Jesus taught that “the Kingdom of God is at hand”. But how do we get there? Do we need a passport, or apply for a visa? Do we have to pass an entrance test to become a citizen?
Anselm described God as supreme goodness, and John’s gospel tells us that God is love; “But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love. And if God is love, love is God.
But God is more than that, he has ‘person-ness’ that I describe in “Four steps of reason leading to a personal God” . So we can think of love as part of his realm, his kingdom. Therefore to live in love is to live in the Kingdom of God. Every act of goodness or love is by definition carried out in the Kingdom of God. Every time a person choses to act kindly to a neighbour, they are in the Kingdom of God. Every time they choose not to respond in a loving, good way they are choosing to live outside the Kingdom of God. It doesn’t matter whether they call themselves Christian, Moslem, Hindu or atheist – acting is love is acting in the Kingdom of God.
Because it is our choice whether we act, or live, in the Kingdom of God there are no border controls. God does not make any demands, or set any tests for those who want to live there. We simply decide. I choose to love, therefore by definition I choose to live in the Kingdom of God.
But by definition, if I choose to be selfish then I am not in the Kingdom of God, because selfishness is not love, and therefore is not part of the Kingdom of God. If I live selfishly, I am in the Kingdom of Me.
Clearly we move in and out of the Kingdom of God every hour of every day. Perhaps we all need to be a little more conscious of which Kingdom we want to live in.
free will
Four steps of reason leading to a personal God
As I begin this post, I ask myself “Am I deciding what to write?” You might think that a strange question with an obvious answer, but if I were to have a materialist view of things then I would struggle to answer with a ‘yes’. At the heart of the problem is the question of whether I have free will or not. Am I able to exert any choice on any decision (such as what to write) or is my action simply a result of the state of the molecules in my brain at the particular time when I think I am making a choice?
If there is nothing but matter, and matter behaves according to strict laws then there is no scope for me, or you, to make a free choice about anything. Holders of the materialist view have argued that those who believe in free will need to demonstrate a mechanism before free will can be accepted to exist.
I do not subscribe to that view of things. A bumblebee flies even if I am unable to demonstrate the mechanism.
Other disagreements with such a view are subjective. Whilst I recognise that many of my actions might indeed be simply as a result of my brain state at a given time, I identify situations where I stop myself behaving according to ‘habit’ and consciously choose to behave differently.
From a practical viewpoint, our whole society is built on the basis that we have free will. If I have no free will to be able to choose how to behave, then what right has society to imprison me for murder? I would have had no choice but to kill my neighbour – it would have been an action that simply resulted from the chemical configuration in my brain at the time.
So for all practical and from all subjective points of view, I accept that we have free will.
That is step one; that we have free will.
The fact that I can call an opinion subjective inherently means that there is an “I” that is choosing to have an opinion. Similarly, I speak about personal experience which requires there to be a person. My personal subjective view is that there is indeed an “I” who is considering the facts and deciding what to write. Descartes’ famous statement “I think therefore I am” argues that the only thing I know is that there is an “I” who thinks, and therefore “I” must exist – even if everything else is just my imagination.
So step two is that there is an “I” who exists.
The next thing to consider is how I exist (with the proviso that my physical being might be a delusion – but I still exist). I exist because I have the ability to exist; something is causing me to exist. I am not causing myself to exist, it is something apart from me that is ensuring that I exist. Some might call that something ‘the laws of physics’, but I shall choose here to call that something God.
That is step three. There is something that sustains me (and everything else) that can be called God.
The final step is to ask whether it is reasonable to imagine that this something (God) could sustain an “I”, who has free-will (which must operate outside the laws of physics) without itself having an “I-ness” to it. Can the physical properties of a human being, which are sustained by God, ‘create’ an “I-ness” that God does not have itself? Can “I-ness” be dependent on the sustaining power of God and yet above and separate from God? And if not, then the power that sustains us must also have an “I-ness” about it.
Step four: the power that sustains us has itself the characteristics of “I-ness”: it is a person God.
Proof of God?
A friend asked “Let us suppose it was absolutely certain there was no god but many people honestly believed there was – how different would the world look today?”
I could answer that if there was no God there would be no universe and no people to observe it.
Clearly, as we are both intelligent people we must be talking about something different when we say the word ‘god’.
