The Tao of Philosophy by Alan Watts

Author:Alan Watts
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8048-3204-5
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing

Images of God

Chapter Five

I imagine that most of you know the old story about the astronaut who went far out into space and was asked on his return whether he had been to Heaven and seen God, and he said, “Yes.” So they said to him “Well, what about God?” And he said, “She is black.” Now although this is a very well-known and well-worn story, it is very profound. I once knew a monk who started out in life as pretty much an agnostic or an atheist, and then he began to read the writing of Annie Besant, the British theosophist who proclaimed the vital force, the élan vital. The more he read this kind of philosophy, the more he saw that these people were really talking about God. I have read a great deal of theological reasoning about the existence of God, and all of them start out on this line of reasoning. If you are intelligent and reasonable you cannot be the product of a mechanical and meaningless universe. Figs do not grow on thistles, grapes do not grow on thorns, and therefore you, as an expression of the universe and as an aperture through which the universe is observing itself, cannot be a mere fluke. If this world “peoples” as a tree brings forth fruit, then the universe itself, the energy which underlies it—the “ground of being” as Paul Tillich called it—must be intelligent. However, when you come to that conclusion you must be very careful, because you may make an unwarranted jump to the conclusion that that intelligence, that marvelous designing power which produces all this, is the biblical God. Be careful, because that God, contrary to His own commandments, is fashioned in the graven image of a paternal, authoritarian, beneficent tyrant of the ancient Near East.

Now it is very easy to fall into that trap because it has been institutionalized in the Roman Catholic Church, in the Synagogue, and in the Protestant Church. It is all there, ready for you to accept, and by the pressure of social consensus it is very natural for us to assume that when somebody uses the word “god” it is that father figure which is intended. Even Jesus used the analogy “the Father” for his experience of God because there was no other one available to him in his culture, but these days we are in rebellion against the image of the authoritarian father. However, to reject the paternalistic image of God as an idol is not necessarily to be an atheist, although I have advocated something called “atheism in the name of God” as an experience, a contact, or a relationship with God that is the ground of your being and does not have to be embodied or expressed in any specific image. Now, theologians on the whole do not like this idea because, as I find in my discourse with them, they want to be a little bit hard-nosed about the nature of God. They want to say that indeed God has a very specific nature.

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