THE HEAVENS—Claiming that love had made Him do crazy things, the Lord God Almighty admitted Monday that sending the Great Flood to destroy the evil He beheld upon the earth was just a misguided attempt to impress Jodie Foster. “Truth be told, I convinced Myself that if I sent mighty torrents of water to cleanse the world of corruption and start creation anew, Jodie would finally take notice and love Me, but I realize now how foolish that was,” said the Supreme Being of Paradise, explaining how He developed an unhealthy obsession with the Silence Of The Lambs actress before sending the global deluge to purge the decadent and the wicked. “She wasn’t responding to any of My divine messages or signs from above, so drowning all life on earth was the only way I could think of to get her attention. I know I’m not legally allowed to contact her, but Jodie, if you’re reading this, I never meant any harm by having the rain fall for 40 days and 40 nights.” At press time, God contended that, despite recognizing the error of His ways, He still considered the Flood to be “the greatest love offering in the history of the world.”
MESSIER 74 GALAXY—Recoiling in pain after the gravitational vortex tore off a chunk of flesh and bone down to the first knuckle, God, Our Lord and Heavenly Father, reportedly lost the tip of His right index finger Monday in an accident involving an intermediate-mass black hole. “Ah, son of a bitch—Christ, that hurt like a motherfucker,” said the Divine Creator, who sucked blood from the mangled stump as He chastised Himself for not paying closer attention to what He was doing while building a new spiral galaxy. “I knew I should have shut that thing down eons ago. Oh well, the tip of my finger is in there now, so no use trying to get it back. Dammit, now there’s blood all over the universe.” The Lord then wrapped His finger in an excess piece of robe and went off in search of a neutron star to cauterize the wound.
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.
Einstein spoke of God frequently when talking about the beauty and elegance of the universe. He said,
I’m not an atheist, and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist… I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings
Spinoza was a 17th century Jewish philosopher living in what is now the Netherlands. He developed an extensive theology and theodicy of God as well as ethics and political theory.
Although Jewish, Spinoza’s was not the God of the Bible. He was formally thrown out of the Jewish community in fact. Instead, Spinoza proposed a God that was impersonal, infinite, and who lends His nature to all things that He creates.
Although this conception of God is seen as pantheistic, it is more appropriate to see his God as consisting of abstract order which gives birth to physical reality rather than equivalent to physical reality.
Spinoza did not believe one should regard God with worship and awe. His attitude is purely a rational approach to learn and understand. By understanding nature and the laws that govern it, a seeker after God comes to better understand Him.
It’s not surprising that, as a great scientist, Einstein believed God could be found in understanding of nature rather than in worship. Indeed, he said,
The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations.
Einstein believed, therefore, that science is discovering truths about reality and, in fact, science is the only way to discover them. Religions that claim to have revelation from God such as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam have no access to God at all.
As he he said about his coming of age, “[t]hrough the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true.”
Hence, the God of the Bible is a human invention while the God of Spinoza, a God who impersonally lends his essence to reality and thereby creates the laws of physics, is true and real.
Although Spinoza was writing at the birth of the Enlightenment, his is a thoroughly modernist, scientistic position that many scientists hold today. For example, Frank Wilczek, physics Nobel Laureate, has stated he is effectively a “pantheist”, writing in his book, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality:
In studying how the world works, we are studying how God works, and thereby learning what God is. In that spirit we can interpret the search for knowledge as a form of worship, and our discoveries as revelations.
Why do these rational-types believe in God at all? Why not be an atheist?
I think the answer is simple. Any God provides a kind of religious underpinning to one’s life, a sense of meaning which avoids the ultimate absurdity and nihilsm of atheism. This belief system is necessary since, as the great atheistic philosophers, Sartre, Camus, and Nietzsche, showed, a life without God is meaningless, absurd, and catastrophic for the human mind in particular and the human species in general.
Human beings will endure the worst suffering for meaning because fundamentally we know that our small, finite lives are of no consequence unless they are entwined in something eternal.
Unless you have your head stuck in the sand and are thoroughly apathetic about whether your life means anything or whether anything you do or love matters, you have to have God, even if that God does not resemble the one our ancestors believed in.
For Einstein and Spinoza, God did not need to be (1) personal or loving, (2) involved in or care about human affairs, or (3) good or evil.
Spinoza’s theology of good and evil, his theodicy, in fact, is that good and evil are relative to human desires, not God’s desires. Spinoza argued that God has no specific purpose or desires because he is perfect. A desire comes from a lack, and God lacks nothing, therefore he needs nothing. God has no purpose for reality, he is anti-teleological, because, again, he is perfect. He needs no purpose.