The God that I conclude exists is a creator, and a God who sustains the universe. Clearly the universe exists and continues to exist. Ask a physicist why and he will probably say ‘because of the laws of physics’. A rose is a rose by any other name, so at minimum my God is the laws of physics – we just choose to give it different names.
Perhaps my friend’s question is going beyond that definition of God. Perhaps he is asking about a God who has ‘character’, a ‘me’-ness that I have. (I know that I exist, there is an essence that is ‘me’). What would things be like if there was not a God who had an essence of ‘me’?
It’s actually not easy to define what ‘I’ am. Science of course shows that my brain has massively complex computational ability, but that doesn’t really help. Literature and philosophy, and our daily experience tells me that there are things like love, joy, peace, thoughts, free will. Let’s consider these as parts of ‘me’, and think – what if there were not a god who also had these characteristics.
But once again, the same sort of argument applies. God is love, joy, peace. Therefore without God there would be no love, joy or peace. There would be no literature, there would be no mathematics, no equations, there would be not science.
Free will though is slightly different. We know we have free will, and yet it is inexplicable by science. It is inconsistent with the laws of physics. Free will seems a bit of a paradox. If God is the laws of physics, and free will is inconsistent with the laws of physics then how can that work? A rational explanation is that free will is something that is a gift of God, that is not constrained by the laws of physics. Therefore we begin to see what would be different in my friends question. Without God we would have no free will, we would not be able to choose right from wrong, we would simply be robots who respond to stimuli.
But to explore the question further. My last paragraph introduced right and wrong. We know that there is right and wrong – even if we don’t always know what is right and what is wrong. Right and wrong are different from free will, so let’s suppose that we were able to have free will but had no knowledge of right and wrong. Clearly right and wrong exist. Goodness and evil exist. And yes, my definition of God includes ultimate goodness. So without God we would have no constraint on what we do, we would simply live to serve ourselves. The world would be governed simply by whoever was strongest. We would be like most of the rest of the animal kingdom. States like North Korea would be everywhere and left unchecked. Anarchy would reign. The world would be a very different place to live.
So have I proved God exists? I think so (but I would) – simply because my definition of God includes everything that we know exists. I define that it is not possible for anything to exist without God, and so anything which exists must be God.
My friend asked what if God didn’t exist but people believed that he did. I hope that I have shown that such a question is not directly answerable, it is like the “can god make a thing so heavy that he cannot lift it” question, or “can God make something that doesn’t exist”. But perhaps I’ve also been able to answer the questions behind the question. Will it satisfy my friend? I doubt it. If any of us really doesn’t want to change our views then no amount of logical reasoning will make a difference. But perhaps others will find the discussion interesting….
If you found this post interesting you might also like:
https://philhemsley.wordpress.com/2013/05/03/goodness-me/
https://philhemsley.wordpress.com/2012/12/29/the-god-of-science/
Can God answer prayer in a universe that operates according to the laws of physics?
We believe that the universe operates according to the laws and equations of physics. And then we ask, “if the behaviour of the universe is predictable according to the laws of physics, then is there any way in which God can ‘do’ anything; how can God answer prayer?”
Perhaps in the same way that we ‘do’ things? As I type this, I am influencing the material world with my mind, with my will. Although we all speculate based on different quantities of data, nobody knows how we do it. We can trace pathways through the brain, down nerves and so on, but we still don’t know how ‘we’ operate with free will or exercise that free will.
Some claim that we don’t, that free will is a delusion. But they don’t really believe it – we all behave as if we have a degree of free will. Clearly we don’t decide everything our bodies do, but we still do decide some things. We exercise our free will daily. How could it be otherwise? If free will were a delusion, then if we were truly able to believe that it were an illusion we would realise that there is no point to anything at all and we would give up all our searchings, all our science, all our religion Yet we would not be able to give it up, because we would not have the free will to be able to! And if someone claims that free will is a delusion, how have they come to that conclusion? If they are correct then clearly they cannot have come to the conclusion themselves, but only had the delusion of coming to that conclusion …. So the claim that freewill is a delusion is contrary to all evidence, and by as outlined above completely un-provable. It is outside of science and outside of reason. Therefore if pursuit of the truth is to have any meaning then we must conclude that we have free will.
So in the same way that we, with our free will can operate in the material world, controlled by the laws of physics, God too can operate. There is thus no scientific reason to suppose that God cannot answer prayer. (If he exists of course!)
Thoughts from a Minimalist Christian 