Alan Watts - in the Academy: Essays and Lectures by Alan Watts

Author:Alan Watts [Watts, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Philosophy, Buddhist, Religious, Zen
ISBN: 9781438465562
Google: _m2-DgAAQBAJ
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2017-04-24T23:00:00+00:00

THE NATURE OF GOD

The five proofs of St. Thomas tell us not only that God exists; they tell us also something of what God is like. From the first, which has to do with motion, we learn that God is power. From the second, dealing with God as the First Cause, we see that God is creative power. From the third we learn not just that God has being, but that he is Being itself. The fourth adds to this that God is not mere being; he does not simply exist like a stone, or a man after a heavy dinner. God is the fullness of Being, possessing every perfection of which Being is capable. And finally the fifth tells us that God is the source of all intelligence, order, and design.

Reason, therefore, leads us not only to the fact that God is; it gives us also some knowledge of his nature, though this knowledge is incomplete beside God’s own revelation of himself in the prophets and in Jesus Christ. There are, however, three specially important aspects of the divine nature that reason deduces from our experience of the universe, and though implied in the foregoing argument, it will be well to examine them more closely since nothing detracts more from belief in God than absurdly unworthy ideas of his nature.

1. The first is that God is life. The sufficient cause of a universe containing persons must, as we saw, be at least personal—that is to say, a living, conscious, intelligent and integrated being. God is the most of qualities that we find in more or less degree in the world, and because created things are more or less alive God is that which is most alive. The higher a form of life, the greater its degree of consciousness and integration, and the greater its independence of physical limitations. We are thus led to the thought of God as one who is absolute consciousness, absolute wholeness and unity, and absolute freedom from other than self-imposed limitation. Therefore to say that God is personal is in no sense to limit or belittle him. It is not to imprison God in a form or shape. On the contrary, it is to say that he is the absolute maximum of life and freedom, bursting, as it were, the bonds of form and finitude not because he is vague and misty but because he is utterly and intensely alive.

The idea of a personal God is so often criticized as idolatry, as making God in man’s image. But the alternatives offered by such critics are yet more idolatrous since they conceive God in terms of less living forms than man—as blind and abstract mechanism, force or principle, unlimited only in the inane and vacuous sense of infinite space or aether. The error of idolatry is not that it makes a finite image of the infinitely Vast and Vague, but that it is an attempt to capture the infinitely Alive One in a fixed, dead and petrified form of thought or imagination.

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