The “immensity” and “incomprehensibility” of this infinite God is fully required if He is to “fit” the cosmology presented to us by modern science: a universe about fourteen billion years old, comprised of billions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars. And of course, many if not most scientific cosmologists see no need to make such a “fit.” The vastness and mystery of the physical universe itself suffices.
Unfortunately, this conception of God also puts Him out of reach of ordinary worship, for not even the extraordinary mind of an Einstein can relate personally to this “immense” Deity, any more than one can relate personally to the entire universe and the physical laws that it embodies.
Needless to say, the “Heavenly Father” of the ordinary churchgoer is quite different. That Deity is a personal Being. It is written that He is loving, compassionate, jealous, wrathful and vengeful. He responds to prayer, blesses the virtuous and faithful, and condemns the sinners, perchance to eternal torment. His wrath, Rev. Falwell tells us, was manifest on September 11, 2001:
... when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped make this happen'.
The personal, loving nature of this transcendent “parent” is testified to in “faith-promoting stories” told in most Theistic religions.
Pat Robertson, who assures us that he routinely converses with God, has often told how, in answer to his prayer, the Lord diverted a hurricane that was headed straight toward Robertson’s headquarters and university. However, he never explains why those who were hit by the diverted hurricane deserved their misfortune.
At our household, we are visited each month by “home teachers” from our local church (which we never attend), who almost always read us such stories. Thus we have heard of numerous prayers that have been answered by “our Heavenly Father.” In one story, a desperate mother was at a total loss at how to build a kite for her child. After a prayer, the Lord supplied the answer. Another faithful soul was reminded of the combination of a lock, and yet another, after a prayer, was able to restart a stalled car. We also heard a story of how a prayerful child was shown in a dream where to find a lost puppy. And many more. (Really! I’m not making this up!).
We listen to these stories patiently and without critical comment, for we see no reason to offend our visitors. They are kind and worthy people, and we value their friendship.
But on reflection, we find such stories to be outlandish, to say the least of it. Even sacrilegious. For in these stories, the Lord God Almighty, creator and ruler of the vast universe, is reduced to the status of a cosmic Google and “Mr. Fixit.” And a very selective one at that. For, while we are asked to believe that all these prayers were duly answered, at the same time millions died in abject poverty and of horrible diseases, their faithful prayers unanswered.
Granted, these stories are naive and childlike in the extreme. Even so, for the vast majority of adherents of the Abrahamic religions, God (or Yahweh, or Allah) is an exalted person who converses with His prophets, answers prayers, suspends physical laws to performs miracles, and manifests thereby His wrath, His love, and His compassion.
Notwithstanding the theologian’s insistence, as stated in the Westminster Confession, that God is immutable and “without body parts or passions.”
So which is it? A personal “Heavenly Father” who is actively engaged with the world, thus perpetually changing with the onset of events and in response to the prayers of the faithful? Or is He the perfect, immutable, infinite being of the theologians? Upon careful reflection neither alternative might be particularly attractive to those desperate to find and believe in an object of worship.
David Hume, in his “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,” clearly recognized this dilemma. On the one hand, conceive of God as an exalted person, and the Divine is reduced to human dimensions, with unsettling possibilities:
This world, for aught [one] knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard, and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance; it is the work of some dependent inferior deity, and is the object of derision to his superiors; it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity.... From the moment the attributes of the Deity are supposed finite, all these have place.
On the other hand:
I ask the theist, if he does not allow, that there is a great and immeasurable, because incomprehensible, difference between the human and the divine mind: the more pious he is, the more readily will he assent to the affirmative, and the more he will be disposed to magnify the difference.
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