by Ethan Johnson
June 28, 2006

Considering all that remains unknown about the finite, the certainty with which one speaks of the intangible or infinite amuses me.

There is a thought that I have been rolling back and forth in my mind. I have been considering it from many angles, debating its pros and cons, and attempting to at least define the edges of its nature, if not its essence. And what is a thought? Thoughts are intangible, colorless. I have yet to read a report that explains definitively how thoughts are formed and how they travel through the brain, let alone become embedded in our short and long-term memories. And yet thought exists, and to deny this is to play at denial.

The thought reads like this: Consider what I have said about thought. We can know that thought exists, yet we cannot define thought empirically. We cannot conclusively prove that a thought weighs 1 gram, contains 3% sodium hydroxide, and travels at 14 meters per second. Yet.

We can measure musical tones, and agree that A# resonates at x cycles per second, and measures y hertz, and is expressed a certain way on the musical scale or on staff paper. And yet, we do not know A#. We cannot see it, touch it, taste it, smell it. We cannot say what gender it is, or the nature of its morality. We cannot say what sort of mood A# is in at any given time.

What then, shall we say about the nature of God?

What amuses me is that there are people who will (quite literally) read chapter and verse about the nature of God, intangible and infinite. We are told that God has a beard, is male, wears all white, sits on a throne, and can be driven to great anger. We are told that God has the capacity for great love and yet great pettiness.

I tend to view Athiesm through the lens of the disillusioned child who learns that there isn't really a Santa Claus. But does the dissolution of the Santa Claus myth dispel or diminish what I will call the "spirit of giving"?

In my view, God is far more vast and incomprehensible than anything that can be neatly contained in something so crude as language. This is not a cop-out. I think people are necessarily being set up for disillusionment and anger by putting stock in an interpretation of God as something akin to a Santa Claus figure, or stern parent. This is not the nature of God. To accept this interpretation of God is to stop well short of the truth. When a previously accepted truth is exposed as something lacking, we may react by violently rejecting either the myth, or that which exposed the flaw. Hence people who violently reject the idea of God, or people who violently reject the discipline of science.

As I ruminated on the nature of God, I considered two distinct possibilities, either of which may be discredited.

One: Perhaps human eyes are not designed to see the nature of God, and thus shall forever remain a mystery so long as we rely on them to provide empirical data. That sounds too squidgy to me, and rightly may be dismissed by the empirically-minded.

Two: For something more tangible, what if God is, in whole or in part, the blackness of space?

Space, and thus the universe, is so vast as to be essentially infinite, if it is not indeed infinite. The blackness of space may be observed empirically, and yet it may not be truly known. It is like the written numeral "zero": It is a finite, tangible expression of absolute nothingness, which is intangible. One may not venture out into space in hopes of touching the blackness of space, any more than one may travel towards the horizon in hopes of touching it. The horizon is always distant (and relative). The blackness of space is not limited to being seen from Earth. Unlike heliocentric representations of God, the blackness of space may be viewed from nearly any vantage point in the universe. Perhaps this is a more fitting analogy.

Perhaps we do ourselves a disservice in seeking to empirically measure God in wholly scientific terms, anymore than we do the same when we speak in concrete terms of the unknowable.

What impedes any consideration of the nature of God is that God is often saddled with all too human attributes. We do not assign these attributes to musical notes or to thoughts in their raw form. So too does the blackness of space defy these crude labels. And yet it exists, as does thought, and sound.

I was mulling over why one's thoughts might be concerned with that which is infinite, when so little is known about the finite. I suppose that it stands to reason that by defining the edges, such as staking out a position on the nature or folly of the idea of God, we might work our way to the center, namely ourselves. Only to discover that is where we should have started. <EM>