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A God to Hope For I Defining God The Greeks believed that the universe created the gods. Heaven and Earth were the first parents.The Titans were their children, and they in turn gave birth to Zeus and his brethren. Contemporary monotheistic religions take a contrary view. If one believes in God today, one believes almost by definition that God has always been.There was never a time before God.Time is in God, and everything came out of God. There are many ways to define God. God is the Creator; a being with infinite presence; a constantly emanating ,overriding life force that puts things in motion and exercises power over all. God is a reflection of our belief that a higher power is responsible for our existence. And asWalter Lippmann,who was among the most prescient political and social commentators of the twentieth century, wrote, “God is the supreme symbol in which man expresses his destiny.” Concepts of God vary widely. Many people,including those who embrace the Bible and Qur’an literally , believe God knows everything and directs what transpires throughout the universe.They trust in a personal God, an intimate God, a moral God; a God who looks over us, acts consciously, and hears our prayers. Others believe in a cognizant but less involved God; one who purposefully created the universe and decreed the laws of nature, but no longer directs their operation.This is the God conceived of by Pliny the Elder, who wrote in Natural History two millennia ago,“It is frivolous to suppose that the great head of things pays any regard to human affairs.” It is the God invoked by Isaac Newton, who believed that a law giver created the universe and made rules that would determine all future events without need of further intervention. God, so conceived, operates only in broad strokes. He is a master watchmaker, who made the watch and perhaps repairs it from time to 288 THOMAS HAUSER time. His awareness includes humanity but is not about us as individuals. He may have empowered us through His plan, but He does not direct us. It would be beneath Him to respond to mundane events on our planet. His work on Earth is in large measure our own. “But there is a third state of religious experience,” Albert Einstein wrote. Einstein rejected the concept of a “personal” or “moral” God and even a cognizant God. “I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves,” he posited. Rather, Einstein believed in what he called a “cosmic” God; a God synonymous with “the mystery and grandeur of the universe. . . .A God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists. . . . It is very difficult to explain this feeling,” Einstein acknowledged;“especially since there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.” Einstein, in other words, accepted a pantheistic God. That is, he equated God with the forces and laws of the universe and believed that the cosmos is a single whole of interconnected parts; that this whole contains an indwelling principle and is driven by a creative life force or energy that we call God.To his mind, the world of nature was all-embracing. Indeed, Einstein went so far as to opine,“In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must give up the doctrine of a personal God and avail themselves of those forces which are capable of cultivating the Good, theTrue, and the Beautiful in humanity.” However, nature is unaware of the joy and suffering of individuals. Einstein’s God is unknowable and unreachable.As Lippmann declared, “While this God may satisfy a metaphysical need in the thinker, He does not satisfy the passions of the believer. He is a principle with which to explain the facts, if you can understand the explanation. For the purposes of religion, He is no God at all.” Thus, much of humanity looks to a cognizant God endowed with human attributes. The God embraced by popular religions has almost always been envisioned as an adult male.InWestern imagery,He resembles a strong, powerfully built, middle-aged white man with long hair and a beard. Often, He is dressed in a flowing robe and sits on a throne. In sum, we give God the qualities we want him to have and put the concept of God within boundaries that are familiar to us...

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