Does God Have a Strategy? by Cary Phillip;Phelizon Jean-Francois;Francois Anne;

Author:Cary, Phillip;Phelizon, Jean-Francois;Francois, Anne; [Cary, Phillip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, General
ISBN: 9781498223966
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2015-10-16T07:00:00+00:00

7. Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, vol. 2, 210.

8. Nietzsche, Gay Science, §108.

5

Paradigms of God

Jean-François Phelizon—Since at this point in our discussion it appears that we have different views of God, we cannot but have different conceptions of divine strategy as well.

As for me, my tendency is to think of God as an infinite being. To be infinite means to be disconnected in a certain way from our present time, or more precisely from our time and space. I am actually located in a double tradition that thinks we human beings are nothing (recall Pascal: “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread”9) and furthermore are the product of an evolution that reaches absolutely beyond us: we did not exist a hundred thousand years ago and will not exist in another hundred thousand years—a hundred thousand years: no more than the blink of an eye on the time scale of the universe!

In fact, it seems to me very presumptuous to believe that humanity is a finished product. Were we to live a few dozen more millennia, we would have profoundly changed in biological terms (always supposing, of course, that we have not disappeared from the face of the earth). Our religions have forgotten that there is life elsewhere than here where humanity has evolved, that there will be life after humanity, and that the existence of human beings will be (or has been) infinitely small in comparison with the duration of the life of the universe. Our religions have also forgotten that human beings are constantly evolving, like all living things. If we believe Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, then the evolution which makes it possible for one consciousness to communicate with another creates ipso facto a kind of super-being: by grouping together through communication, consciousnesses are going to make the same qualitative leap as the molecules that, linking up together, suddenly changed from inert to living beings.

Humanity is not a finished product: that is the reason why I said that our problem with regard to God is whether he is infinite and thus probably infinitely distant from human beings and the religions that they have instituted to worship him, or whether he is the God of one human religion, in which case he cannot be infinite. It seems to me that the God of Israel, of the Gospels, or of the Qur’an must have existed long before Israel, long before Abraham, long before Adam and Eve, and he will continue to exist long after the disappearance of the human race and thus long after the end of all religions. Thus I cannot agree to reduce God to the dimension of history because I think I discern in this reduction a very inauspicious, anthropic idiosyncrasy.

Yet the anthropic aspect of God in the Abrahamic religions is quite present in the “sacred” texts on which they are founded. To take but one example: David says to Goliath the Philistine, before striking him down with a shot from his sling,

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