God Insists

Two quests for God seem equally misguided: The quest to abolish God, and the quest to establish God. 

On one hand, those who seek to abolish God make God merely a figment of human imagination and subjectivity. God is the projection of human hopes and fears onto the universe as a “Big Other”, and thus we must abolish God just as surely as we must abolish other remnants of our intellectual childhood, such as the tooth fairy or Santa Claus or the monster under the bed. Thus they gather their evidence and make their case for the absence of God. But perhaps the entity they are disproving is a category error. 

On the other hand, those who seek to establish God want to make God into an objective fact, a Supreme Being above and beyond all other beings. God is like other beings, but is the biggest and most impressive Being, unbounded in knowledge and power and goodness. This God is outside us and over us— the most invasive and exclusive interpretation of “Our Father who art in Heaven”— and we must submit our thoughts and desires to God. Or else! Thus they gather their evidence and make their case for the existence of God. But perhaps the entity they are “proving” is a category error. 

Perhaps God is neither a subjective construction nor an objective fact. Perhaps God neither exists nor does not exist, but rather is the Ultimate Value which insists all else exists. God thus neither “is” nor “is not”. God is ought. God is should. God is must. God is value. Ultimate Value. The Infinite Value which gives value to all values, and calls all of existence into being by the power of “ought”. As Genesis says, God is the force of “Let there be!” Life and Light ought to happen. They should happen. They must happen. And thus Eternal and Unconditional Value calls all temporal facts into being through the unfolding dance of time and contingency. 

God is not an object beyond us. Neither is God an idea created within us. God is the ought which structures our entire experience of existence, by which we evaluate the quality of our lives. This Ultimate Value is the very framework which makes conscious experience possible, because in order to be conscious we must be able to stand outside our own experience and evaluate it from beyond. The infinite gap between “is” and “ought” is precisely the subjective space which allows us to be conscious evaluators of our experience. Without this gap of transcendent value, true consciousness or meta cognition is impossible. Consciousness thus relies on the evaluative dialectic between what “is” and whether it “ought” to be that way. By such evaluation we become fully aware of the quality of what we experience. 

Thus while God is Real, God does not “exist” as an object in a universe of objects, but rather God “insists” as the Self within all selves who is the value by which we are able to evaluate reality and thus become conscious of reality. God is the Real which insists all reality exists as an expression of the Ultimate Value and Infinite Potential within Godself. Life exists because every potential within Godself ought to become real in order to actualize these potentials as objective realities. And as that Life unfolds, it actualizes the ought which is God, who gives value and meaning to all living things. This is part of what it means that God is Love. Love values all life and desires it’s full unfolding. Love is the “ought” which inspires us to work for the full flourishing of Life in all of its diversity. And Love enjoys the experience of Life as it unfolds, embracing and treasuring it in all of its vibrant beauty and peculiar particularity. 

Thus humanity will never grow beyond a need for God. Because humanity will always need an Ultimate Value to direct all powers and energies and efforts toward. Humanity may grow beyond God as a source of explanation because scientific inquiry allows us to find the answers for ourselves. Humanity may even grow beyond God as a source of power because humans may become gods with the power to shape and mold and create reality as they will. But the direction of our “will” requires a value— an ought— which determines the ends toward which our power and knowledge are directed toward. We cannot be our own ends. We are always directing every choice, every creation, every discovery toward some other end. Those ends may be pleasure or power or praise or possession or rage or conquest or destruction or death. Or our end may be creation and health and virtue and life and relationship. But we all serve something beyond self which transcends self, in which the self finds fulfillment and meaning and purpose and Ultimate Value. Thus, while we may outgrow God as Supreme Power or Infinite Knowledge, we will always be dependent on God as Ultimate Value. 

So what is God? We all have a God in that which we value above all else. And lest we make idols in our own image, it behoves us to seek to bring our ultimate values in line with the Ultimate Value from whom all reality flows. And the greatest clue about whether our ultimate values are in line with Ultimate Value is summarized by Jesus, who spoke of God’s goal for us as “abundant life”. God is that Ultimate Value which seeks to actualize every life-giving potential within each person individually, and within all of us collectively, so that we all experience maximal, abundant, overflowing life forever. May our heart and mind, our imagination and life, our culture and society, be brought into harmony with that Ultimate Value of Life and Love which alone is rightly called “God”. After all, God insists we do precisely this.