As Spinoza said, “[t]hings are not more or less perfect because they please or offend men’s senses, or because they are of use to, or are incompatible with, human nature.”
Spinoza is often called a moral relativist in the sense that he considered morality to be relative to what humans believe is right and wrong and has no absolute standard outside humanity.
Truthfully, however, Spinoza wasn’t a moral relativist. Instead, he believed in deriving morality from natural law, i.e., that one could discover the correct moral laws from nature and how human beings interact with one another. This is a form of moral realism and very in line with the thinking of quite a few scientists and philosophers today.
Spinoza’s theory about human beings is that the more we grow in knowledge and rational thinking, the more “good” we become in terms of our own needs. What we perceive as evil comes from ignorance about ourselves, others, and the world. A world made of perfectly rational beings, Spinoza believed, would be perfectly harmonious.
Now that we understand something about the kind of God Einstein believed in, we can ask if this God is “real” or, more correctly, is this an accurate portrayal of God?
I would argue that this portrayal of God, while perfectly logical, falls short of what people need or want from God. Moreover, there is little reason to put one’s faith in a conception of God embedded in and tied to natural law.
Anti-realist philosophers, for example, question our ability to understand nature and regard the natural world to be fundamentally incomprehensible. Anti-realism suggests that human beings are free to define reality how they see fit in the same sense that moral anti-realism allows us to define morality as we see fit.
The anti-realist stance, which began with Kant and progressed through the German idealist school to Heidegger, proposes that we have either no or limited access to reality.
If this is true, then Spinoza’s God, even if the true God, is cut off from human beings. Einstein’s library of books are all blank, waiting to be filled in and arranged by human beings.
It isn’t that we don’t live in the real world at all, but rather than the real world becomes so filtered by our subjective perceptions that we end up with a thoroughly personal view of it. An objective view of reality, by contrast, doesn’t exist.
Anti-realists point to the existence of idealized models, none of which can be confirmed but only falsified with more data. These models are all conjectures that have not yet failed. Their longevity does not lend them additional reality but indicates that the data that will cause them to fail has not yet been collected or applied. When that does happen, we will say they are “approximate models”.
In the end, they argue, all science is a construct of the human mind, like a novel that we are writing about the universe that we all agree is true because none of us can prove it false.
Someone can be anti-realist about physics but not about God, but not if they subscribe to the God of Einstein which is fundamentally realist.
On the other hand, one could, hypothetically, still believe in the God of Spinoza but believe that we are cut off from Him, i.e., God is inherent in the nature of reality, too bad we can’t know what reality actually is, but this is hardly the attitude Spinoza or Einstein took. It’s hard to see value in placing one’s faith in such a God.
More recent philosophers, starting in the early to mid-20th century with Wittgenstein and continuing with Derrida, have taken a stance against the realism versus anti-realism debate, suggesting that neither viewpoint can be supported because all truth is relative to language alone.
In other words, there is no such thing as “truth” outside of human words. When we say that Newton’s law is “true” because it explains how planets orbit and how rocks fall, it is simply a statement about human experience.
Furthermore, the formulation of Newton’s laws as well as other scientific laws such as Einstein’s theory of General Relativity are merely language games that we play to help people predict future data in order to accomplish necessary tasks (or get papers published or win grants or win prizes, etc.). All truth, therefore, reduces to human activity. It is the information that makes us go as a species.
Wittgenstein’s isn’t an anti-realist stance because he is silent about reality. Whether we are perceiving real things or not, we cannot say because language cannot talk about anything that isn’t other language. When we communicate about the real world, it is because we have learned how to use language. We have learned the rules of the game and apply those to our actions. There is no inherent meaning.
Each religion or spiritual practice has its own language game that it plays in the same way that science plays its language game.
We play the game that best meets what we naturally desire: meaning and beyond that God.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that all roads lead to God or all religions are equal any more than all roads lead to useful scientific theories. Likewise, it does not mean that life is a meaningless game. Rather, it means that what we do and what we believe is, in large part, part of the games we have learned to play. A baby knows none of these games (save very simple ones with which it is born such as how to nurse and cry). All these have to be learned.
The convergence of knowledge-making onto the scientific method and the convergence of meaning-making on values such as innate human dignity and love one’s neighbor as one’s self, forgiveness, justice and mercy is no accident. These games lead to the best human flourishing and sense of personal fulfillment. We are all too aware of both our ignorance and our moral inadequacy to play other games happily.
Still, if all that we do is just a game, does that mean that there is no God behind it all?
