What is God?

If horses could conceive of the gods, they no doubt would conceive of them in the form of horses. – Xenophanes


Things known are known in the form of the knower, said Thomas Aquinas. His idea helps us understand “anthropomorphism” – the depiction of the non-human in human shapes, or with human experiences. My thesis here is that most everything important to us carries in it some human attribute or characteristic. Many of our activities have some anthropomorphic aspect. Some examples include:


Cloud-watching. You’ll see clouds obviously in the form or shape of things we know. David Hume agrees with Aquinas: “We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds.”


Movies about aliens. Usually friendly aliens arrive in human form, sporting human emotions (e.g., “E.T.”, or “Close Encounters”), and the hostile ones are more unrecognizable. They’re easier to hate.
We esteem animals as “cute” or “useful” in direct proportion to how they correspond to human understandings of these two categories. Meanwhile we blithely neglect the vast masses of the animal world because of their apparent non-human form or function.


Rule #1 in human relationships: If it ain’t inside us, we won’t recognize it outside us. If things known are in the form of the knower, then things unknown are things not recognized – data not in the form of the knower.


An important issue arises. Aquinas’ thought applies to the category of god. By definition, god is indefinable. “God” has to be so different from humans and our “stuff.” There must be a continental divide (“intellectual distance,”) between “god” and our wars, our Hitlers, our destructive passions.


Jewish and Muslim faiths are the most aware of this holy difference between the divine and human. Each faith imposes severe restrictions on depictions of the divine, so the two categories shall never suffer an identity crisis.


However, many religions in the world rather blatantly concocts recipes for divine images using human materials. We like our god(s) familiar, and so give god a family: Father God, Mother Mary, and Son Jesus.


We infuse these heavenly persons with essential human qualities. A short review of the traditional Western attributes for the divine will confirm this: all-powerful, -knowing, and almighty; loving, merciful, wise, good, beautiful, just, friendly, and even territorial. We usually see divine beings with gender (and if THAT’S not anthropomorphism, I don’t know what is!). Finally, we render this divine personage very similar to us in our dominant desires, hatreds and passions. What society feels important gets torqued into the idea of the divine. Marx is our guide here: “the ruling ideas of each age are ever the ideas of its ruling classes.” Feminist Mary Daly makes some sense: “When the male is god, then god is male.”


I’m not proposing god is female, or male. Gender is a human category uploaded into the divine. What other human categories do we confuse with the divine?


Genesis 1:26 says God made humans in the divine image, but I wonder if we’ve not returned the favor and rendered “him” in ours? Ideally, “god” is a placeholder name for our experience of the transcendent and the sublime. But when we make “him” the root of our nationalisms, or the heavenly Wanter of all we happen to want, have we not just made an idol of ourselves? When our idea of god becomes pretty much one-on-one with our own human ideas, is god really in our ideas? How different from us does god have to be, to be divine?


What is god, after all? Makes one think, doesn’t it?