out of it as leaves from a tree. As the ocean ‘waves,’ the universe ‘peoples.’”

The poets help me much more than scientists or philosophers to understand who I am and who you are. Lines such as Richard Eberhart’s in “The Incomparable Light”:

“Elusive element, final mystery,
The light beyond compare has been my visitant,
Some sort of angel sometimes at my shoulder,
A beckoning guide, elusive nevertheless,
Under the mind where currents of being are running.
It is this strange light I come back to,
Agent of truth, protean, a radical of time.”

[see notes in addendum that were inserted at this point]

The physicists instruct us that what appears to be solid is really a form of energy. Molecular structures are complex, with elements of different atomic weights active in their orbits. I’m told that more advanced studies have made the planetary model suggested by Niels Bohr somewhat dated, but it is illustrative. The atomic nucleus corresponds to the Sun and the electrons correspond to the planets moving in orbit. We may not soon get more basic than to say that at the core of eternal reality are positive and negative discharges of electricity. Which would be instructive if we knew what electricity was, really. We know what it does, we do not know what it is.

Without being able to present any evidence which would be persuasive to those who insist on tested assumptions, I believe that the same ultimate creative force is related to the dimension of depth in Self and the dimension of depth that is not Self. In this, I certainly am not a rationalist, for what I have been speaking about is not verifiable discourse.

But when we protest the follies and cruelties of war, of the need for rights to be established for all people, everywhere, of the need to understand our conflicts and other issues of a given day, such views are advanced not only for the cause in its won right, justified by that alone, but also because this Creationist Force is somehow involved when persons make serious commitments. (Brutus: “What need we any spur but our own best cause.”) Of course there is considerable relativism in manners and morals in different times, places, circumstances. Of course many persons would consider rubbish this feeling I have for a Creationist Force. Like Jacob and the angel, no one may wrestle with this “bright blur” without thereafter walking with a limp, figuratively. Nevertheless, I sometimes feel the mood which grasped Francis Thompson, poet-mystic, when he created the “Hound of Heaven.”

“I dimly guess what
Time in mist confounds;
Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds
From the hid battlements of Eternity;
Those shaken mists awhile unsettle, then
Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again.”

What the poet describes as “the trumpet sounds”, Maslow, the psychologist, called peak experiences. When this happens, we have broken through the crust of Self or Other or both. The interpretations we give these experiences not only differ because of the unlike complexities of individual layers of Self, but also words are inadequate, although they may be the best effort we can make in such an age as ours. Alfred North Whitehead was more eloquent than most of us when he wrote (quoted by Margaret Isherwood in FAITH WITHOUT DOGMA, p. 102): “This creative principle is everywhere, in animate and so-called inanimate matter, in the ether, water, earth, human hearts. But the creation is a continuing process, and the process itself is the actuality since no sooner do you arrive than you start on a fresh journey.”

Rainer Maria Rilke:

All those who seek Thee tempt Thee,
And all those who find would bind Tee
To gesture and form

But I would comprehend Thee
As the wide Earth enfolds Thee
Thou growest with my maturity
Thou art in calm and storm.

I ask of Thee no vanity
To evidence and prove Thee.
Thou wert in the aeons old.
Perform no miracles for me,
But justify Thy laws to me –
Which as the years pass by me,
All soundlessly unfold.

Addendum:

Colo Spgs area – Garden of Gods
Reddish sandstone – various striking forms
human eye – rock formations
2 kissing camels
Steamboat Rock – bow of a vessel
Balancing Rock – great mass
seemingly poised on a thin edge

But not fashioned to be.

Millions of years – forces heat/pressure
beneath earth fracturing/folding
submerging, uplifting the
Accumulated deposits ancient rivers/seas
when mountains thrust atmosphere
wind, sand, water, freezing, thaw
erosive forces wear away rocks
sculptured mountains, created
River valleys.

Scenic experience just one
Aspect of reality
Creation forces still engaged in chance
change so show that little if any
change Balancing Rock to latest tourist
Our perception – real –
Just as real dynamic forces
everlasting energy