God In the 21st Century – Jeffrey Kamins

Rabbi Jeffrey Kamins from the Emanuel Synagogue in Sydney addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 23 August 2011 as part of a discussion on God in the twenty-first century. He was joined by Angela Shanahan, a columnist with The Australian, Robyn Williams, the ABC Radio National presenter of The Science Show & Ockham’s Razor and Dr Shakira Hussein from the National Centre for Excellence in Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne.

GOD IN THE 21ST CENTURY

JEFFREY KAMINS

The issue of God in the 21st century is not as much about if or why one believes in God, but in what God one believes, and how one applies that belief. In terms of “what God” one might believe in, the topic “God in the 21st century” is not too different than it would have been if the topic had been “God in the 21st century BCE” – humans have had a belief in a force or power beyond us for millennia.

One only has to think about the Dream Time of the first inhabitants of this land or the cave drawings found throughout Africa, the original cradle of our civilisation. Somewhere around 4,000 years ago – the monotheistic traditions trace it back to a story about a man named Abraham – humans began conceiving God as one. Over 4,000 years, what one learns from the concept that God is One has continued to evolve, but the notion that there is only one God has become the dominant theology.

What makes the discussion about God in the twenty-first century so exciting and important is that the notion of God as One has profound implications for humanity and our understanding of religion. Nevertheless, it is first important to look at this discussion from a matter of belief, for that does have some implications for “what is so”, which is ultimately to me a far more important and interesting conversation.

As far back as I can remember I have believed in that which we call God – a Life Force that is the Creator of All, a creative consciousness into which we can tap. I have sensed It, I have felt It, yet I acknowledge that all that may just be a figment of my imagination, for faith and belief exist beyond the realm of that which can be proved scientifically.

Moreover, I do not posit that faith and belief necessarily lead to good and right action – the most ethical man I have ever known, my father, was an atheist well before I was born until the moment of his death.

However, belief in the ”Oneness of All that Is” should lead to good and right action, and that to me is why the topic before us has such significance – for there is no doubt that in today’s world, the way belief in God manifests, the way religion often but not necessarily works, is to be a force of fear and destruction.

How can we break that connection between God and fear, God and punishment, God and destruction, and thus liberate both God and humanity in the twenty-first century? It is to realise that what makes God so fearful, punishing and destructive is not God, but all the words that have been written about God that we call Scripture and the word of God. It is to understand that all religion is a human construct, that all our stories are merely that – stories our ancestors wrote in their attempt to connect to God and draw down God consciousness.

It is also to understand that there need not be antagonism between science

and religion; each has an important and different role to play in the development of humanity. Accordingly it is important to analyse the scientific and philosophic arguments against God and then attempt to rescue God from the straightjacket of literalist religion. To believe in God in the twenty-first century is to believe that God is the source of all Conscious Being, the Source of Life Itself, just not the Author of any book.

Authors such as Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens in God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything use scientific method – reason, evidence and facts – to destroy the notion that Scripture is the literal word of God.

Dawkins does an admirable job in the opening of his book to demonstrate that there is absolutely no scientific or other proof that God exists. But this does not mean God does not exist. God is a matter not of proof, but of belief, even deep knowing or understanding.

Indeed, science helps to open us to the awe of life in the universe, atheist and religious thinker alike. As a person who believes in God, I do so in the full embrace of the insights of science into the origins of the universe and life as we know it.

Michel Onfray, the French philosopher and author of The Atheist Manifesto states, “I am striving to destroy some of the mythologies on which our civilizations are built.” “Don’t accept things that haven’t been proved as true,” he says.

The great Jewish philosopher Spinoza made many of these points back in the seventeenth century; it is no wonder that in Judaism one has the highest percentage of liberal practitioners – that is those who believe in God, but not in God’s authorship of Scripture.

The scientific and philosophic case against God is not really against God as much as against what humans claim about God and what humans do in the name of God. It would be more constructive to critique humans, and that is what God in the twenty-first century is all about.

There is a wonderful teaching from the Book of Deuteronomy that guides us on this path: “The hidden things – or mystery – belong to God, and those which are revealed are for us and our descendants to know and learn from forever after.”

