Bertrand Russell wrote a little essay some years ago (before he died) which he playfully called “Why I am not a Christian.” This thought-provoking document (which I have never actually read all the way through) is available for your perusal elsewhere on the internet. A quick Google search led me to an edition on ClassicReader.com. I encourage everyone who is sympathetic to atheism to read it, since they will be bound to give it a fair hearing and probably enjoy the thing. I, myself, don’t need it, as I have already given thought to the question and come to my conclusions.

It is not my point here to argue with Russell. Nor to convince you to believe in some sort of God. Nor to make apologetics for the Christian faith. What I do want to do is to look at the philosophical question of the existence of deities, since such entities do have their intellectual uses, and to make a few quick comments by way of explanation for my own belief.

First, a definition. By God, here, I mean an entity of some sort, and not just a force or a universal principle. This entity can manifest forces, of course, by being the origin of them, but it is related to forces it manifests by being the cause of them. And it may embody universal principles, or be the reason universal principles exist — but it is not just the principles. So at once, I have made a distinction between my God and the type of thing Einstein was talking about, or pantheists.

I could continue with an overview of the Nature of God, but that might best be left to another post. In the interest of Brevity (a universal principle and fundamental property of Wit), I’ll limit my further comments here to the Uses of God, just to focus on why we want such a thing hanging about.

There are three Uses of God.

The first use is Creator. Science, which works by the method of causes, worked its way back to the Big Bang, which is rather gratifying to us as believe in a Creative Principle, but stopped short at trying to say where the Big Bang came from. That’s eminantly praiseworthy, because science has no way of knowing why or how it happened. Some people think invoking a creator involves one in an infinite recursion, since the next question is, How was God created? But if we suppose God is the Foundation of Being (I love capitalized words), which is what we are really implying by proposing a Creator, then no such recursion occurs, because God isn’t created. God exists. At time t, t-1, t-1-1, etc. I wasn’t going to speak on the Nature of God, but one must take a moment to point out that Being itself has no reduction, no parts, no simpler form, and no precursor. So we are left with a being which is either eternal, or outside of time. Either way, it isn’t created. It isn’t even its own creator. Existence is the one proposition which has no negation.

The second use is Logos. We assume the universe is logical, well-ordered, and that it can be described by mathematics. Whether or not we believe mathematics exists, we find that th e universe gives rise to some sorts of mathematics but not to others, as if the logic of the mind is built into the very fabric of space-time. Kant would have argued that it’s only built into the fabric of our mind, but since we have no way to know the universe other than through its use and application, there is no way to tell the difference, and we might as well assume the necessity of logic is an Actual property of the world. So when we ask why there are natural laws (something science assumes without question), the answer is, it was made that way.

The Logos, by the way, expands into all non-physical qualities of being. Logos encompasses not only math, but also thought, meanings, symbolism and semantics, art, music, everything that we could list under the heading of patterns. Mind itself, such as we have and use in reading this, is an aspect of the spiritual Logos which complements the physical reality of the Universe.

The third use of God is Love. Now, this is a very difficult proposition to propose, because at first sight, it’s obvious that God has ordained an ending for everything. Far from being that which Saves us from the Shadow of Death, God has created the Shadow of Death to hound us all. Even atheists have to come to terms with the bleak cruelty of nature, with its volcanos and earthquakes, supernovas and entropy. Every creature which can feel pleasure can feel pain. We are all equipped, from humans to plants, with all the necessary faculties for suffering. So what is loving about God’s Nature?

It could take whole books to fully explore the answer to such a question, but one thing is clear at the outset. The universe is such a place that brings us into being. Starting from a cloud of hydrogen gas, progressively more complex things have evolved, leading eventually to us, and to other intelligences in the universe, and ultimately we have to recognize that the universe is of the kind where this happens, and not of the kind where it doesn’t. So ultimately, we are wanted. We are supposed to be here. The entire history of the world is a path of destiny which leads directly — yes, directly — to you and me. And I think this has some profound implications.

I will have to cut this short. I’ve put off writing this article for a long time, mainly because there is so much to say. Having touched briefly on some of the reasons for and uses of God, I think I can get away with a brief remark that, having arrived at this basic conclusion, I thought it was a very short path to arrive at Christianity.

One final comment. I don’t dispute that the phenomena I’ve talked about can be accepted without proposing any deities to explain them. The position of atheism seems to be one of accepting a deep and unresolvable mystery about the nature of the universe, anyway, and if you’re comfortble with that, then erecting a barrier with the sign “Go No Further” around the questions we find disturbing is understandable. What I have not done, here, is to explain what this notion of God I’ve proposed does for us. What problems does it solve. Why do we need the idea. And on some level we don’t.

But, I think. And there is a reason why things are as they are. What do you think?