GOD MIGHT EXIST

Yes, I’m officially announcing it: God might exist, after all!

But don’t get too excited, I only said “might”. Not time to crack the champagne yet. All I’m saying, I guess, is that God’s non-existence is no longer certain.

Many of you will be in the same leaky boat as me: a life-long, mostly fruitless search for God. He (or she, or whatever) is as slippery and elusive as they come, and gives a constant, distinct, very convincing impression of just not existing at all. Every time we go looking for God, we see him disappearing round the corner. At precisely the moment when we need him most in our lives, he is conspicuous by his absence.

Yet we can’t stop ourselves searching for God, can we, even though it often seems so futile? If you read my last piece in this magazine (December 2020 issue), it was there that I introduced you to the imaginary, virtual God, the God who doesn’t exist. I was being a bit disingenuous – I should have said “the God who might exist”.

I think the reason we’ve had so much trouble finding God is that we’ve been looking for him in the wrong place – indeed the wrong world! The fact is that we live in two worlds, not one – two realities, both absolutely real, inextricably entwined – the material, physical world of the present moment, in which we interact with each other and with the material conditions of life; and the virtual world of our memory, thoughts, imagination, reverie, dreams, emotions, aspirations – our “soul-world”, if you like.  Now, this is my hypothesis: we won’t find God in the material world, but we just might find him in the virtual.

We humans have always wanted our gods to be material, and we’ve tried so hard to “materialize” them. We start by imagining them into existence, then we bow down before them, hoping they will intervene for us in this material world in which we live – we want them to be power-gods, super-heroes – but on our side, of course. Sometimes it seems to work, the miraculous occurs, and we fool ourselves into believing in them for a while. But really, who are we kidding? Hard, cold reality comes back to bite us, time and time again. These imagined material gods are certainly not to be relied upon – sometimes they’re our best friend, other times they’re our worst enemy. It’s always the same old story; we’re better off without them.

But there’s something else we’ve also always wanted from our gods, something not at all material, which has gradually become much more important for us. It’s like we’ve always been in two minds about them, not sure what sort of gods we want. At first they were our wise and beloved ancestors speaking to us from beyond the grave, in dreamlike apparitions; then, transformed into gods, we imagined them to be the most perfect version of ourselves, the ultimate personification of all the greatest human virtues – goodness, lovingkindness, justice, peace, courage, determination ….. – at least as far as we understood these virtues at the time. Even when the gods seemed to do bad by us (materially), we found excuses for them, usually by blaming ourselves, terrible sinners that we are. The gods are our true friends; we are our own worst enemy.

You could almost plot the career of the gods by this dichotomy. We start out imagining they’re everywhere, all the time – in nature, in animals, in hybrid human-animal forms – but gradually they de-materialize and merge into single, abstract entities, as we trade off their material power (they were never much use for us anyway) for the virtuous and virtual power of their goodness and their love for us. De-materialization culminates, probably, in the Cross, after which God – now one, and with a capital G – withdraws altogether.

What I’m saying is that we eventually come to our senses and pin our hopes on one God of love rather than many gods of power. I’m talking about a general trend in human history – the gradual evolution of human understanding of life, the universe and everything, if you like – although in fact there’s really nothing gradual in the transition from the power-gods to the love-God – it’s more of a quantum-leap!

There’s a risky, scary change of thinking, of heart, involved here. We have to let go of something we thought we were certain of, in order to gain something we can never quite put our finger on – something with the faux certainty of materiality, for something with the real uncertainty, elusiveness of virtuality.

I’m talking as if this notion that we live in two worlds, one material and one virtual, was familiar and obvious to you. The fact is that it’s just not something we’re usually aware of, because we make the transition between the two realities seamlessly, naturally, moment by moment.