As Life Consciousness develops, more will enter into the realm of the revealed, the human consciousness. Nevertheless, to assert that there is no consciousness beyond us is an act of temerity as unprovable as God Itself. The realm of fact and faith must remain separate.

Science can take us to the smallest of particles with quantum physics and to the edges of the universe back to the Big Bang with astrophysics. Science has revealed to us that no matter how much we explore and learn on the micro or macro level, we are always left with mystery. That mystery, the Creator of It All, says the believer, is God.

Let us bracket God, the hidden and mysterious, to explore some of what

has been revealed to us by science. Bill Bryson writes of one scientific insight that can open us to the awe of life:

To begin with, for you to be here now, trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and curiously obliging manner to create you. It’s an arrangement so specialised and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. For the next many years (we hope) these tiny articles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, co-operative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience the supremely agreeable but generally under-appreciated state known as existence.

Why atoms take this trouble is a bit of a puzzle. Being you is not a gratifying experience at the atomic level. For all their devoted attention, your atoms don’t actually care about you – indeed, don’t even know that you are there. They don’t even know that they are there. They are mindless particles, after all, and not even themselves alive. It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you. Yet somehow for the period of your existence they will answer to a single rigid impulse: to keep you you. (Bill Bryson, A Short History of Everything, page 1).

Similarly Steve Grand invites his reader to think

. . . of an experience from your childhood. Something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there. After all, you really were there at the time, weren’t you? How else would you remember it? But here is the bombshell: you weren’t there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place . . . . Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. If that doesn’t make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important. (Steve Grand, in Creation: Life and How to Make It, as quoted by Dawkins on page 371.)

Science can take us nearly to the origin of matter and energy, but not fully explain the creation of consciousness. In reality, the materialistic scientist or thinker cannot deny God’s existence, as ultimately one knows there is always the mysterious unknown. Dawkins writes:

Let me sum up Einsteinian religion in one more quotation from Einstein himself: “To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.”

Dawkins continues:

In this sense I too am religious with the reservation that “cannot grasp” does not have to mean “forever ungraspable”. But I prefer not to call myself religious because it is misleading. It is destructively misleading because, for the vast majority of people, “religion” I implies “supernatural”. (The God Delusion p.19)

“The vast majority” of people used to believe in Zeus and other Greek gods we now place in the category of mythology. Monotheism evolved out of polytheism. That the majority of monotheists still believe in a supernatural God who authors Scripture does not mean that they should have the claim on God and religion that Dawkins accords them. God in the twenty-first century does not have to be a supernatural Author, rather the ultimate Mystery and source of all that Is.

What then is the practical difference between a belief in and a denial of God’s existence? If one is a pure materialist, and by that I do not mean someone avaricious, but simply someone who denies the realm of the spiritual, then all existence is a combination of matter and energy.

Death is ultimately the reconfiguring of particles and waves. Consciousness is something produced by brain activity that ceases with brain activity. There is no God, and the mystery of life, of evolution, is just that, a mystery. Someone who is spiritual posits that creation began with Spirit, which in that sense the Life Force, or Creative Consciousness, is that which begins It All.

In Hebrew, the name for God is a form of the verb to be, and Moses teaches that God is that which is or that which is becoming. One is the source of all, and all is part of the One – “The concealed things are in the realm of God, and the known things are for us and our children to implement the teachings of the Torah”.

When speaking about God, we must distinguish between speculative faith and empirical knowledge. I believe that there is a Cosmic Consciousness that exists beyond the Big Bang. It is something concealed, the great Mystery, as to how we ourselves become conscious being. For scientists and materialists like Richard Dawkins, nothing exists beyond the known world, and our consciousness is a natural outcome of the development of the brain.

For religious people, consciousness precedes and is the essence of all matter and energy. No one knows as a matter of empirical proof; belief in God is a matter of faith. But whether believer or atheist, the conclusion is surprisingly the same, we are part of a whole.

