Should We Shun a God who Hides from Us?

Being a Christian in the twenty-first century should feel strange for lots of reasons.

Just like in the ancient world, there are many other religions, but modern globalization happens to bring them all to the Christian’s attention on the internet or in the schoolroom.

So, whereas the ancients had more of an excuse for their tribal disregard of opposing cultures, late-modern Christians are left in the lurch. Their religion is explicitly exclusive in that it tells them that the only way to win out in the end is to be Christian. All the other religions and secular cultures in the world are supposed to be deeply flawed, if not active demonic traps.

Yet late-modern Christians are largely influenced by the founding principles of developed societies, which are those of liberalism or humanism. Whereas in most ancient societies, the law was regarded as the whim of some monarch who stood in for the leader of a society of deities, late-modern Christians are beneficiaries of the secular realization that human laws emerge from our natural plight.

To put it briefly, we use reason and familial empathy to extract ourselves from the war of all against all in the wilderness, so we band together and learn to compromise to keep the peace and to benefit from the group’s greater power to help us all get what we want in life.

Thus, Christians are under some pressure to tolerate other religions, which is to say that modern Christianity is implicitly liberal simply because it exists in modernized societies or in the developing world that aspires to be modern. By “modern,” I mean the reckoning with the relatively recent revolutions and institutions of science, capitalism, democracy, and the free-thinking arts.

So what’s a Christian to do? How to reconcile Christianity’s ancient tribalism, xenophobia, and cultish impudence and resentment with the modern logic of liberal tolerance?

James W. Miller, who holds degrees from U.C. Berkeley, the University of Edinburgh, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Fuller Theological Seminary, has written about this problem in Jesus Among the Gods.

There, he arrives at a balanced solution. On the one hand, he says, Christians are commanded to love their neighbour. On the other, Christians should remember that “some religious doctrines are evil.” Moreover, “people are religious by nature, and we are naturally inclined to guess at our origin story. That in and of itself is not evil. That’s natural.”

Miller thus attempts to turn the theistic problem of the multiplicity of religions against the atheist. The many religions that our species produces are supposed to be evidence for theism, since if God exists, we’d naturally be inclined to search for him.

In Miller’s words,

The variety of religions actually works in the Christian’s favor rather than the skeptic’s. They actually give rise to a form of wonder, which any pastor should be grateful for. I would be much more likely to suspect that a species created by God would be brimming with expectations for Him, whereas if there were no God, I would not at all be surprised to find the world populated by irreligious animals. As it stands, in every era and culture throughout time, most of us have looked up at the stars and sensed the work of an Artist. Creation can’t stop looking for its Creator. It’s like God has prepared us for the real thing.

This reversal of expectations shouldn’t be surprising. Just as there are a large number of religions, there are a great many theistic arguments. The obvious reason for this is that theology is like playing tennis without a net. There are no rules, nothing in religion is properly testable or rigorously tentative, and the myths and creeds are as loose as poems.

Notice that a poet can adapt his or her creativity to any setting. Poetry is like a filter through which anything can pass, whereupon it’s immortalized in verse. Similarly, the urge to worship something, or to arrive at easy, flattering answers to life’s most challenging questions, can readily accommodate any set of circumstances, no matter how they might seem to undermine a faith or ritual. You just adjust your style of play, like a creative child who tires of one game and easily invents another.

But if we look at Miller’s assertions from a more neutral vantage point, we’re likely to notice the flaws of his turnabout. Is it true that in a godless universe, there would probably be no religions? Think it through for a moment.

Assuming life nevertheless evolves because nature itself is creative, organisms would have to develop ways of coping with this godlessness, or with their environment’s wild neutrality towards their welfare. These coping mechanisms should be familiar since they’re just the traits that distinguish animal species, such as claws, fins, and wings. Another familiar trait is intelligence, which enables a species to adapt to any niche by modeling options for flourishing in it with compensatory tools, structures, vehicles, and the like.

But just as some animals may overextend themselves in their adaptation to a lifestyle, such as the giraffe that’s used to eating from tall trees and must carry around a long neck, highly intelligent animals may endanger themselves by getting caught up in their imagination. Internally, we live in a sea of abstractions, models, and fictions. We rely on our concepts that simplify real patterns, so we’re tempted to mistake the map for the territory. To plan and gain some tactical advantage, we fixate on modeled possibilities and even counterfactual scenarios, so we’re liable to take actual circumstances for granted.

This is the psychological basis of theological speculation. In a godless universe, intelligent animals might arrive at the idea of gods by imagining possible versions of themselves. Just as tribal mammals have leaders who are stronger, faster, or more popular or ruthless than the other members, we can imagine the ultimate person, just as we can imagine the purest, ultimate tiger, snake, or bird. Our concepts naturally idealize because they simplify what they categorize, ignoring troubling complexities, so the models can fit in our limited mental bandwidth.

We’d begin by imagining that all natural processes are divinely animated since the root causes of natural order are mysterious and remote from our senses. Then we’d imagine immortal versions of us specifically, such as the versions that seem to survive in our memories when we grieve our dead ancestors. We imagine that their “spirits” live on, as they seem to do in our dreams, memories, or shamanic trances. Then we’d reify our social structures, distinguishing between high and low gods to suit the differences between the socially evolved classes of people.

Eventually, we’d exaggerate and reify our self-image, arriving at the notion of a super-duper person, and we’d do this as a side-effect of surviving and flourishing with the traits with which wild, impersonal nature equipped us. There would end up being many religions that worship gods because we’re inherently self-absorbed and egoistic, trusting our imagination’s models, and using personification or mental projection as a shortcut to understanding the world and reassuring ourselves.

