3 - What Do We Mean By “god?”

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. 

The deeper one penetrates into nature's secrets, the greater becomes one's respect for God.  - Albert Einstein

In this post: What is the Scriptural God? What are the alternatives to the Scriptural God?

As is evidenced by these quotes, Einstein believed in a god. Many people will tell you that Einstein was, in fact, not a believer in God, and that too is true. Einstein did not believe in the God that most people refer to when they talk about “God.”

Most people use the word God to refer to the particular God they were taught about as youngsters, in the family, church or school. If they belonged to a totally secularized family, and weren’t exposed to religious school, then it's the one they heard about in movies, on television, or on the street.

I call it the Scriptural God, and I use the word God, with a capital “G” to refer to it even though it is often called by other names, such as Christ, Yahweh, Allah, Adonai, omigod and many others. (I should point out, however, that the name “Gott,” except in a German Bible, is not a name for God. If encountered In English the name belongs to Trevor Gott, a baseball pitcher on the Los Angeles Angels team who has a good ERA and, as far as I know, no interest in becoming a god.)

God is usually thought of as all-powerful, all-knowing, eternal, good and the creator of the Universe, among other things. But God is all this only in the Scriptural world. In real life, as we live it, good people suffer and bad people prosper, wars and genocides happen, and prayers are not answered to everyone’s satisfaction. It’s easy to become an atheist if you compare the Biblical promise against the real life we all experience.

Fundamentalist theists like to quote the Book of Genesis (1:27) which tells us “ ...and God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them…”

Atheists gleefully respond: “Man created God in his own image…”

It appears there is much more to support that thesis than that of the Scriptural God. So, if there is a god that created the world, it’s not the God that the scriptures present us. But if there is no god, then the Big Bang was just an accident without cause, or not there at all, with a random history over the last 12 to 14 billion years, with no laws governing evolution — a Universe with no intelligence, no purpose and no direction.

I am not alone in preferring, from the various possibilities of how we happened, some form of a creator rather than a totally accidental Universe, though not the God we once invented.

Paul Davies, a great British scientist, wrote in his book The Mind of God:

… I belong to a group of scientists who do not subscribe to a conventional religion but nevertheless deny that the Universe is a purposeless accident. Through my scientific work I have come to believe more and more strongly that the physical Universe is put together with ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it merely as a brute fact. There must, it seems to me, be a deeper level of explanation. Whether one wishes to call that deeper level “God” is a matter of taste and definition… 

There are in fact many scientists who are not atheists or traditional theists — they fall into yet another category, that of rational theists. And they have lots of company among people who aren’t scientists. 

Paul Davies suggests that many scientists believe there certainly must be some sort of agency that created the Universe, and at some level of resolution manages it through natural laws that are in some ways defined as a probabilistic direction, with some purpose.

That agency, the god of many rational theists, (including me) must be totally differentiated from God. As part of that differentiation, I use the name “yotzer,” the Hebrew word for “creator,” to refer to this god.

We know nothing of that agency other than that it created us, and we may never learn more about it. However, there are many things that we may learn once science focuses its attention on the subject, and also there is room to learn more about it through the serious application of logic and observation.

The only thing that rational theists know about yotzer is that it is the creative force that intelligently created our Universe, complete with a set of processes within a set of “laws” that we know of as the laws of physics, chemistry and evolution.