We’ve almost always got one foot in one world and one in the other. Now and again we might be most perfectly mindful in the material moment – we’re facing up to a ball in a cricket match, perhaps, or really nailing a meditative practice – but at that point is not our mind actually at its fullest, most aware of itself, most perfectly attentive and poised, ready to pounce at a moment’s notice?

Conversely, in our dream-filled sleep we are completely adrift in the virtual world of our memory and imagination; but, no, not completely, because our material body keeps bringing us in and out of consciousness, its functions no doubt influencing in all sorts of interesting and unknown ways the content and drama of our dreams; and eventually, hopefully, it wakes us up in the morning (even if it is only by the beating of our eardrums in tune with that accursed alarm clock).

The most profound reason we’re not usually aware of the two worlds, however, is because we, ourselves, are virtual. I am (and you are) a virtual soul – a self, an I, a me, a mind, a spirit, a psyche, a consciousness … – in a material body. My soul is the “form” of my body (Aquinas would say), the living agency, the élan vital, that animates it (Bergson would say) – it is absolutely real, but it is virtual, not material.

You’re probably going to say that the virtual reality of my soul life is purely imaginary, purely a figment of my imagination. Yes! You’ve hit the nail on the head!

It is in our imagined, virtual world, not in the material world, that we really find, or create our gods, I contend. Our virtual world is, so to speak, a “world within a world”, more intra-natural than supernatural. And I say “we”, because we share this virtual world with each other – in intimate relationships, families, communities, whole societies, even as a species – which is not to say that sometimes, or even often, we don’t become cut off from each other, lost in “our own little world”.

It’s clear that the material and the virtual are in constant interaction, and the medium of this interaction is organic bodies. I know of no evidence for the material and the virtual being able to interact in any other way – the virtual gods being able to interact directly with the material world, for example. As much as we might have wanted them to be, the gods, as far as I can tell, have never been embodied, and therefore can only interact with the world through us. I take St Teresa’s word for it, in the famous quote, when she says “Christ has no body now on earth but yours” – although this implies, obviously, with the word “now”, that he once did – ah, you’ve caught me out!

Of course, there is always the nagging question of which came first, the chicken or the egg? I can only guess an answer. Did we imagine the gods, or God, into existence, or did they first imagine us? I asked this question last time. My guess is the latter (and it’s only a guess). A related question, possibly even more interesting, is, regardless of what we think about the gods, where did we, as virtual souls, come from? Did we pop out of the materiality of our physical bodies, so that our bodies come first; or is it that, somehow, the living agency of our souls, when it interacts with matter, “organizes” that matter into “organic” bodies, so that, in fact, it is our souls that come first? Again, crazy person that I am, I’m going to opt for the latter.

Be that as it may, it is opting for the latter, in both cases, that, finally, enables us to contemplate the tantalizing possibility that the God of love we want to exist might actually exist. This virtual, imaginary God is so beautiful, so amazing, that even just the possibility of his or her existence might be enough to keep us hoping, keep us searching, through a whole lifetime!

There is real subjectivity in this virtual God, but not mere subjectivity. The creation/discovery of God is a lifelong task, a joint project, between you and me and, as a matter of fact, all humanity. I described how it sort of might go in my previous piece. The God we end up with (who is always, however, a work in progress) is just the greatest person who could exist, the epitome of goodness, grace, justice, etc.; the very best version of ourselves, as far as we truly understand ourselves at any point in time/history. From this quintessentially personal God we can derive real comfort, hope, spiritual sustenance, inspiration, as well as the odd bit of good practical advice. What more could we want in a God!

We seek him here, we seek him there, we seek him everywhere – do anything you can, leave no stone unturned, pursue him to the ends of the earth if you’re that way inclined – although you’ll probably find he has been there, waiting patiently, right inside you, all along. Yes, do whatever it takes to fabricate an encounter with this lovely, possible God – this real person who is not much more, but so much more, than that perfect version of ourselves, that self we’ve always wanted to be and continue to aspire to be. Let me know how you’re going with that.

July 2021