Today I was too busy to listen closely to the weekly Ultimate Issues Hour on Dennis Prager’s radio show. But I caught one guy calling in on the subject of the existence of God. He explained that, for his own part, he thought of God as some kind of Force. Seeing God as an “old man in the sky” seemed to him primitive thinking.
One hears that sort of thing fairly often. I attribute it to the scientific world view that’s dominated public thought ever since the Enlightenment. Religion, under that view, is irrational and all about emotion. Science is about reason. If there’s a true explanation of ultimate reality, such thinking argues, it must be a scientific answer. So if there’s a God, He must be describable in scientific terms. A powerful Force seems to fit the bill.
Hey, George Lucas built a whole movie franchise out of it.
I would like to propose that describing God as a Force is both inadequate and profoundly unsatisfactory. Here’s why.
My first proposition is that God must be the greatest thing in the universe. Because if anything were greater than Him, that thing would be God. God is, by definition, that which has no superior.
A Force is by its nature an impersonal phenomenon. Forces do not think or choose or love.
Therefore, if God is a Force, God is not love.
But if you believe (as I do, and most people in our culture do, because they’ve never examined their beliefs) that love is the greatest thing of all, how can you say that God is a Force? That would mean that something that cannot love is superior to things that do love (that would be us).
You have to have it one way or the other. If God is a Force, He is not love, and love is not the greatest thing of all.
If God is Love, He is not a Force (or not merely a Force). He has to be a Person (three persons in one, according to Christians).
For me it’s a no brainer. Love wins. God must be Personal.
Amen.
Here here!! Speech! Speech!!
Agreed, but–and I am very curious to hear responses to this–does a Force have to be impersonal? Could God be imagined as accurately as a personally-interested Force of Love/Justice/Holiness as he can by an Old Man in the Sky?
Popular theologians such as C.S. Lewis and N.T. Wright have spent a good portion of their time arguing against a “dead” image of God as an “old man with a beard.” Instead, they tend to push for more cosmic and inhuman images–God the Father as a “person,” but not a human being, and not anything like what we think of when we think of an “old man in the sky.”
In fact, the old medieval cliche (“God is the being whose circumference is nowhere but whose center is everywhere”) seems to make an image of God the Father that is closer to a “force” than it is to an “old man.” In medieval cosmology, of course, that works out because the force that holds the universe together is, in fact, love.
If you say a force is personal, aren’t you calling it a person? If you say it loves, aren’t you conceding that it’s a force that’s personal?
I don’t think C.S. Lewis spent a lot of time arguing against the “old man with a beard” image. In one place, he asks rhetorically whether anyone has ever been spiritually harmed by thinking of God as an old man with a beard.