God is a concept that people pack all kinds of ideas into. Some see it as representing a conscious, all-powerful being. Some see it as analogous to nature, the universe, the ground of being and existence and the mysteries that it contains. Some see it as a delusion. It can mean many things to many people. To me it represents the second, and beyond that, I don't know. I like the way Jesus talks about it, however.
He speaks of God as compassionate (Luke 6:36), which comes from the Hebrew word for womb-like love. He says that the clean of heart will see God, and that peacemakers will be called the children of God (Mt 5:8-9). He's very clear about God and how our relationship with God is mirrored in our relationship to each other. Just as the rain falls on everyone equally, so too does God's love (Mt 5:43-48). It's a more immediate, experiential, and relational understanding of God as a unifying force and ground of being in which we all share our existence. Beyond that, it's all angels and pinheads.
Do I think a lot that's said about God is contradictory? Yes. Do I think a lot of it is untrue? Yes. Because these ideas and writings are the product of evolving human thought and experience over many centuries, and they're trying to express something that's ultimately inexpressible and incomprehensible. But it's also not as illogical as people make it out to be, as science itself is full of paradoxes and contradictions that make no sense to us, from the illusion of time to the bubbling cauldron of empty space. For example, let's take the idea that God is all good, powerful, and knowing.
Many have argued against the existence of God, for instance, on the grounds that human beings encounter things we generally find evil, such as pain and suffering. So the logic goes, if God is all-powerful and allows evil to exist, then God isn't good and unworthy of being called God. God is basically evil for allowing bad things to happen. And if God doesn't have the ability to remove evil from the world, then God isn't all-powerful and not worthy of being called God. God is basically impotent or irrelevant so why think about it? The 'problem of evil' is something everyone from Voltaire to Bertrand Russell have used to ridicule the belief in God. But others, like Leibniz, argue something interesting, that we live in the best of all possible worlds. How can that possibly be?
I've thought about this a lot myself, and I've become partial to one answer: that we live in the best of all possible worlds because we sit in between the world of perfect order (pre Big Bang) and the world of perfect disorder (the entropy at the end of the universe), and it is in this present middle that our existence is possible. Because at both ends of this spectrum time loses its meaning, and change is impossible as there's either static order or the chaotic, logical conclusion of entropy. And this could be a logical foundation for the claim that God is all-good and all-powerful, if God is the reason or mechanism of this state of reality and we assume existence is better than nonexistence, since God's power and goodness brought the possibility of existence itself into being, is being itself. And to intercede too much would destroy the laws that govern and make possible this reality and our existence within it.
In essence, to make the world as perfect as possible (i.e., the most conducive to creating and supporting conscious beings capable of choice), the world has to be as such. A perfectly orderly universe free of the things we see as evil, things like aging, illness, death, accidents, harmful actions, etc., would be effectively static. Nothing could change or grow, and there could be no choice in any meaningful sense. A completely chaotic world would prevent the necessary order needed for the formation of galaxies or the evolution of life.
So the middle way between these two is our causally-conditioned world that's ordered by natural laws and also subject to the underlying chaos of quantum level uncertainty, which together allows for the order necessary for life and the freedom and flexibility of choice. Things can grow and change, and consciousness can arise and be self-aware and make choices. However, that means that the things we see as evil from our POV are simply necessary components of this existence and constitute the best of all possible worlds, because the causes and conditions for this 'best possible' world are so complex and messy and must be allowed to play out on their own. If we were made perfect in a perfectly ordered world, we'd be little more than puppets.
Furthermore, when we look around, we see a causally-deterministic world. God is said to be omnipotent, yet we perceive a world where things follow physical laws. Anything can happen, yet only certain things do. Miracles, things which tend to defy scientific explanation, seem few and far between, which got me thinking that maybe God doesn't work in the ways we sometimes assume. Events appear to require causes, so perhaps miracles are simply events with causes that we're unable to perceive, God being the mechanism of all causal relationships.
We're not just puppets within a pre-deterministic world, though. Or at least that's not how it seems to us. We intend. We make choices and experience the results of those choices. We exhibit self-agency. Somehow God's omniscience allows for this. How so? One way is, maybe God is the totality of the infinite number of possibilities that exist in the quantum world. From God's point of view, all possibilities are. But paradoxically, when all possibilities are, nothing effectively is—there'd be no order, no continuity, no being as we know it. Yet out of God, this infinite, chaotic all, comes a casually-deterministic world where both order and intention can play out and unfold, from the Big Bang (creation out of nothing and everything) to the ever-present now. It's almost as if God limits their infinite potentiality so that our finite actuality can manifest itself, making space for us within this totality.
With this act of creation and self-limitation, then, much like in the Kabbalistic doctrine of tsimtsum, God is able to create the only world in which history is possible, one in which we're able to evolve and grow and help complete and perfect the world through acts of charity and loving-kindness. God isn't a cause separate from its effect, nor is God some kind of celestial tyrant; God is more like Paul Tillich's "ground of being manifest in existence," which I think also corresponds to the Kabbalistic saying, "God is the Place of the world, but the world is not God's place." Paradoxically immanent yet transcendent.
In addition, there are many in the scientific field, from Albert Einstein to Julian Barbour and Carlo Rovelli, who suggest that time as we know it is an illusion, with some arguing for a timeless world (Barbour) and others arguing that all moments of time exist together from the standpoint of physics (Rovelli). The latter I find especially intriguing. We experience time flowing like a river towards the future. Events seem to happen in one direction, into an unknown and as yet uncreated future. But while we see time flowing forward from our limited POV within time and space, and experience the future in, well, the future, from the standpoint of a being or consciousness aware of the wholeness of all the universe (or the universe itself, all of which can be called God), time doesn't really flow as all things simultaneously exist in a 'block universe,' allowing for what we'd classically refer to as omniscience.
I don't know if such a being exists and if they are conscious of us and care one way or the other, but it's not inherently illogical to posit one, although it may be improbable or unnecessary. And to be honest, I can't really fault 2,000-5,000 year old tribal cultures for not always expressing such ideas coherently and logically-consistently without the benefit of science and the same level of history of logic, philosophy, and science we're privy to, but rather their own ancient observations and imaginations about reality. Modern generations have no such excuse, however, and I think we have to get rid of a lot of our irrationality and prejudices. But I also believe there are some things we can know from experience and intuition. That doesn't mean I think this proves that God exists, or any other kind of religious claim, only that we may on some level sense or know things about reality we can't quite intellectually understand or prove but can experience in some way, which we then attempt to articulate into words, hence much of religion. And I find it fun to think about that.
The world isn't perfect per se, because unpleasant things happen. But I find it incredible that it even exists considering everything we do know about the craziness of the universe. And I think our conscious interactions with it all are equally as incredible. I sometimes wonder if the universe itself is conscious and what that might mean. And I don't pretend to know or understand what the truth of it all is, but I definitely find enjoyment in contemplating what it might be like and why it could potentially be the best of all possible worlds even though we feel like it could be immeasurably better. Maybe it could be. And maybe it's our job to make it so.
