What If There Isn't a God?

Davidson Loehr

20 October 2002

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Storytime – “The Great Stone Face”

Once there were people who lived in a valley at the foot of a large mountain. High at the top of the mountain there was a face, a great face carved in the stone. The people said it was the face of a god. And if you could see that face clearly, they said, it would show you who you were, and how you were meant to live your life.

That sounded easy enough, but it was not. For the face was in a part of the mountain impossible to climb, and so high up clouds or fog almost always obscured it. Furthermore, the face seemed to look differently in different light, and no two people ever saw it exactly the same.

But it was important, this face, because if only it could be seen clearly-well, then you would know who you really were, and who you were meant to be. And so the people studied what they could see of the face, as best they could, and they told others what they thought they saw.

Stories even arose, stories about times that the great face had actually spoken to someone, and what the great face had said. People wrote these things down, and tried to make a list of do’s and don’t for living, but no two lists ever completely agreed. Still the people told their stories, and listened to the stories of others, because after all there was so much at stake, if only they could get it right.

And as they believed they understood the message of the great face in the stone, they tried to live in the ways they felt they were meant to live. Usually, this meant they tried to be kind to one another, to be good neighbors, to work hard, to make their little valley a better place for their having been there, and so on, as you would expect. There were always a few, of course, who did not care much about making the valley a better place. They lived to chase after power or wealth or other things like that, and they too, if pressed on it, would argue that this was the way the great face of stone had intended things to be.

From time to time, as you would also expect, there were people who said that all of this was just nonsense, that there was no face at all in the stones above, that these were just these silly myths. And it was certainly true that if there was a face up there in the rocks, it was very faint, so faint that you couldn’t even be sure you were seeing anything at all.

Yet others would then say that without the face, and the stories about the face, the people in the valley might not have been so eager to be decent to one another, and then what kind of world would they have? After all, you needed something to live for, and some kind of rules to live by.

But as any visitor or other objective person could see, if there was any face at all up there, it was too vague to be clear about, even on a sunny day. All you could be sure of was that the people had these stories, and they lived by them. Should there be an expedition to the top of the mountain to try and see once and for all what the great face of stone was trying to say? Or should they instead be paying more attention to their stories, and their lives? If they could never see the great face clearly, then all they had were their stories, and their efforts to live well together. And if someone swore that the great face had indeed spoken clearly but the way it wanted them to live made no sense, either to individuals or to the community, then who would have cared what the great stone face said, anyway?

Well, as you can tell, this is not settled, neither within that valley nor elsewhere. And yet there is something here of importance, and we cannot seem to stop thinking and talking about it.

Prayer:

We use words to move us toward an awareness beyond the reach of words. We offer prayers not to appease a powerful creature, but to awaken ourselves, to take ourselves and our lives more seriously, to remind us of our higher possibilities and nobler callings.

We pray we can feel safe enough to remove our masks, and the hard crust created by our fears.

Let us get in touch again with our soft center, that place of hope, doubt, vulnerability and possibility.

Let us be open to those softer voices within us: the pleadings of our most tender mercies, the inspiration of the angels of our better nature.

Words fail us in prayer: these things don’t have clear names, though they come from real yearnings.

But we don’t have to know what to call them, so long as we can call them forth.

Let us call forth those gentle hopes and tender mercies, and say “Be with us here, be with us now, be with us always, and let us live in ways that are worthy of you.”

Amen.

SERMON – What If There Isn’t a God?

This is one of those sermon titles so ambitious you wonder if it could possibly be serious. Yet it’s dealing with a confusing word.

You have probably been asked at one time or other whether you “believe in God.” Pollsters love it; everybody writing about religion seems to think it is the most important question to ask.

But the question is incoherent, as are answers to it. It is the oddest thing: we think this “God” business is so important, yet nobody ever wants to say just what they mean by the word. That’s the elephant in the room of religious discussion, and has been for a few centuries: what exactly do you mean by the word “God”? Once that’s clear, it will be pretty clear whether many people would “believe in” that sort of a god. Let’s just take three definitions for the word “God,” you’ll see the question of “belief in God” dissolves once you’ve settled the definition:

God is a physical being with kneecaps, toes and ear lobes. He occupies space and has weight; a video camera could record him. He lives somewhere where we can’t see him, probably “up above the sky.” I don’t think I know anyone who believes in this God. The better theologians have always considered this kind of literalism to be vulgar.

