From Robert Lawrence Kuhn, host and creator of Closer To Truth:

I like arguing God: whether God exists, what God might be like. For me, God debate is good fun.
But God debate is not a game. And when I get serious about God, I wonder about God—critically, whether there is a God; philosophically, about God’s essence and traits. I wonder about all the ways that God could be. Or could not be. I seek those of different views, whose Gods have different shapes and stripes.
Divinity philosopher Keith Ward seeks the essence of God, beyond the specific doctrines of traditional religions. “God is not a thing,” Ward says. “God is not an object, not a person in the sense of one person among others. But you can’t just say God is so mysterious you know nothing at all about God. But still, God is not anything you can easily imagine. God is always beyond that.”
“Beyond” in what sense? Ward says, “In asking about God, one is asking about the ultimate reality which accounts for the existence of the universe, and that’s going to be very different from anything within the universe. But one has to take analogies from somewhere. One can’t just say God is a great blank. And of course, persons are the most developed forms of beings that we know about in the universe. So starting from persons, at least one is saying, ‘Well, this is the best I know about.’ God must be infinitely better than that, but it can’t be worse.”
He continues: “God is infinitely more because God is the cause of everything, the being who conceives all possible worlds and actualizes this specific world. God is not subject to the sort of moral demands that humans are subject to because God is the source of all moral demands. He is goodness itself, not just good. God is the source of everything that exists. But again, not in a very straightforward way.”
Ward goes on: “It’s not only that God starts things off. It’s rather that everything somehow depends on something that is beyond time, something on which all finite things depend for their existence, their nature. So that’s one strand of God. Another strand is that God is, in the words of St. Anselm in Christian tradition, that than which nothing greater, nothing more perfect, can be conceived. So God is a maximum of value. In fact, the way of getting to state what the word ‘God’ names is to ask what would be the most perfect possible sort of being. And that’s what God would be.”
I seek logical boundaries for God, so I ask Ward: “Is it logically necessary to require God to be the greatest conceivable being? I can conceive of a minimal kind of God—which would not be the great conceivable being—by naming God as “the minimum requirement for a being to create this universe.”
Ward responds that “the pressure in the theological tradition is to look for something which is somehow self-explanatory. But if you hypothesize that there could be something that explains itself, then it certainly wouldn’t be just something which happens to be powerful enough to create a universe. Because you’d say, well, why is it that powerful and not more or less powerful?”
Self-explaining is perhaps the toughest test to meet. “For anything to be self-explanatory, two conditions are required,” Ward says. “One is ‘necessity.’ It has to be the way it is; there is no other possibility. But that’s not enough. One also needs to add ‘value.’ That is to say, the self-existing entity exists because it’s good that it exists.” For something to be self-explanatory, he says, it must “bring together necessity and value.” Hence, God would be something “which necessarily exists and is the greatest possible value. And part of the reason it necessarily exists is precisely because it is the greatest possible value. God is the best thing there could be.”
Necessity and value. To Ward, these are the core characteristics of God. If God exists, God is so overwhelming, and God’s traits so broad. I’ve seen so many portraits of God, drawn by theologians and philosophers from the grand religious traditions and from no religion at all. Why such diversity? Multiple dimensions of the divine creator? Or intrinsic contradiction and utter confusion?
The Islamic God is radically transcendent—ineffable. To Islamic philosopher Mahmoud Ayoub, “God is.” God is that powerful and that simple. “God is not a body, not a form, not a thing limited in space or time,” Ayoub says. “God in his essence is unknowable. We know God only through his attributes. These attributes have been conveniently divided by Islamic mystics into two basic categories: the attributes of beauty and the attributes of majesty. The attributes of beauty deal with God as creator—merciful, forgiving, and so on. And they are embodied in a concentrated way in paradise. God’s attributes of majesty manifest God as divine judge—punishing, conquering, dominating. And they are expressed in a concentrated way in hell. There is then nothing in creation that is not a manifestation of one or the other of the divine attributes.”
To Rabbi Neil Gillman, trained in philosophy, “the Jewish God is wholly engaged with humanity, even struggles with human beings.” Gillman is transfixed by “the chaotic.” He asks, “What do we do with those endless stretches of time in our everyday experience of the world when terrible things happen, when God seems to be sleeping or on a coffee break or away or whatever? How do you put the whole thing together? How do you ascertain an ultimate pattern? Indeed, is there an ultimate pattern?”