At the core of Jewish teaching about God is that God is One and thus everything is interconnected as God creates and flows through all. If from a scientific perspective, Stephen Hawking is correct, and creation began with gravity, then we are still part of the whole. Naturalist John Muir put it this way a century ago: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

(Stanford Magazine, July/August 2010 p. 40).

From a point of religion or humanism, we recognise the singular unity of existence, the interconnectivity of life. As Jews, that is what we are called to serve, that is what we mean in general by the service of God. It is practically a matter of semantics whether one is a person of faith or not; the crucial element is understanding the interconnection of all creation from a single source, whether God or gravity, uniting us in one universe.

The great Baruch Spinoza in the seventeenth century already posited that God as One, divorced from book writing, led one to understand God within and beyond nature; Process Theology in the twentieth century began teaching of God as the continuing unfolding of Consciousness.

A teaching from the Torah has God, whose name in Hebrew is a form of the verb “to be” as defining itself as “I am that which I am becoming.” Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles of Faith, written in the twelfth century, posit that God is one, unique, the creator of all who has no form and exists infinitely beyond time and space.

In contemporary terms, Rabbi Zalman Schechter Shalomi (Reb Zalman) has inferred from both contemporary science and prior religious thinking a new understanding of God and the role of religion which he describes as a “paradigm shift”. Knowing what we know from science has vast implications for what we mean today when we say, “God is One.”

Reb Zalman writes:

We are in the shift to the place where everything is God, pantheism.” He remarks that some will object to pantheism, “Are you going to tell me that the excrement of a dog is also God?” and the answer would be – “Yes.” What is wrong with that? It is only from a human perspective that we see a difference between that and challah (special braided bread eaten at the Sabbath meal). On the sub molecular level, on the atomic level, they all look the same. And if you look from a galactic perspective, what difference is there between one and the other? “So if God is everything, why are you and I here?” Because we are the appearance of God in this particular form. And God likes to appear in countless forms and experience countless lives. (Paradigm Shift, p.20.)

Reb Zalman speaks of Scripture arising in a time known among some as the axial age, age “when things turned””

That was the time when Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Zarathustra, the Buddha, Mahavira, Lao-Tzu and Confucius were active. It was like a blip on the radar of the Global Brain, as if the Global Brain was having an “aha” moment. The big “aha” eventually disappeared, but there were some people who codified the “aha” and religions were formed as a result. (Paradigm Shift, page 19.)

He continues,

Now in talking about paradigm shift, I am speaking of trying to understand a history of spirit, a history of mind. I can then take every writer of religious and spiritual material and acknowledge her or his great accomplishment of the time by going into that paradigm in which the individual appeared and taught. . . . Each paradigm shift was considered heresy by the people who came before it. In other words, they will judge that what we are doing is wrong because we don’t do what they have done in the past. That is why I say from time to time that many people in religion are driving by the rear view mirror. They are superimposing the past onto the present. . . . If I try to judge the paradigm of the past with my understanding of the present, I am going to find myself in trouble. That is because I will judge everything as being lesser. (Paradigm Shift, p23.)

A paradigm shift, an “aha moment”, is happening now. Human beings are breaking the nexus between God and scripture, liberating both God and Scripture to have new meaning. There is a great paradigm shift happening now as we understand God and Scripture in new ways.

Reb Zalman reminds us there is still much to learn and absorb from the old, provided we understand the word of Scripture from within its context of belief that God spoke directly to humans. Their world was more intimate, more interactive, between the many gods and humans, so it followed that the One God would still intervene in supernatural ways, communicating direct revelation.

Now, our knowing even more about the awesomeness of God, our scientific and historic understanding of how Scripture developed, should not lead us to belittle and dismiss the stories of before. Rather, we should learn from the myths, legends, moral foundations, faith traditions and prophetic insights therein.

So what then is the most important question about God in the twenty-first century? In a sense, the scientific critique has been shining its light in the wrong direction. It is not whether or not God exists, or how God is compatible with science, for both lead to an understanding of singularity and unity in life, but rather whether God is compatible with a scientific, or evidentiary reading of Scripture.

