God-Talk: "Supernatural" and The Meaning of God

If you care about God-talk, you might like to tune in to this conversation between me and Touchstone.

Touchstone (who is an atheist) and I are engaged in a debate on another forum about the definition of "god." 

I welcome his interaction here: he's very much a co-blogger, and more than that, a friend whose thinking and life I admire and respect enormously.

Defining what you mean by "god" is one of those things that a lot of people blip over in their rush to say something meaningful. 

But it's like that little twitch on the steering wheel that has low consequences at low speeds running over flat land; but enormous ones at 90 m.p.h. on a twisty mountain road.  And I think Touchstone and I agree that god-talk is a twisty mountain road, not a flat empty plains-state highway.Slow Down: People Live Around Here

Touchstone's thesis is that materialism is the only cogent or even semantically meaningful way to talk about reality.  That is, there is nothing gained in terms of meaning by introducing words like "spirit" or "god" into any conversation.  There might be utility in it: for instance, you can persuade more people to behave well with the threat of hell than you otherwise could.  But there are no "real" things that god-talk describes, nothing that we could have any knowledge of.

And I think that's essentially correct insofar as it goes.

But folded into his definition of God is the characteristic "Above and outside of nature taken as a whole."  

And so as we've discussed this, I've realized that I use the word "god" a little differently than he does.  For Touchstone, "god" means something that must be worshiped because He Exists.  (And obviously since a materialist has no way of verifying that He Does Exist, this releases Touchstone from the obligation to worship.)

I on the other hand don't believe that one worships God because God exists.  I believe that humans worship that which is worthy of worship.  That is, we "ascribe worth" to a quality in the real world.  We might personify it, we might find in it certain unaccounted for properties (miracles and other freaky shit)... but words like "supernatural" are to me pretty meaningless simply because I don't (and you don't) know what the boundaries of the natural are.

And the (modern) Christian dilemma of proving that The God Who Is is also Good strikes me as pretty futile.  But the enterprise of saying "that which is good is God" without meaning anything more or less than what you said (that is, without assuming necessarily that "god" means limitless power or ultimate triumph or anything of the kind) strikes me as rather freeing.  All we really ever meant when we said God was, "That which I believe is good."  Call it what you like: I'm not hung upon using the word "god" if it's been too cluttered by 2000 years of Christian theology.  It's still worship, and susceptible to greater and lesser forms of structure, liturgy, and community, one of which of course is science itself.

Freaky shit that happens in the presence of great belief is not ordinary.  But it is not necessarily unnatural.  The question to me really is, Is it (and the structures of belief, ethics, or practices that surround it) worthy of worship?  And if so, is this best served in terms of personification of those qualities or not?

In the case of the God Who Is Love, and the Love Which Is God (that is, a just, unsentimental, self-sacrificial, powerful love that also happens to produce superordinary events in the presence of great commitment), I think the answer to both questions is "Yes."  Or, if you prefer, "Yes," and "If it suits you," respectively.

Which means Love is God, and God is love.

Touchstone rejoins (rightly) that this is an affront to monotheism, and (perhaps rightly) therefore to Christianity.  I'm not sure that that's right, though.  Wherever monotheism comes from, I'm not sure that I see it univocally in the New Testament, so a great deal depends on how we're defining Christianity here: if that word "Christianity" refers to the worship through Christ of the solitary and dominant God of Nicea and the other ecumenical councils, I've got some serious difficulty pinning that metaphysic on Christianity.

And this gets (for me) to a serious problem with orthodox Christianity: the councils don't make sense, at least not measured against the profound insights that materialism offers about knowledge.  And on the basis of this, some have accused me of "redefining God" to suit my own purposes.

The New Testament itself, though, has a much more subtle balance than the Platonist rigidity of the councils allows for.  I've no brief to defend the New Testament, but insofar as it describes an experience of worship in the "real world" that is still intelligible today, as a literary historian I want to argue for its intelligence and intelligibility on this point.  And while it is certainly possible to find verses that argue precisely for the metaphysic Touchstone objects to, I think on balance that the New Testament urges, "Choose your god.  Declare what is worthy of worship.  Found a kingdom rooted on the worship of that god."