When I was struggling through the last months of my faith, I turned to process theology and more liberal, less literalistic conceptions of God and religion. As I did so, I found myself in a strange intellectual and emotional world where the walls of orthodoxy and tradition seemed to vanish. Indeed, even the “floor” of my Christian faith seemed removed, leaving me in a state of suspension, in which I relied only upon my own experiences and thoughts, and the experiences and thoughts of other disenfranchised “believers” to guide me. At some point, I remarked to my pastor that my endeavors, without the crutch of strict doctrine, left me feeling like I was “making it all up.” I could not cling to the God-images of my tradition because they were (and continue to be) simply incompatible with my intellectual life. They were unbelievable, irrational, unconvincing. And so, with his encouragement, I began to ask myself, “Why shouldn’t I pursue these new images of God, even if their source is my own intuition and deep reflection?”
In the end, I abandoned all notions of God-as-literal-reality. But along the way, I came face to face with a thought that continues to scratch at the periphery of my spiritual life: If religion is created, and God-images are the explanatory projections of other human beings’ experiences of the “something-more” of life, then why are ancient myths treated as more valid than modern ones? Why should the modern skeptic (given that she has sufficient interest in the subject, and that she is dissatisfied with a purely secular ideology) not engage in crafting their own conceptions of what it might mean to say “God?”
I must admit that I am sometimes deeply dissatisfied with the answers that many modern atheists provide to questions of existence, meaning, and fulfillment. Some days, I hate being an atheist because it can be a painful and depressing concept to think that this is all there is–this being a purely biological and evolutionary existence in which there is no intrinsic meaning, no intrinsic hope. Only a brief and difficult journey that ends in nothing more than annihilation. It is a crippling thought, at least for me, to think that all that I am, and all that my loved ones are, will simply cease to be. That my wife Mackenzie, with all her personality and internal beauty and intellectual brilliance, will one day vanish into a sea of nonexistence, with no part of her carrying on into something else. It seems like such an unimaginable waste.
But, as I stand in that moment of emotional and existential uncertainty and consider turning back toward belief, again I am confronted with a problem: as much as I may feel unsatisfied with the outcome of a purely atheistic ideological system, I still cannot return to religion because there is simply too much superstitious and unbelievable baggage that accompanies the world of religious explanation. Heaven and hell, angels and demons, sinners and righteous separated out by an all-seeing, all-knowing God-figure–all of it rests totally beyond the realm of the acceptable for me. To believe again in these things would require a complete abandonment of my intellectual life. And that is something I am unwilling to do.
Perhaps the answer to my existential dilemma lies in the willingness to engage in imaginative rethinking of spiritual explanations. God, for me, is not (and very likely can never be again) a literal being, a personal force, or an internal coach which prompts and directs life toward some noble end. And the afterlife, similarly, cannot be reasonably conceived of as a literal place in which the souls of the dead, despite the total cessation of all processes that made them alive, mingle and carry on. Does this mean that God must mean nothing to me? That the afterlife must be conceived of only as a void? Must it be one or the other–accept wholesale either religion or atheism?
I do not think so. Maybe, if one finds the courage to entertain notions that the transcendence we experience as humans is more than psychological mind-tricks, one can find a sense of satisfaction in these difficult questions of existence. Maybe, if I am willing to “make God up” a bit, to look beyond the apparent and obvious and to welcome the sensation of mystery in the universe, I can find a creative outlet for the haunting sense that there must be something more. That life is not simply a terrifying tragedy which sees us wandering through events trying to find their meaning, developing as interesting and potentially beautiful human beings, only to meet our final and total end in eradication.
I do not think that God, as this figure has traditionally been explained, is the answer to our spiritual longing. I do not think that Heaven is the solution to the tragedy of death. But I am willing to entertain the idea that what is now apparent to us, in this scientific age, is not the ultimate answer. I do not think it is mandatory, given our current knowledge, to conclude that we are nothing but genetic machines. That life leads to death, and that beyond death there is nothing whatsoever.
Bruce Ledewitz posits that the biblical authors looked at their world, at their experiences, and labeled the something-more of life “God.” God was their answer to the questions that haunted them. For them as well as for us, “Maybe God just meant they did not know.”
Unfound Places 