Of course, this hypothetical development should be familiar, too, since it’s roughly the actual development in the history of religion, proceeding from animism and shamanism, through ancestor worship and polytheism, to monotheism.

Thus, Miller’s assumption about the unlikelihood of inventing the concept of gods in a godless universe is dubious. His assumption indicates more a failure of theistic imagination than a real improbability.

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What of the other half of Miller’s point, that the multiplicity of religions helps confirm that religious folks are on the right track, since if God exists, “we’d naturally be inclined to search for him”?

The trouble with that isn’t hard to discern either. What Miller does here is skip over the classic problem of evil, and more specifically, the problem of God’s hiddenness from the world. If God existed, why would his creatures have to search for him in the first place? Why would God hide from everyone else? What kind of loving deity is this?

No, Miller’s scenario isn’t so intuitive after all. Sure, if God exists, he could hide for some reason, and he could implant a desire in some of his creatures so they’d look for him. Maybe God is testing us, or maybe he’s coy or protecting us by giving us some autonomy. Or maybe God is cruel or doesn’t care about us, and he’s busy creating many worlds because he just likes to create and toy with his handiworks.

Again, it’s tennis without a net. The theist can tell any just-so story he or she likes. None of them is testable or falsifiable since none is a rationally responsible proposition. These theological possibilities are just poetic expressions of ignorance and existential longing. Theists can make it up as they go because they’re only perpetuating a fiction. Even if the myth or creed turns out to be true, the religious narrative works like a fictional story, not a scientific theory or philosophical conjecture. Reason has very little inherently to do with theology or religiosity.

To quote the glorious speech on religion from the television show Mr. Robot, “All religions are just metastasizing mind worms, meant to divide us so it’s easier to rule us by the charlatans that wanna run us. All we are to them are paying fanboys of their poorly-written sci-fi franchise.”

In any case, sure, maybe there are lots of religions because we’re all searching for God, and God arranged things that way. He hid himself and built us so we’d nevertheless long to find our Maker. To quote Bob Ross, “maybe, maybe, maybe.”

Still, a possibility isn’t automatically probable. If we’re looking at things at least halfway rationally, we need to distinguish between far-fetched and likely possibilities. Again, what kind of God would arrange things this way, hiding and forcing us to come and find him? Is that a deity we should want to find?

This is the important question to ask here, and notice that it’s aesthetic. After all, while we’re free to make up stories, once a story is told, a critic is free to examine the story’s worth by checking whether its assumptions and plot points are coherent or relevant to our current problems or level of knowledge.

The Christian spins a narrative about why there are so many religions, just as the writers of Genesis wrote a fanciful myth about how the universe was made. A guy made everything in six days and then rested because who wouldn’t after so much hard work.

But once the Christian’s speculation is on the table, we’re free to evaluate the story’s implications. So humans search for God by producing a welter of conflicting religions, and God wants it that way because he’s supposedly omnipresent but also an expert hider who pops up only seldom, surprising the dickens out of prophets and saints.

Some such scenario is as possible as any far-fetched fiction. But is it a good story? Is it still good enough to live by in the twenty-first century? Is a religion that takes that story seriously liable to sustain itself without resorting to a host of underhanded ploys, such as the indoctrination of children or the resort to casuistic sophistry, not to mention the conquest of opposing societies and the stretching of theology to accommodate every possible vice and misdeed?

Is the protagonist of this narrative — a wily God who conceals himself to such an extent that it looks as though he doesn’t exist at all — worthy of our reverence?

Perhaps the Christian should return to the older, Jewish recommendation that we should fear such a God, not love him as though he were our doting parent. Christians turned to such a polytheistic device because of the Hellenistic themes running through their religion’s formative period. Christianity began as a Jewish version of the Hellenistic mystery cults that were popular leading up to the first century CE. So Jesus was elevated to a divine status, which made for a multiplicity of gods, and to attract adherents, the relation between them had to be positive. Thus, to emulate the Father and Son, Christians had to be loving too.

But does that traditional narrative work with the need to posit God’s shyness when confronting the multiplicity of religions, and more broadly, the prominence of evil in the form of unjust suffering? That’s far from clear. Of course, we judge likelihoods according to our background knowledge and formative experience, and because Christians are playing tennis without a net, they can stretch their beliefs to overcome apparent inconsistencies. They can harmonize their worldview to avoid cognitive dissonance.

We all do this, but that doesn’t mean that all worldviews are equally meritorious in all time periods and circumstances. Some stories get outdated, so the labour of having to patch up the narrative to cover up its shortcomings becomes increasingly onerous. At some point, the Christian may come to think the trouble isn’t worth it, or he or she quietly quits the religion, going through the motions without caring about the core myth or taking much practical inspiration from it.

Why are there so many religions? It’s because our species survives mainly thanks to our intelligence and imagination, so we tell a great many stories and fixate on them in our cultural playtime. Specifically, because we evolved from wild primates, we’re inherently vain and tribal, so we readily presume we’re crucial to everything else, and we project our idea of personhood onto all causes in nature.

Alternatively, it’s because God exists, but he arranges things so we could be forgiven for thinking he doesn’t exist after all: he systematically hides from us but torments us by implanting in us a desire to find and to know our creator, yet this deity is also supposed to be loving and merciful like Jesus, and he wants to have a personal relationship with us.

Which scenario is simpler and more intuitive? Which makes the most sense from a twenty-first-century standpoint? Those questions should be rhetorical.