God isn’t a being, isn’t physical, you can’t see him/it, but is still objectively present as very real energy – and not just psychic energy. If we could get the right scientific instrument, this God-energy could make the needle jump. Once this is spelled out, I’m not sure many would want to defend this one either. It would certainly not be the “God” discussed in the bible. And it would be hard to imagine projecting anthropomorphic attributes to such a pure-energy-God. And then, why would this sort of God care about us? It might have an attraction for electromagnetism or gravity, but why (and how) would it care about a carbon-based life form on an obscure planet?

“God” is a symbol, a metaphor, an idea, a concept. It takes no more space than truth, beauty, justice, love or “America” do. Yet it is profoundly important, in spite of the fact that it is just a concept. Most of our most powerful words are just concepts: love, truth, justice, America. God-language isn’t about a heavenly Critter. It’s an idiom of expression, one way of talking about the enduring human concerns.

By the time you get to the third definition, almost everyone I know would subscribe. But now the question “Do you believe in God?” has no meaning. It isn’t about believing in some “thing”; it’s about recognizing that idiom of expression as a significant one.

So learning about God isn’t like exploring outer space in search of a great cosmic being with whom we might sit down and talk about the meaning of life. It is more about exploring inner space.

Religious stories tell of hundreds of different gods. But we don’t live in a world where hundreds of gods walk by us on the street. We live, instead, in a world of stories people have made up about the gods. Many of them are great stories: stories about gods who created the world, created us, who interact with us in various ways — not the physical way we interact with each other during coffee hour, but the way our conscience or our love for someone interacts with us and affects our lives.

But if there isn’t a God in the sense of a Guy in the Sky – and I don’t know anyone of any religion who really wants to argue that there is a guy in the sky – then all we have are our stories, which become terribly important.

It’s like the story of the Great Stone Face. People may quibble about whether it’s literally there, but nobody quibbles about the fact that what is most important is learning how to live more fully and responsibly. I want to weave together some ideas from wildly different places to help sketch the picture I’m trying to make for you.

The first comes from the writer Jorges Borges. He wrote something I use at most memorial services. He says we die twice. The first time is when our body dies and is no longer present. But the second and final death comes, he says, only when there is no one left to tell our story.

The same is true of Gods. Gods also have two deaths. The first death comes when our understanding of the world no longer makes a place for the gods to exist except as ideas and concepts. So the deities of ancient Greece have died their first death, but not their second death. 2400 years or so after people stopped taking those gods literally, we still tell their stories, and the names of their gods and mythic figures still provide us with the names for our space programs (Apollo) and millions of Americans who would never think of “believing in” the old Greek gods know and love their stories, and use them to help make a better kind of sense out of our lives.

The second death comes when even the ideas and concepts are no longer compelling.

In Western religion, we have been between the first and second death of God for a couple centuries. As a being, a critter, God has nowhere to live now. Yet the stories, poems, music, prayers devoted to the idea of God are still with us, and for many of us still quite powerful and precious. And so it feels important to us to tell these stories.

In the Hindu tradition, one of the two central stories is called the Ramayana. I’m reading it now and already, there has been a scene where Rama entrusts his story to a character called Hanuman. He grants Hanuman conditional immortality, meaning that Hanuman will live as long as he keeps Rama’s story alive. When he stops telling the stories, he no longer lives.

You have heard of Sheherezade, and her 1001 Arabian nights of telling stories. She told stories to a deranged king who would have killed her in the morning except that he wanted to hear the next installment. She was no dope, and continued the installments for 1001 nights until she had finally softened his heart and converted his soul. Sheherezade told her stories in order to live. But we are all under the spell of Sheherezade; we all tell our stories in order to live, and in order to keep our gods and high ideals alive.

