Living Without God

The easiest way downtown from our house is along Barbur Boulevard. You are going mostly north on Barbur—it weaves a good bit because of the Willamette River just below and the West Hills just above—and just to your right as you pass the Seventh Day Adventist Church, you encounter this sign.

I laughed out loud. I really love this sign. I deeply respect the questions underlying it, since I bear most of them myself. When I imagine myself in conversation with the folks at the Center for Inquiry, I don’t imagine it going very well. Still, when I saw the sign, I felt a wave of collegiality come over me.

First, these guys are in favor of inquiry. I like inquiry. Let’s get to it.

Then, “you don’t need God” for any of the four specified actions. I want to get to the specified actions later, but I want to think now about the position they are attacking. Someone is arguing, apparently, that you need God. Note the instrumental approach. The covenant God made with Israel selected then to be—Tevye’s memorable complaint aside—a chosen people and it was their delight and privilege to be that people. Is there a “need” there I am missing? The gospel, in its most gentrophilic form (occasionally, there just isn’t the word you really want, and you have to dip into the etymological tool kit for your own) form tells the new gentile Christians, “You, who were no people {at all) are now God’s people.” Any desperate need there?

In the perspective of the Center for Inquiry, God is a utility. God is asserted by some to be necessary to some of the most deeply human actions we are capable of: hoping, caring, loving, and living.

You can hope without God. There are some things you can’t hope for without God—maybe I should pause here to note that the sign imagines a “God/god/gods” with no context at all, but I am presuming God as He is known to Christians, so these remarks do not bear at all on God/god/gods” as He or She or They are known to other traditions. You can’t hope to be accepted as “family,” of course. You can’t hope for the “life from above,” as Jesus described it—not because there is anything wrong with Jesus’ description, but only because there is no “life from above” if there is no “above.”

There are other things you can’t hope for either, but I want only to pause here to note that I will have nothing to say here about attaining heaven or avoiding hell. Those are both instrumentalist notions of God, like the notion held by the Center for Inquiry and by all the villains in C. S. Lewis’s compendium of instrumentalists, The Great Divorce.

You can care without God. You can even care deeply about other people without God. Altruism is a part of our genetic inheritance, along with homicidal rage. We wouldn’t have become what we call “human” without learning to care for others without concern for our own welfare. If Christians want to make a case that “caring” and God are connected, we will have to get to doing the kind of caring that wouldn’t otherwise get done.

You can love without God. Of course you can. Humans love. They love good things and bad things. Of course, you can’t love God without God. In the Christian notion, God is both the source of the love we draw on—the ocean from which we draw our little pails of lovingness and stagger back with those pails to our needy families and communities—and the proper object of our love. Christians teach that there is a godly love, agápē, which is characteristic of God and of our rightful love of God.

The hitch about loving is what you love and how you love. Ordinarily, love is a transitive verb and the complications come mostly with what you transition to.

You can live without God. This can’t be the trivial point in which live is equated with exist. It must mean “really live,” in which case, it is the opposite of “really die,” a prospect the serpent tried to assure Eve against in Eden. “Really live” must mean a life of significance and I affirm that heartily. I believe a life of significance is of utmost importance and if it were not, then the people who are “living” in the pods the Matrix has prepared for them are “living” in the same sense as Morpheus and the other members of the Nebuchadnezzar IV, who “live” by avoiding Agents when then can by dying when they can’t. Also, a life of significance is a life that signifies something and if there is no meaning, there is no signification—no sign-ification, if you will allow that.

So the Center for Inquiry is on the hook for a universe of meaning within which we find ourselves and within which we may have “significance.” I wish them well. It is a struggle that means a lot to me and which is, in my own theological commitment, the principal referent of “salvation.”

So good luck, guys. People who as good questions are even more valuable than people who give good answers. Nothing against good answers.