{"id":5159,"date":"2013-11-17T09:02:05","date_gmt":"2013-11-17T14:02:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/?p=5159"},"modified":"2015-05-14T16:22:55","modified_gmt":"2015-05-14T20:22:55","slug":"atheistic-belief-in-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/atheistic-belief-in-god\/","title":{"rendered":"Atheistic belief in “God”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Princess-bride-image\"Not “inconceivable<\/a>” – but rather, “God.”<\/p>\n

Check out this interesting post, The Dread God Roberts<\/a><\/strong>,\u00a0at our friend Dr. James McGrath’s blog\u00a0Exploring Our Matrix<\/a>. (Which amazingly, just had its 10th birthday. He was blogging way before it was cool.) \u00a0Dr. McGrath describes himself as a Progressive Christian.<\/p>\n

I commented over there, and he’s replied. The part of his post that got me going was this.<\/p>\n

Tillich\u2019s emphasis is that God is not a being<\/strong>, one among others but really advanced. If that term means anything less than Being itself, encompassing all of Reality, then the term denotes a god and not God, and our worship is idolatrous.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He mentions this view positively, without quite endorsing it.<\/p>\n

To me, this is not a Christian view of God<\/strong>, and isn’t even any sort\u00a0of monotheism. In fact, this type of view has always competed<\/em> with the monotheisms. Isn’t it obvious that the Christian God is a He, not an It<\/strong>? “God” in the Bible has human friends, loves and hates, has knowledge and plans, sent his Son, and wants to be obeyed. James’ reply, in part:<\/p>\n

The Reality that encompasses every he, she, and it does not necessarily need to be thought of as “it” as opposed to transcending even the appropriateness of such pronouns.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To me, this type of view – and I say this not<\/em> to abuse, but only to describe – is a kind of atheism<\/strong>. I mean, believing in God (in the context of any Abrahamic religion) is believing in a great and powerful self, the creator of the cosmos, and this this view entails that there is no such being. There is, on this sort of view, which I have called Ultimism<\/strong>, an Ultimate – a reality which is somehow more basic than, and which in some sense lies behind the physical world. But that being is denied to be a self. This is not naturalistic<\/em> atheism<\/strong>, to be sure (which is what people most often mean by “atheism” nowadays), but it is atheism.<\/p>\n

James makes clear, though, that we should go beyond denying<\/strong> that God is a self.<\/p>\n

But why posit that the Ultimate is either personal – which quickly gets one into inappropriate anthropomorphism – or impersonal<\/strong> – which suggests that the Ultimate is in fact less than we are? Why not accept that the reality of God must be so far beyond what either of those terms could refer to that we simply cannot grasp the nature of God?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are a host of interesting questions here, which deserve more than a quick reply. Still, here’s the quick reply<\/strong>, as this post has grown long.<\/p>\n