Knowing the Mind of God

The world is rife with people eager to tell us what God thinks about this or that—marriage, work, family, food, entertainment, the purpose of life, and just about everything else.

I always wonder how they know.

Sometimes, they refer to the Bible. That’s silly enough to begin with. The Bible was created by people to whom the universe was little more than the Middle East—or in the case of the New Testament, the Roman world—and the sky above it, which they thought of as not very high up. Their god was an unpleasant and emotionally insecure father figure who insisted that things be done his way, or else. Like any such father, the only reason he gave was “Because I say so!” To follow rules supposedly laid down by this tiny, limited god of a tiny, limited world is absurd. But let’s accept that, for the sake of argument.

The Bible contains many dos and don’ts supposedly written by this god, or by humans inspired by him. Some of those rules are fundamental to the conduct of a sane society and are found all over the world; the most obvious one is “Thou shalt not kill.” Those rules are old, basic, and owe nothing to the Bible; they are recorded there but didn’t originate there. They are irrelevant to this discussion.

As for the others, they are largely nonsensical but in some cases clear enough: keep the Sabbath (why?); pigs are unclean (huh?). Many of the rules, though, are tricky because they were written in a far simpler time. People who take the Bible seriously must jump through strange logical hoops to figure out how to apply those rules to modern life. For example, the Old Testament forbids lighting a fire on the Sabbath. Modern observant Jews therefore don’t turn on electric lights on Saturday, even though no fire is involved. At some point, when electricity became common enough for this to become an issue, rabbis pondered mightily and declared that turning on lights violates this biblical proposition. God knew all of the past and the future, but he neglected to write down a rule for electric lights, the mention of which would have been bewildering to the ancient Hebrews but which God knew would become a problem for them in a few thousand years. Thus human religious authorities were required to tell us what God meant but neglected to write down.

If he didn’t write it down or cause it to be written down, how do they know what he meant?

This is very common in Judaism, the religion I was immured in until I was able to leave home. Almost all of what we now consider Judaism, such as the wacky dietary laws, was invented by rabbis centuries ago. Crammed into little rooms, they argued with each for hours other about the meaning of a word or phrase in the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament). The records of their discussions fill immense volumes, called the Talmud, which rabbis and religious students have studied and memorised ever since. The discussions of those ancient rabbis, along with later such theological squandering of brain cells, have been codified into detailed sets of rules that dominate food preparation, dining, and much of the rest of daily life among observant Jews.

(Those rabbinical discussions weren’t limited to the written version of the Torah. They also included discussions of a number of unwritten rules and regulations supposedly transmitted to Moses by God on Mount Sinai and then passed on, without a word being changed, from one generation of priests/rabbis/theologians to the next. The number of improbabilities and assumptions one has to swallow to believe in all of this is remarkable.)

I gather that something similar applies in Catholicism, where the rules by which the devout live were deduced from holy writ by theologians arguing with each other about what God–Jesus (remember that the two are mysteriously and inexplicably the same) meant by this or that phrase or sentence. For that matter, I think this is generally the situation in religions generally, monotheistic and otherwise.

The old men spending their days debating meaningless theological minutiae while being supported by hardworking peasants or family members are imbued with the aura of divine authority. Their supposed wisdom (they pronounce nonsense with great conviction), learning (they know their religion’s fairy tales in great detail), and holiness (they have big beards and soft hands) are taken to mean that their decisions about right and wrong bear God’s stamp of approval. He is speaking through them.

(“But, God, why didn’t you just cause everything to be written down in great detail in the first place. That way, there’d be no risk of a misinterpretation?” “I was busy, okay? I had a universe to run.”)

The religions these old men represent are granted elevated status by time. The dogmas are covered by the accumulated grime of centuries, which looks like a holy patina.

Actually, that patina isn’t even required. As we know, dogmas are revered even without that layer of grime. New sects arise in a moment—especially in Protestantism—whenever a self–appointed leader appears with a new dogma, a new claim to know the mind of God. The sheep line up to hand him their money and follow his new set of rules.