Perhaps it simply means that we find God not in words or theories but in the stillness of contemplation. Words prepare us for that encounter but the encounter is nonetheless beyond spoken language or marks on a page.
This is what the great mystics believed such as the author of the 14th century primer The Cloud of Unknowing, Saint Teresa of Avila’s the Interior Castle, and the works of the 6th century author now known as Pseudo-Dyonisus the Areopagite.
While a mystical understanding of God is opposed to a rationalist approach, we do know that Saint Thomas Aquinas, who wrote some of the most rational statements about God ever written in his Summa Theologicae and other works, nevertheless, abandoned it all after such an experience (Alban Butler’s “Lives of the Saints”):
On the feast of St. Nicholas [in 1273], St. Thomas Aquinas was celebrating Mass when he received a revelation that so affected him that he wrote and dictated no more, leaving his great work the ‘Summa Theologiae’ unfinished. To Brother Reginald’s (his secretary and friend) expostulations he replied, ‘The end of my labors has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.’ When later asked by Reginald to return to writing, Aquinas said, ‘I can write no more. I have seen things that make my writings like straw.’ … Aquinas died three months later while on his way to the ecumenical council of Lyons.
Which goes to show that perhaps the only way for us to know God is for God to reveal Himself to us, one way or another. Whether that is in the discovery of a new law of nature or a mystical encounter is not up to us. It is up to Him.
Spinoza, Baruch, The Complete Works, Samuel Shirley, translator (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2002).
The longer I live, the more qualified I become to speak on the topic of suffering. I don’t write about suffering as one who stands on the sideline, like an armchair expert who makes comments on a football game that he’s never played in his life. I write as someone who has played the game. In fact, I am in the middle of the game, and I’m not winning.
Two weeks ago, my wife was diagnosed with advanced stage four bowel cancer.
It came at us out of nowhere.
I can’t begin to tell you the shock, the grief, and the sense of utter powerlessness that I felt and am still feeling. There have been moments of utter despair and of shaking my fists at the sky.
There was an assumption amongst some of my friends that I might be angry at God for all of this. Is he in control or not? At the very least, my faith should have been shaken to the core. And, to a certain extent, it is.
However, certain things about suffering actually make me believe in God even more. You might think that’s crazy, but I’ve come up with seven reasons why suffering points me to God:
Suffering makes me ask the “why” question.
My wife is a 42-year-old mother of three. It feels completely unfair that she should have cancer. When we were given the diagnosis, it was like being slapped in the face with a piece of two-by-four.
On the tail of the shock inevitably comes the question…
Why?
Why is this happening to us?
It’s a natural response, I suppose, to search for some semblance of reason or meaning in the face of such adversity. But here’s the thing… if you look behind the question to the reason that the question is asked, you are forced to arrive at an astounding conclusion.
We all assume, subconsciously or otherwise, that the universe is somehow on our side. And when it is not, we get angry. The fact that we feel this profound sense of injustice points us to a truth: Human beings struggle with the idea that maybe there isn’t someone steering the ship.
When something goes wrong, we scream at the universe, “I demand to speak to the manager!” And the reason we do this is that we believe that there is one… or at least there should be.
That’s God.
Suffering makes me recognize that there is a moral order
People ask me all the time, “If God is so good, then why do bad things happen?” It’s a fair question, but it’s not a problem exclusive to Christianity. Every worldview has to answer the question: The Buddhist, the Hindu, the Muslim, and even the Atheist are all confronted with the same dilemma.
The atheistic worldview, in particular, has little to offer the suffering person. It says to the sufferer: “Your suffering is statistically unfortunate but ultimately meaningless.”
But this does not satisfy us, nor should it. If we were hard-wired to suffer, we would not be asking, “Why?” Suffering would not bother us in the slightest.
But, the very act of questioning why something unjust or painful is happening implies an inherent belief in a moral order. We intuitively grasp the concepts of right and wrong, fairness and injustice. This sense of moral framework suggests that there is a higher power that defines and governs these principles.
Suffering brings out the best in humans
Moving from the philosophical to the intensely practical, suffering simply brings out the best in human beings.
When news of my wife’s battle with cancer spread, it felt like we were surrounded by a warm embrace from all corners of the world. Our friends rallied around us with breathtakingly generous support and care. But what truly took me by surprise was the kindness that came from complete strangers.
From a man in Colorado who offered to buy me a coffee, despite the oceans between us, to a woman who sent us a heartfelt card from halfway around the world — these gestures touched our hearts in ways I can hardly put into words. It’s moments like these that remind me of the extraordinary goodness that exists in people, even in the face of adversity.