It is Scripture, taught as the literal word of God that is the biggest challenge to God in the 21st century. Over this upcoming century, I hope that humanity will evolve to recognise (and I see it as part of my role as religious leader to teach these ideas) that Scripture clearly has the human hand in it, and therefore is neither immutable nor the word of God.

It is the word of humans trying to understand what it means to be part of God’s creation.

This conclusion has profound implications for how we actually choose to live, how we take responsibility for our human consciousness and on concomitant freedom of choice. I, for one, am glad Scripture is not the literal word of God – I do not want to have to justify its support of genocide, its inequitable treatment of women and its condemnation of homosexuals.

Those positions are just plain wrong. If those positions were the word of God I could not believe in God. Scripture may not be God’s autobiography, but it is our ancestors’ attempt to understand what it means to be fully human, fully connected and striving for the Divine.

Our ancestors may not have gotten everything right, but for the most part they got it so right that Torah remains one of the most insightful teachings into how to make our life’s relationships meaningful. Torah does not have to be written by God to establish the essential foundation and structure to create religious community.

If scripture is the creation of human and not God, why should anyone be involved in a scripture-based religious community? The human hand in scripture does not eliminate the sacredness (otherness or uniqueness) of scripture. Each people’s scripture is the beginning of its story and forms the structure and foundation for its value system.

It is not necessary to alter the words of scripture, but it is crucial to evolve our interpretation of scripture and the traditions learned from it along with our ever-increasing scientific understanding of the universe.

All religious systems require the human to interpret the word of Scripture; the famous rabbinic dictum is that this power to reason and interpret, adapt and apply, is “not in the heavens” but on this earth “for us to do it.” This enables life-supporting teachings to be extended and adapted and harmful ones to be curtailed. Some dismiss this approach of taking the good and curtailing the bad in Scripture as “cherry picking”; others assert that it is the God-given application of wisdom, knowledge and discernment within our level of consciousness.

In a contemporary religion, revelation means that humans have the ability to tap into the consciousness of the life force. Scripture records those endeavours of ancestors in their social, cultural, political and economic milieu. Some passages in scripture that may have rung true in their context no longer do in ours.

A person of contemporary ethics cannot believe that scripture is the final, exclusive bastion of God’s teaching and lesson on morality since there is also the immoral. A religion that uses its scripture as the exclusive basis for ethics and morality perpetuates ignorance and can in fact violate human rights.

When someone challenges us as to how we dare to “pick and choose” from the Torah, we have a twofold response: one, this is what our ancestors have done for thousands of years, and two, this is what it means to be endowed with intelligence. When they say, well how do you know what is right or wrong, we can respond, we use the model of Torah itself. It opens with creation, consciousness and goodness.

We choose, whenever possible, the course that deepens consciousness and awareness, supports creation and not destruction, and works to enhance life and good. This is how we understand the presence of God working through our sacred story.

The force, the life force, the something beyond ourselves, the connectivity or power, what I think of as cosmic consciousness or creative intelligence, all are synonyms for God. To strive for that level of awareness and apply it in everyday life and relationship is to create religious community.

The question remains: if God is merely a possibility and if the authority of revelation is dependent upon human intelligence and discernment, then what good is a religious system? Even if religious systems contribute positive teachings to humanity, could we not achieve those independently of religion?

Michael Onfray says wisely:

I’ve always found it amazing that people can think that art must be connected to religion. I think there has been art that is peculiar to men (sic) since the beginning of time. Religion gives art themes, occasions and circumstances. But if religion wasn’t there, there would still be art. Bach is not proof that God exists. I think Bach would have existed without God; he would have been a musician anyway. He wouldn’t have composed oratorios and cantatas, but he would have done something else that would have been just as brilliant. Religion has acted as a structure, but if we change the structure, we still have arts.

People can exist just fine without God: with art, poetry, music, ethics, kindness, love, communal organizations and all the other beautiful values we can list.

Religion is not art, and religion is not science. To be human is to recognise the great mystery in life itself. The scientist continues to describe and reveal, the artist to celebrate beauty, the religious person to articulate how to live consciously within our known parameters. More and more people are.