What is God?

The concept of God or a Divine Universal Being has been prevalent in human culture since the beginning of time, though through the millennia the “face” of this being and the name has changed.  As a species we have always sought a quantifying force that would explain everything to us, give us the meanings to life, give us the purpose for our being, comfort us in death and let us know that we are not alone.  The belief in the Divine may not simply be a wish inside of us for answers, according to geneticist Dean Hamer, the director of the Gene Structure and Regulation Unit at the U.S. National Cancer Institute, and author of the 2005 book The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into our Genes, it is a genetic coding in our very DNA.  His hypothesis is that a specific gene (VMAT2) predisposes humans towards spiritual or mystic experiences.  Dean Hamer has taken strong rationalism to the ultimate level with his position.  He is using absolute reason, science, to prove that humans must believe in God.  But true strong rationalism will contest his findings and ask the question “Does that prove God exists just because our genetics tell us we must believe in something?”  Strong rationalism must have that final answer.

But God is more than a genetic marker, more than a need or wish to many people.  I personally was raised in a very devout Baptist family.  We believed in God and never questioned, fideism was prevalent.  We never questioned the Bible, never questioned our beliefs with reason or facts.  With our family and beliefs it was very much “if we test God’s Word by logic or science, we are really worshiping science or logic rather than God!” as stated in Reason & Religious Belief by Peterson, Hasker, Reichenback & Basinger.  Faith was the only thing needed and we were expected to believe without question, without reason, but to leap blindly based on that faith.

As I matured I began to question my faith.  I had to know WHY I believed what I did.  There were too many unanswered questions in the blind faith and religion I had been raised in.  I began to question, not in the way of strong rationalism but in critical rationalism as I believed and still believe that the religious experience must in part be accepted on faith and that some things the human mind cannot fully grasp at our present evolutionary state.  In seeking answers to validate my faith, my view of God and the Divine Being changed, evolved.  I studied many of the world’s beliefs, and found myself drawn to Paganism with a mixture of feeling and reason.  I have found in my spiritual journey that I cannot detach one from the other.  I will always question and therefore must reason the course of my path, but I cannot deny my feelings or instincts.  It is my belief that true spirituality must be a balance of faith and reason, of feeling and knowing with mind and heart.  It is this balance that has led me to what I believe God is.

God is the One, the universal energy and being that connects and binds all things, the creator of the universe and life.  The One is something the human mind cannot fully grasp; a being of completeness is not something we can fully understand as we are so incomplete.  Therefore it is human nature to try to quantify and identify God into a personalized being.  For me it is the dual aspects of the God and the Goddess, the male and female, the two halves that I can relate to.  As a Pagan I take this even further and divide the God and the Goddess into multiple gods and goddesses, choosing polytheism, so that there is a god or goddess that I can relate to in every aspect of my life.  I do not, nor will I ever claim that my path is the ONE path that all should follow, but it is the current path that I must follow in my walk of faith.

But faith alone and even reason are not the deciding factors in establishing the validity of religion.  Religious experiences are what inspire continued faith and push one to know that there is a Divine. Dean Hamer’s hypothesis tells us that we are “hardwired” to have spiritual experiences.  If we are hardwired to have these experiences and that is a “fact” according to Hamer then religious experiences are fact even if they may differ from person to person, or faith to faith.  And it is these religious experiences that prove that God exists regardless of reason.  Some people can see a religious experience in a malformed potato, while others will look at the same potato and see nothing.  But if Hamer’s hypothesis is a fact then it means the religious experience of the potato is fact regardless of the perception of others viewing the potato.

But if we disregard Hamer’s God Gene we are left with the question of why religious experiences are not universal.  Some are.  Near death experiences recorded throughout the world and through history have shared a remarkable similarity regardless of the subjects’ social, economical or spiritual status.  Does this similarity prove that religious experience is real?  Would a strong rationalist accept this as fact?  One would posit that the similarities of the near death experience would prove that religious experience is not merely a perception but a fact.