Such kindness points me toward belief in a higher power — a benevolent force that orchestrates moments of grace and solidarity, gently nudging us, urging us to recognize that there is something greater than ourselves, something that transcends the boundaries of our individual lives.
Suffering turns us toward what is really important
This is absolutely crazy, but our marriage is the best it’s ever been since the diagnosis.
I feel such intense compassion and love toward my wife — unrivaled by any other time in our twenty-year relationship. In the midst of the uncertainty, somehow, we’ve been gifted with a newfound clarity about what truly matters. The petty grievances and trivial concerns that once occupied our thoughts have faded into insignificance.
For example, I have tended to be a bit of a cheapskate, but I am suddenly finding it much easier to open my wallet and share what I have. The impulse to hold onto every penny has given way to a profound understanding that there are far more important things in life than money. I knew this already, of course, in an intellectual sense, but now my behavior is finally catching up to my intellect.
My only regret is that it took cancer to make me more compassionate, generous, and kind.
Sigh.
Suffering leads us to the end of ourselves
In a world that often celebrates self-sufficiency, it’s easy to forget that there are some challenges we simply can’t conquer. However, real faith begins when we reach the end of our own resources. And nothing announces your powerlessness more than a disease you cannot heal or fix.
Suffering has a way of humbling us, of showing us that we’re not invincible. It’s in these moments of vulnerability that we realize we need faith in something beyond our own strength, ability and understanding.
Now, some may deride faith as some kind of cosmic crutch, dismissing it as a sign of weakness. Yet, I believe it takes immense strength to admit our need for something greater. It’s an act of courage to set aside our pride, to lay bare our vulnerabilities, and to seek solace and guidance beyond ourselves.
But without the gift of suffering, many people continue to live comfortably with the illusion that they are in control — until one day, when life teaches them the truth.
Suffering brings us back to the now
When you are faced with uncertainty, there is a risk that your mind will constantly try to wander into the land of “what ifs.” I know I have visited “Dr Google” many times over the past few weeks to try to get some certainty about what the future may hold for my wife.
But, here’s the thing: When you worry about what will be in your future, anxiety is your constant companion. Therefore, suffering invites us to make NOW the primary focus of our lives. After all, NOW is all we have. Those who live too much in the past or the future rarely experience peace.
As Eckhart Tolle says, “All negativity is caused by a denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry — all forms of fear — are caused by too much future and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of non-forgiveness are caused by too much past and not enough presence.”
I think he is right.
And, what is more, I think the only place to find God is in the “Now.” There’s a reason God is called the “Great I Am “— not the “I Was” or the “I Will Be.” The presence is always in the present.
Suffering can be accompanied by unexplainable peace
In amongst the tears, the anger, and the sense of utter despair, there have been moments of inexplicable peace. This peace doesn’t make any sense, given the circumstances.
There is a whisper from the universe that I cannot explain. It’s a quiet reassurance that we are held in a greater embrace, even when life’s storms rage around us. I do not pretend to have an explanation for this phenomenon, and perhaps you think I am crazy. But, ask virtually anyone who has suffered, and you will discover that somehow, despair is so often punctuated by peace.
Some, like me, call that sense of peace “ God.”
The Last Word
C.S. Lewis once said: “God whispers to us in our pleasures but shouts to us in our suffering.”
I agree with him.
In the crucible of suffering, where pain and uncertainty converge, amidst life’s harshest trials, God shouts to us!
The “why” questions, the search for order, the outpouring of human kindness, the newfound clarity about what truly matters, and the acknowledgment of our own limitations — all these facets of suffering converge to point me back to God.
In a way, it doesn’t make sense to find greater faith in the midst of all this trouble, because there are no guarantees of a positive outcome. In fact, the odds are completely against us.
And that is how I know this faith is real.
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STOCKHOLM—Honoring the deity’s transformational and enduring contributions to the scientific field, the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded Monday to God, our Creator, who devised the Heavens and the Earth in all their brilliance. “This prize recognizes the Lord’s foundational work in developing the sun, the moon, and all the manifold stars in the cosmos,” said Hans Olsson, a member of the Nobel Committee for Physics, who went on to praise the elegance of God’s insight in separating the day and night, thereby developing the very concept of time, without which physics itself would be functionally meaningless. “Beyond that, this year’s laureate also created the laws of physics, which continue to be of inestimable importance to the field. In that sense, this is really long overdue.” At press time, God’s Nobel Prize had been rescinded after it was discovered that He had taken credit for the work of Lise Meitner, the late Austrian physicist who first created light and set the universe into motion but was overlooked for the prize because she was a woman.
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