This is common in religion, and it’s even more common in the world of woo–woo. In that case, it’s not the mind of God that the new leader claims to know but rather the secret workings of nature, hidden to all save that new leader. But it amounts to the same thing: “Only I can see what’s beyond the veil, what God/the universe requires of you, how to propitiate/harmonize with the divine/secret force and live happily ever after.”

Of course, much of this simply a confidence game. But there are, I think, a fair number of religious/woo–woo figures who are sincere. They delude themselves before they delude their followers. They really do think that they—and only they—know the mind of God/true nature of the universe, and they burn with the need to impart hat knowledge to the masses. And there are masses, sadly, who are eager to believe them.

That raises a very different question: Why? Why are the masses so ready to believe these people? Rabbis, priests, imams, politicians, self–appointed health experts, music experts, fashion experts, wine experts, conspiracy theorists, talk radio babblers, and on and on. Why is their self–proclaimed authority so readily accepted?

There has been research on this subject, and it seems to confirm what I’ve long thought: that the believers and followers fear uncertainty, want definite rules, want to think the universe isn’t random, want to think someone knows the answer, and want to be part of an elect group of insiders who know the truth.

However, that’s not the question I started with: Why do the people who claim to know the mind of God believe themselves?

Again, I’m not talking about the con men, the preachers with immense incomes happily fleecing the sheep. They’re despicable but no more so than con men of any other type. I’m talking about the ones who are actually sincere. They are legion. They are everywhere. Most of them aren’t even preachers; they’re simply convinced that they know the mind of God, although they may express that knowledge by saying that “the purpose of life is...” or “I believe we were put on Earth to...” Others, though, are eager to share their special knowledge with the world, to preach.

No doubt a fair number of such preachers are bonkers. Perhaps the most famous example is Joan of Arc, who saw visions. I have the impression, though, that most of them are sane. They’re not hearing voices, let alone the voice of God telling them what he wants. They don’ t claim to have a literal direct line to Heaven. In a way, that would make a kind of crazy sense. What’s even stranger is that they seem to think that they have an extraordinary ability to simply know what God wants and what verses in the Bible really mean.

Perhaps in some cases, they never grow out of being nineteen–year–olds. That’s the stage at which people tend to think they know everything about everything. (In my case, that happened around seventeen, and by nineteen, I had begun to realize how incomplete my knowledge of everything was.) Maybe the people I’m talking about simply don’t progress past that point.

But surely that only explains a minority of them. Few people retain the ignorant certitude of nineteen well into adulthood. I have to assume that the people I’m talking about realize how little they know about other areas of life. So why do they continue to think that they know the mind of God? What is the nature of that part of their self–image?

I’m mystified.

The Material Atheist

Years ago, when I was commuting by bus to work in downtown Denver, I used the time to read. There were people who preferred to spend the ride making small talk with the stranger sitting next to them. My reading time has always been precious to me, and I resented people interrupting it with pointless babble. Usually, answering them grunts while keeping my eyes glued in the book made the point, and they’d turn their attention elsewhere or even change seats.

Except for a smiling young man who sat down next to me and asked me what I was reading.

“A book.”

“What’s it about?”

“Mumble.”

“Oh.” Pause. “Do you know what I like to read?”

I looked at his smiling face and realized what was coming. “The Bible?” I asked.

He seemed  disappointed that I had seen through him, but he persisted, jabbering about Jesus—witnessing, I suppose, that annoying word Christians use to mean interrupting the precious reading time of someone who hasn’t intruded on them, is trying to ignore them, and is hoping to be ignored by them.

Finally I told him to stop talking to me and that nothing he said would affect me. I was an atheist and thus fully immunized.

He looked nonplussed for a moment and then asked me to define “atheism” for him.

I told him that in my opinion it was essentially materialism. I thought that would put an end to it.