Gillman is convinced that “there is an atheist at the heart of every believer and there’s a believer at the heart of every atheist. And the thing that separates them is the frequency of beliefs. What’s the overriding pattern? Atheists have to deal with moments of awesome cosmos, of coherence of meaning. Believers have to deal with moments of chaos, absurdity, craziness.”
So “I guess you have to make your choice,” Gillman says. “It’s a leap of faith. Where do you want to cast your lot? As for me, I want to cast my lot with the prevalence of meaning, coherence, order. And then I struggle with the chaos and incoherence. But that’s the ‘fun.’”
Ananda Guruge is a leading Buddhist thinker. “I used to assert that Buddhism was a religion without dogma,” he says with a smile, “until a friend pointed out that my assertion was itself a dogma.”
The Buddhist “god” is, well, as if there is no God. “The Buddha,” Guruge says, “is not prepared to accept that everything happens because a God created it. The Buddha wants you to be the creator of your destiny. So human beings must take responsibility for themselves.”
Guruge says that Buddhism has “functional atheism” as its basis, an interesting term. It suggests that no matter how one views God, God plays no role in our lives. When a tsunami kills thousands, Buddhists do not say “God did it.” At the same time, Guruge says, “we wouldn’t say that the devastation happened entirely because of chance. We say that the people who suffer may be suffering for some action of their previous lives, or present lives, for which some kind of moral punishment, or moral retribution, was required of them. But having some kind of God functionally responsible, either as creator or as supervising the human race, is a concept that is missing in Buddhism.”
Pantheism is the ancient idea that God is all and all is God, that the universe and God are one. To philosopher John Leslie, “Pantheism of the sort which I think makes most sense is the view that everything which exists is part of God. Some people think of God as a divine mind which carries in itself the structure of our universe. I take that theory very seriously. I have been working on the Platonic view that the reason why the universe exists is that it’s ethically demanded that it exist. It’s a good system. And its goodness is responsible for its existence. The fact that it’s good sets up the requirement that it should exist. And it has existed eternally because of that. This can only make sense, I think, against a background of pantheism.”
Leslie contends that “many people believe that in order to understand the divine existence, one must base it on the divine goodness. That is the reason why God exists. It is good that God should exist.” But he goes further. “I believe in an infinite series of minds,” he says, “each of which knows everything worth knowing. You could call the whole collection God. Or you could use the word God just for the infinite mind in which you exist. Or you could say that the word God shouldn’t be used here at all.”
There is a classic tradition that we can only know God in the negative (called “apophatic”). We can never know what God is. We can only know what God is not. Metanexus founder William Grassie says that “most theologians today take it for granted that God exists. This is the difference between what was previously called ‘natural theology’ and a theology of nature. So we’re not trying to identify divine action in any particular causal sequence to prove that God exists.”
Grassie continues: “But if God exists and this is God’s universe and these are God’s Scriptures, how do we understand it all? Recently, there has been a revival of what’s called ‘apophatic theology’ or ‘negative theology,’ the idea that if God is infinite, then nothing that humans can say in human language is adequate for describing God. So the only affirmative things one could say about the attributes of God is what God is not. For instance, to call God a ‘father’ is purely metaphoric speech. God is not literally a father. If God were a father, he wouldn’t be God.”
To get God to be “that than which nothing greater can be conceived,” this idea of the negative space is essential, Grassie concludes. “If you eliminate all attributes,” he says, “what you’re left with is God.”
Some modern theologians believe that God—at least the human concept of God—needs updating, refining, re-understanding. Christian theologian J. Wentzel van Huyssteen recounts the “complex history of dealing with the diverse characteristics notion of God, which has evolved through notions of Trinitarianism and is today being rethought in many ways. So the idea of God has to be taken up within a very specific tradition, within a very specific faith, so that it breaks down into very clear and differentiable kinds of theologies. Otherwise, the conversation becomes so abstract and generic that we always end up with these highly personal belief systems.”
