Metaphors and God
When I first started getting into religion, one of the biggest impediments for me was what’s known as the problem of evil, specifically wild animal suffering. In other words, why would an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good God create a world in which starvation and predation are commonplace? Why create pain and death at all?
A lot of things have helped me move past these questions. Perhaps the most important of these was the realization God isn’t a person or a being. Asking why God did this or that, as if he was an old man in the sky, misunderstands what God is. God is a force. God is love. God is all goodness everywhere. Evil is the the lack of God.
On the other hand, thinking of God as an old man in the sky or something else like that has a purpose. It’s a way to make sense of a concept beyond human understanding. It can be a useful metaphor. But if you forget that’s what it is, an approximation of something words and images can’t describe, the metaphor can hold you back.
My spiritual teacher, the Hindu perennialist Eknath Easwaran, recognized God as “the very ground of existence,” and yet he understood the need for metaphor. “Most of us, however, do not respond deeply to the impersonal aspect of the ultimate reality,” he said, wryly noting most people wouldn’t respond well to an impersonal girlfriend or boyfriend.
So God is impersonal, but there’s a practical reason why we personalize this force. When you realize God is love and, perhaps more broadly, all goodness, atheism or agnosticism become somewhat nonsensical. You might as well say you don’t believe the sun exists or know whether your neighbor does. God is in everything and everyone.
I think this is why, when Easwaran talked about atheists in his writing, he had a somewhat amused tone. For instance, Easwaran described a man who insisted he only believed in “Nature with a capital N.” When this man asked how Easwaran’s mother was, my teacher would cheerfully answer, “Very well, thank you, thanks to the grace of Nature with a capital N.”
Similarly, Easwaran repeated a quote he attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, saying, “[George Bernard] Shaw was a very religious man who didn’t believe in God.” I imagine if Easwaran weren’t so polite, he’d have said there are no atheists. I think he’d say atheism is merely a rejection of the limited metaphors we use to describe God.
From this perspective, I always believed in God, no matter how alienated I was or how much I railed against religion. I simply called God another name. Perhaps it was animal rights, socialism, or something more generic, like freedom or equality. Of course, these concepts are still important to me, but I’m no longer averse to religious terminology.
In fact, I think there’s a power in it. For instance, building the kingdom of God is a metaphor for building a more just, compassionate society, and for many it resonates at a deeper level than academic descriptions of the same. You just don’t want to forget that, ultimately, all our words and images to describe the divine fall short.