The concept of God found in the Old Testament has a kind of life cycle. It began, as biblical scholars have long noted, as a projection of a tribal chief, the man who makes the rules, sets the boundaries, and offers protection to the obedient and punishment to the errant. The covenant between God and the Hebrew people was modeled on ancient Hittite treaties between minor rulers and their people, in which the rulers promised protection to their people as long as the people didn’t follow after other competing rulers.

By the time of Christianity, people spoke as though this God existed up above the sky, in heaven, which was a place Jesus could go “up” to and where we might all somehow “go” after we died. In the first century, most believed the universe was a small affair, and heaven wasn’t all that far away: that anthropomorphic kind of God had a place to live in their worldview.

But for centuries now, we have known there is nothing above the sky except infinite space at temperatures near absolute zero. Western theologians have been saying for centuries that the word “God” doesn’t exist in that way.

In other words, that God has already died his first death, he can no longer exist as a being in the world as we know it to be made. That leaves the stories.

The stories are entrusted to the religions, or at least claimed by them. Most religions teach the stories of their God as though they were true, as many of you know. It’s as though God made these pronouncements long ago before human history, and they were faithfully recorded, we preachers now tell you what God said and wants, and you obey – and pay us for it.

In part one of this two-part series, I joked about the better divinity schools having some hidden and secret courses that we take that tell us the answers that you don’t know, so we can sit here and tell you the secrets on Sunday. There is something to this. There are things you learn in any good and extended study of religion that fundamentally change what you once thought religion was about. There are lots of “Aha!” kinds of experiences that seem to reveal some of the best-guarded secrets of religion.

I hate to risk punishment from the union of those who protect religious secrets from the people in the pews, but I’ll tell you one of those stories that I learned, that helped me understand how religion, belief, and gods work.

It’s the story of an Australian tribe that Joseph Campbell reported on, a tribe where the “bull-roarer” plays a major role. The bull-roarer, if you’ve never seen or heard one, is a long flat slotted board tied to a rope. When you swing it in a big circle above your head, it makes an absolutely eerie kind of sound, a kind of ominous moaning.

The bull-roarers were sacred and secret objects. Only the male elders of the tribe were allowed to have them, and everyone was constrained to keep their existence a secret, under the penalty of death. In one case, a chief’s young daughter found the bull-roarer hidden under his sleeping roll, brought it out and asked what it was: the chief killed her. So this was a terribly powerful, sacred and secret object. It played a central role in holding the whole world together for the tribe.

When the male elders decided that their people were straying from the behavioral rules they thought were right, they would sneak out into the woods at night with their bull-roarers. Then, in the middle of the night, they would swing them and the night sky would be filled with that low and awful rumbling and moaning. It would terrify the children, and the women would pretend to be scared (though, really, they knew the story).

The next day, the elders would call the village together and explain to them why the gods were mad and what they wanted the people to do. The bull-roarer was the symbol and instrument of absolute authority in that tribe.

The magical, amazing moment came during the secret initiation rites during which boys became men. When a boy reached the right age – about 13 to 15 – some of the elders, dressed in scary masks, would come into the village from the woods and kidnap the boy. His mother would pretend to protect him, but in the end the men always carried the boy off.

They took the boy deep into the woods and tied him to a table. Then the masked men performed bloody initiation rituals of circumcision and subincision on the frightened boys.

Finally came The Moment. An elder dipped the end of the bull-roarer in the boy’s blood, and brought up very close to his face so he could see it. Then the man removed his mask, revealing a face the boy recognized. And he whispered into the boy’s ear the magical secret: “We make the noises!”

Without knowing that secret, the boy could never become a man. And the same is true in the study of religion.

Learning about religion is a lot like this – though it’s usually far less bloody. As you read theologians and philosophers and preachers, you begin to realize that the words you’re reading are not the words of gods, but the words of men, of theologians with their own agendas, their own limitations. That’s why you have to read so much: most people only get a little bit of it right, and you have to piece together for yourself your own mature picture of what a word like God needs to mean.