He pondered and then said something like, “Have you ever thought that maybe there’s more to life than the accumulation of worldly possessions?”

I realized that he only knew that use of “materialism,” so I told him that I was using it in the other sense, the philosophical one, that the universe consists of matter and nothing else.

He digested that for a while and then finally left to find another victim, mouthing platitudes about blessings and praying for me as he went.

Recently, I’ve been trying to remember the process by which I became an atheist. At the time it was happening, I wasn’t looking at myself from the outside. I was concerned with what to believe or not believe, but I wasn’t analyzing myself. Now that all of that’s in the distant past and I’m an old fart who’s toying with writing his autobiography (because why not?), I’m trying to look at that period in my life objectively and analytically. When I remembered the incident of the twit on the bus, I realized that I was always a materialist by nature. It just took me a few years of intellectual and emotional struggle to cast off parental conditioning and become my true self—a materialist, which is to say, an atheist.

When I was a child, I believed what my parents believed. The mythology in the Old Testament, the existence of God, the inherent rightness of the wackadoodle Jewish dietary laws, and so on—that was how the Universe was. At the same time, I really wanted to understand how the Universe worked. I read science books written for children and absorbed their contents, which I placed on the same level of truthfulness as the religious nonsense fed to me by my parents. It was all equally true and equally important to understanding everything. My parents were pleased by the religious part of the preceding and assumed that I’d follow path of religious self–brainwashing everyone in their families had followed, which they thought was the right and proper path for a Jew, especially a male Jew. I was very good at parroting religious rubbish. One of my sisters once called me the little rabbi.

An important difference, though, was that science was exciting and satisfying. It appealed to me emotionally as well as intellectually. Judaism was just there. It was true (as I still thought) but increasingly uninteresting. The rituals and seemingly endless time spent in the synagogue were annoying and oppressive. That was time I could have used to read science books (and science fiction and comics).

As far as I can remember, it was that emotional disconnect that moved me steadily away from religion and toward science as a way to understand the Universe. Well before increasing understanding of science showed me the absurdity of the creation story in the book of Genesis, this lack of a need for a religion, and therefore a lack of interest in it, made me a Jew in name only. God and religious belief disappeared from my life.

Not so with outward religious display and observance. As the rabbi’s son, I had to keep going through the motions. That would last until I left home for college. At the same time, I was struggling with what to call myself. I think I had arrived at “atheist” by the time I left home.

On an emotional level, the Universe was a material thing to me. But what a wonderful thing! As a teenager, I devoured books on astronomy. The astonishing size and age of the Universe and the variety and strangeness of the objects and energies that filled it delighted me. I wanted to know everything I could about it. I wanted to understand it. Clearly, religion was not a path to that understanding; it was only a path to fantasy—boring fantasy. I could see that science was the path to understanding. It wasn’t that science led me to atheism. Rather, it was materialism that led me to science.

Space and astronomy fascinated me, but so did books about the opposite end of nature, what we see through the microscope and what we learn from particle accelerators. There is another stunningly wonderful Universe below us in size.

LaPlace told Napoleon that God wasn’t mentioned in his book explaining the workings of the Solar System because “I had no need of that hypothesis.” For me, in our vast and wonderful Universe, there is no room for that hypothesis. How trivial, shallow, and silly the idea of God is compared to immense reality. To an ancient people who thought of a small part of the Middle East as the entirety of existence, the concept of a god who had made all of it might not have been so absurd. Expand that view to the entire world, with all of its natural diversity and wildly different human cultures, and already you have to strain to believe in such a supreme being. With what we now know of the Universe—and knowing that we can only observe a tiny part of it—you have to willfully restrict your conception of reality to something cramped and simplistic in order to still believe in a god of any kind.

One of the reasons I want to be immortal is so that I will live to learn about further scientific discoveries on both the microscopic and telescopic levels. What wonders we’ll uncover! Who needs childish fairy tales?