Does God have a Divine Mind?

There is a powerful, perhaps instinctive, desire to imagine a God that has a human-like divine mind. Even those who have rejected an anthropomorphic, “personal” God still have a difficult time abandoning the idea that God is conscious of us. This conception of God as having the characteristic of consciousness is an ancient one. Pre-scientific humans conceived of the gods as spirits with human-like personalities. The gods of the ancient Greeks tended to toy with humans and use them for their own selfish purposes, but these gods certainly paid attention to what humans were doing. The Old Testament describes a God who listens to people and becomes angry with them, even when God appears as a pillar of fire or burning bush. Even Deists, who are willing to accept the idea of a God who sits on the sidelines of the universe and does not intervene in history, hold on to the notion that God is conscious of us and, at least in some sense, “loves” us.

In The Uncertain Believer, I suggest that we abandon the notion of a God that has a human-like awareness of us. I suggest that the most persuasive conception of God, the one that is most consistent with what science has shown us, is a God that we can love but that does not love us back. That is because this God is an idea, a central, unifying idea that can be shared throughout the world, and the universe if there are other intelligent beings who are capable of sharing it.

The implications of such a God are far-reaching. On the one hand, it means we that we have to give up the idea that God listens to our prayers and answers some of them. I suspect that loss may not be so devastating for most of us, since real life has taught us that most prayers, even by the worthy, appear to go unanswered. At the same time, this intellectual step is enormously liberating because we need no longer struggle with the conflicts between science and religion. We do not need to tie ourselves in intellectual knots trying to fathom the purposes of a divine mind. There is no need to compete with other religious traditions on the grounds that we are the true followers of God but others are not. Paradoxically, perhaps, God can be more meaningful to us if we stop trying to understand God’s purposes and concentrate on our own.