The trouble with religion, as I see it, is that it encourages us to be incurious about God. The confirmed Christians that I know either approach God with a set of assumptions about His nature, or concede that He is unknowable but must be loved and obeyed nevertheless.
My college-age daughter, for example, has become a Christian, despite my lack of enthusiasm for the metamorphosis. When I brought up to her a theory of mine—not exactly an original one—that God might be something other than all-good and all-powerful, she responded, with some hauteur, that no, God is indeed all-good/all-powerful, and He uses us to His ends.
Well, I asked her what about evil, then? Why would a good God allow it? (I felt like I was back in college myself.)
He allows it so that we can choose, she said.
Okay, then, but what about natural evils? Earthquakes, hurricanes. We don’t cause them. Why does He allow them?
I don’t know, she said. End of discussion.
In other words, her stance is, she doesn’t know, but she just knows.
Maybe this is just a case of being 21 years old, but I find it fairly typical of religious people of all ages.
Religion is based on fear, and if you begin with that, then you’re afraid to ask too many questions. If you’re going to anthropomorphize God (He wants me to know Him), then why not speculate as to His character and motives? Maybe God is evolving, too, as I suggested to my daughter; maybe He’s working out His own destiny, as we are. That would explain evil (it’s an expedient, or unavoidable, not a violation of a perfectly benevolent nature) and resolve the knotty problem of free will (we’re all free, but what we choose to do affects God’s destiny as much as ours), and it would go a long way toward liberating religion from dogma, and giving us all a stake in the fate of the universe.
That’s a faith I could embrace.
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