When I learned about Non-Violent Communication through Marshall Rosenberg’s book of that name, I found it difficult to reconcile the God of the Bible and the liturgy with Rosenberg’s non-judgemental scheme of mediation and reconciliation. My problem with ‘God’ became more serious when I read a Karen Armstrong footnote: ‘God is a construct of the human imagination’. It shouldn’t have done so, because language is the verbal map through which we construe our world, just as a physical map is a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional terrain.
Communication by language is so much a part of our life as human beings that we take it for granted. We assume that our words accurately and sufficiently express our thoughts and perceptions. In fact, quickly as it happens, all speech is a work of art, an art learned in childhood from our cultural background. After a brief look at the neurobiology and learning of language, I shall distinguish between ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’ words and then examine how this may affect our conversation about the word ‘God.’
Neurobiology
The information we receive through our senses is transmitted to the brain by a vast series of electrochemical signals. These are processed against data already stored there at an amazing speed. The peripherals are discarded, and the salient elements are established from the sea of indicators. For example, we can detect a table or chair from any angle by deduction from the shapes we see, their position and the pointers we get from their surroundings. What we say will generally be understood, but no two persons can see precisely the same or have the same background experience. When it comes to more complex ideas, this difference in standpoint easily gives rise to misunderstandings. What we already have in our brains is crucially important: as my father used to say, what you see depends on what you bring to it.
Learning of Language
When we learn as children, we learn first the names of things, objects which we can see and touch, what we later learn to describe as concrete or empirical. We soon learn adjectives relating to these things and to make grammatically well-formed sentences, but the power of names retains its influence. We like it when we are greeted by name. In some cultures, knowledge of the name is supposed to give power over the individual. In the ancient story of Rumpelstiltskin, the goblin’s unusual name is the key to enable the heroine to escape from her obligation to him. In Russia they call the bear medved – honey-lover – in the hope of escaping his fierce embrace. The Jews are so in awe of God that they never use his name.
Concrete and Abstract Nouns
We go on to learn abstract words relating to personal and inter-personal experience. These start as verbs and adjectives, but, when there are many examples, we begin to give them a name, to ‘nominalise’ them. For instance, we see people being sad or happy, so we form the nouns ‘sadness’ and ‘happiness’ to talk about such feelings. Because of the value we attach to truth and beauty, we even emphasise them with capital letters; but they are abstract nouns just like their opposites. Because abstract words have no anchor in the physical world, in the last century some philosophers, called Logical Positivists, developed the thesis that only words with an empirical content were meaningful. This was clearly nonsense: the Positivists overemphasised the importance of physical criteria for meaning, because they thought they should be ‘scientific’.
Grammatically, concrete and abstract nouns look the same, but the distinction is important. In The Structure of Magic, an examination of successful psychotherapeutic discourse, Bandler and Grinder suggest a visual criterion. In ‘well-formed sentences’, those which are not obviously nonsensical, concrete words ‘fit in a wheelbarrow’, abstract words do not. A ball fits in a wheelbarrow, sadness clearly doesn’t. To take a recent headline from The Times, ‘As empirical beings, we know that truth and beauty exist.’ Wrong! Empirically, we cannot fit ‘truth’ and ‘beauty’ in our wheelbarrow. In this context, we should mention the word ‘real’ in all its forms: it is used most often to suggest that an ‘abstract’ word has a ‘concrete’ existence and should arouse instant suspicion.
Discussion of ‘God’
With these thoughts in mind, let us look at Rowan Williams’ recent book Being Human. In the first chapter he discusses consciousness. He rightly rejects mechanistic and reductive approaches to the brain: we are neither computers nor a chemical soup. However, he fails to locate consciousness to his satisfaction. Williams feels that we are leaving something out of account: ‘what may be called “the sacred” in general, but that I am much happier in calling God’. So he gives an apparently concrete name to a hole in his exposition.
In his last book, Unbelievable, Bishop John Shelby Spong addresses the problem of God in a different way. He starts by making a distinction between an experience and the explanation of that experience. He then shows that the God of ancient cosmology, the superhuman Father seated on a throne above the sky, no longer makes sense in the light of the discoveries of Copernicus, Newton, Darwin and Freud. But he still feels the need to account for his religious experience. He speaks of God as Being, or the Ground of Being. His final mantra is: ‘God is not God’s name. God is our name for that which is greater than all and yet present in each.’
Williams and Spong are not alone in their problem with God. In her book Heaven, Paula Gooder eventually finds heaven here on Earth. These writers are familiar with the advance of science, but they have not taken on board the latest ideas of how the human mind works. On the one hand, we are not as rational as we like to believe: as Jonathan Haidt wrote, ‘the emotional tail wags the rational dog.’ On the other, we tell stories: we like to account for our experiences. From a very early age, we can see cause and effect. When we have experiences far out of the ordinary, we are inclined to talk of the transcendent or the sacred, looking for cause outside the human mind. We also look for some certainty to anchor us in this uncertain world. It is not comfortable to live without any fixed reference point.
It is often suggested that we need God as the basis for morality: without God, morality is said to become purely relative. However, morality is another word that does not fit in our wheelbarrow: it is simply shorthand for all that we consider vital to our communal life as human beings and changes with circumstances and advances in our human understanding. The Golden Rule was formulated centuries before Christ. Richard Holloway has explained that we can have ‘Godless Morality’ in his book of that name. Religion has the important function of transmitting moral values from one generation to another, but runs the risk of becoming a fossil, as human moral understanding develops. Tradition cannot stand still.
Conclusion
Originally, I was going to suggest that we would do better without ‘God’. Bryan Magee suggests that we do better to acknowledge the gaps in our understanding: this may lead to further enquiry and possible new answers. Then it occurred to me that, by analogy with truth and beauty, we might have a good use for ‘god’ with a little ‘g’. We know that human beings need to have meaning to thrive in their lives in the world. Viktor Frankl records that he found such people to survive better in the concentration camps. In her book The Choice, the holocaust survivor Edith Eger emphasises that we can choose how we are to react to our experiences without any reference to God. This suggests that we should recognise the human desire to become something more than we are. I would suggest that we might use the word ‘god’ as a symbol for our aspirations, for what gives meaning to life, but recognise that we develop these ideas in our heads without the need of some external prompter. This is the world we live in, dream as we may about what it might become if our choices bear fruit in the future.
If you want to find your god, you might try writing your own obituary, as Gerry Hughes recommends in his last book Cry of Wonder: it is a well-established spiritual discipline. And if you think there should be more to life than the world we live in, let me recount a recent experience. When my wife was researching on skin, she found that a small cut produced an immediate proliferation of cells to migrate across and close the wound: a scratch can disappear in a day or so. Her professor, Hans Krebs, suggested that this might well be a universal phenomenon. In a recent book on trees, I learned that when a tree is wounded, it also proliferates cells to close the gap, though on a much longer time scale. And we share 70% of our genes with trees. For me, this rounds off our place in the ecosphere as a product of evolution. Indeed, there is enough that is wonderful in this world to fill many lifetimes.
After retiring from a management job with IMI (the demerged Metals Division of ICI), Michael Hell became interested in theology. He is a member of the Progressive Christianity Network (PCN) and SOF and has published in Progressive Voices and elsewhere. He has five children.