What you learn, in other words, are two important things. One is that we make the noises. People who preach, pray, write about religion, make the noises that define religion. You can do this yourself. Try writing a prayer to God, and you will find you have created the image of what, for you, is God. We make the noises.

And the second thing you learn is that there is something behind the stories about our gods that is very real, and which we are charged with protecting. A good minister knows there are things in life worth believing in, ideals that give life and raise us up, and that we must try to protect, articulate and advance these. Yes, we know we make the noises, but we believe that if we can learn to do it well, the noises will be in the service of values, ideals and allegiances that have the power to give more and better life to us, to those we love, and to our world.

This isn’t only about the gods. This is also the way it is with most of our other important ideals: love, justice, even America are things that exist as ideas, concepts, stories, but not as things that can speak for themselves. And look at all the stories we invent for these things.

A million love songs teach us what love is, says, does, and wants. Cupid, that little critter we made up with the magical arrows, shoots someone with an arrow and they fall in love with the first person they see. Cupid didn’t tell us that. This story was not an eyewitness account. Long ago, some poet said that’s how it seems love works.

And the American symbol of justice is Lady Justice, blindfolded, holding scales in which she weighs – and our lawyers and courts, as her servants, are to weigh – the facts impartially, to give us justice. In Washington she’s made of stone, a stone-face. Downtown on our own state Capital, the Goddess of Liberty stands on top with her sword and her Lone Star, and everything that goes on in that building is, according to the myth, supposed to serve her. But she doesn’t tell us how to do that. For that, we turn to the laws we have made: the stories we have made about how to do justice.

The word “America” is like this too. There’s nothing you can point to and call it America and ask it what it’s like and what it wants. It’s a symbol, and the noises are made by us, by those who presume to speak for America.

And the stories we tell about God are the same. Some tell stories about a God who wants war, wants obedience, dispenses punishment, and is a terrible fearsome thing. Others tell stories about a God to whom war is destroying his creations, slaughtering his children. The real America never speaks up to correct us, and neither does God. All we have are the stories. We make the noises.

If there really were a God in the sense of a being more powerful than any we could imagine, we would all know it. The rules would be clear, the punishments would be clear, and the bloody battles between the theological arrogance of Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Jews could never have arisen. There couldn’t be hundreds of thousands of different beliefs, because God, the Goddess or the gods would have settled it, if they cared at all.

But if we make the noises, if the gods are ideas and concepts rather than beings or critters, then the world would look as it does today.

We would spin out our stories like a spider spins a web, making it from what is inside of it and connecting to the world around it. We would live in terms of our stories, spun from yearnings and hopes deep inside of us, and connected to the world around us. Then, like Hanuman and Scheherezade, we would tell our stories in order to live.

And then everything would depend not on the gods, but on the quality of our stories. For now our guiding myths would take on the role and the power of gods. The stories would create our worlds, give us our meaning and purpose. And competing stories that denied or ignored ours would be seen as dangerous rivals, threats to our world and our way of life. Those who believe differently would be dangerous enemies of the story that holds our world together, enemies who must be controlled or destroyed.

Unless” unless our stories were large enough to include all others as our beloved equals. And that would mean that attending to the quality of our most powerful stories and symbols is one of the most important responsibilities we have.

It would mean that when people degrade a word like “God” by turning it into a mean and hateful thing, we must speak up. We must say “No, whatever the word “God” means, it must mean more than something so petty.”

The same would be true of our other powerful words and stories. When “justice” is defined as something the poor can not hope to afford, we must speak up to say No, whatever Lady Justice means, it must be more inclusive than that.

And when “America” is defined as a belligerent and imperialistic nation claiming the divine right to invade and destroy weaker nations at will, we must speak up to say “No, an America worth loving may not be reduced to that level of warlike, bloody arrogance.”

If the gods were real, it would be our job to choose carefully and serve only the noblest and best among them. If they were merely powerful ideas and concepts, then it would be our job to choose and serve only the noblest and best stories.

Either way, our task is to develop an absolute relationship to absolute things, a relative relationship to relative things, and to learn how to tell the difference. And either way, it is our move: both alone and together, it is our move.