The Org Chart God

May 26, 2008

It was a recess period and I was talking to our substitute teacher who was on monitor duty. I was telling her about dinosaurs, and when I expressed my fifth-grade theory that dinosaurs were “God’s mistakes,” her voice — and her body — suddenly became rigid. “God does not make mistakes,” she said.

Oh.

A couple of weeks ago I started talking about four visions of God, and right now I’d like to focus on the first and most familiar way of looking at God. That is what I am calling the “Org Chart God,” or the traditional Monotheistic deity familiar to most people who ever attended Sunday school — and the God my long-ago substitute teacher worshiped. The God who does not make mistakes.

Imagining someone who doesn’t make mistakes is hard enough, but the things we’re told about the Org Chart God are practically impossible to contemplate. God is “that than which greater cannot be thought,” a mouthful of a phrase Medieval philosopher Anselm of Canterbury came up with to prove the necessary existence of God.

The way it works is something like this: think of the most perfect being you can. God’s even greater than that. The end cosmology of this kind of thinking is a God who is by definition indescribably perfect in every way, master of everything, and beholden to nothing. You can’t tell God what to do, physics can’t tell God what to do, and logic can’t tell God what to do.

This latter point is very important and we’ll circle back to it in a moment.

So if God is indescribably perfect, that means he must be all-knowing (omniscient), all-powerful (omnipotent), everywhere (omnipresent), and perfectly good (omnibenevolent). But these claims raise questions that have plagued philosophers, theologians, and message-board flame-warriors for centuries. Questions like:

1. Can God create a rock he cannot lift? (Or: can an all-powerful being exceed his own power?)
2. If God knows everything, is there such a thing as Free Will?
3. If God is everywhere, is God also in Hell?
4. If God is perfect, why is there suffering?

This latter question is troubling enough to lead some people away from belief in God. It even deserves its own name. Attempts to answer this question are called theodicy. But most of monotheistic theology and philosophy wrestles with questions like those above, attempting to explain away apparent contradictions or extrapolate the nature of God from the fact of God’s perfection.

But remember that God is not subject to logic? That means logical inferences can’t really tell us anything about God. At best that means theology is suspect, at worst that it’s pointless babbling. Or is it?

Our own abilities are so limited that there’s really no reason to need to worship a transcendently perfect entity. The only real value in worshiping a perfect God is that makes your authority — as representative of that God — impervious to any other belief systems past, present, or future. If you’re Constantine, the first Christian Roman Emperor and dedicated to ruling the world, who better to have take your side than absolute perfection? God tells you, you tell the people, and if they don’t do what you say, well, it’s off to the lion pit with you.

And that’s the org chart.

All the excuses why apparently contradictory claims aren’t really contradictory serve as a smokescreen for the real argument, which is political and earthly: I know better than you, so do what I say. Nothing gives you confidence like believing you are being backed by transcendent perfection. And the argument of transcendent perfection is not spiritual but political: why one human is justified in forcing all other human beings to obey.

Next we’ll take a look at Panentheism, a way of looking at God that’s less political, more inclusive, and more flexible on matters of perfection.

Incidentally, thank you MEL, Freddie, wyo, Zorya, and Mystical Seeker for encouraging me to continue this series.

Posted in Religion