Van Huyssteen does not think it possible to get to God by “weaving little strands together. I wish reality were like that,” he says, “but I don’t think it is like that.” He expects that various religions “will keep on evolving, refining the concept of God so as to feed back into the way we live our lives and hopefully make this world a better place. But beyond that,” he concludes, “who knows?”
To cosmologist-philosopher Paul Davies, “the word ‘God’ means different things to different people. And so we have to be really careful that we just don’t use it in a sloppy manner.”
The popular image of God, according to Davies, is “a sort of a super-being up there in the sky, or beyond the universe, who, like a cosmic magician, could bring the universe into being, who keeps the universe going, who watches over things, and who intervenes from time to time to work miracles.”
He says, “When I became a scientist, I hated that idea. I rejected the notion that the laws of nature could be overruled or suspended in some way, that God was in essence just another force of nature—‘Well, we’ve got gravitation; we’ve got electromagnetism; and oh, from time to time, we’ve also got God, prodding atoms around with additional forces and then disappearing for long periods of time.”
To Davies, “the idea of God as a fitful being living in time, a cosmic tinkerer who intervenes from time to time, is offensive. All horrible.” But then, he says, “we have a more sophisticated concept of God as perhaps a timeless being who is the ground in which the rationality of the universe is rooted. This idea has a lot of appeal. I think it’s really what many physicists actually believe, even though they may not use the word ‘God.’”
Davies explains that he has recently come to “a completely different point of view in which we should try to get away from the notion of a universe which has meaning and purpose imposed on it by some external being. In fact, I would rather get away from the word God altogether and focus on this intrinsic meaning or purpose within the universe.”
What do I think about God? I am taken by wonder, though sometimes I’m also taken by guilt. On occasion, I can feel intellectually backward, embarrassed, for wondering about God without arguing about God, for enjoying speculations of the nature of God without pursuing analysis of the existence of God.
Can I believe without reason? Would that be “faith” or excuse?
God is not a game. Am I playing a game? Am I justified in wondering about God?
To find out, I ask Alvin Plantinga, a towering figure in the philosophy of contemporary religion. He explains what it takes to believe in God.
“First of all,” Plantinga says, “let’s suppose, initially at any rate, that belief in God is justifiable. That is, you’re not going contrary to any intellectual duties or obligations by accepting belief in God. Secondly, let’s suppose that it’s also rational. It’s not a manifestation of some malfunction of your mind if in fact you believe in God, as presumably it isn’t, given that so many people do in fact believe in God. Thirdly, let’s suppose that it holds at least enough of which separates knowledge from true belief. There is a difference between a lucky guess on the one hand and knowing something on the other. Let’s call that difference—whatever exactly it is, however we want to characterize it (which is another large question)—‘warrant.’ And let’s suppose that belief in God also has warrant, at least some degree of warrant initially.”
Plantinga then examines the “proposed defeaters” for such a belief in God. “A defeater for a belief,” he says, “is when some other belief you acquire is such that given that you now have that second belief, you cannot anymore rationally maintain the first belief.”
Among the classic defeaters for belief in God, he says, “is, first of all, the argument from evil. There is always evil in the world—all the suffering and pain, much of it caused by human beings. The world is full of evil. So isn’t evil a defeater for belief in God?”
No, Plantinga explains. “Evil is not obviously a defeater because God might have a reason for allowing evil in the world,” he says. “Philosophers and theologians have suggested a wide variety of reasons for God allowing evil, many of which have to do with free will.”
Plantinga classically comments that, “if God did have reasons for permitting all this evil, it’s not at all likely that we would know what those reasons are. Put it like this,” he says: “From the fact that we don’t know what God’s reasons are, it doesn’t follow that it’s unlikely that God has reasons. The distance between us and God—between our cognitive, epistemic situation and God’s—is just too great for such a conclusion.”
I do wonder about God. I admit it. Wondering can reveal the richness of God’s existence. Or expose the bankruptcy of God’s nonexistence.
I like Ward’s “necessity and value.” Necessity: It’s impossible for God not to exist. Value: Goodness drives existence; God is the greatest possible being.
Islam’s god transcends existence. Jews struggle with God’s polarities—good and evil, coherence and chaos. Buddhists’ “functional atheism” removes God from human affairs.
Davies is offended by an interventionist-magician God who would violate the laws of nature. As for Leslie’s vision of infinite minds, what could be bigger?
Knowing God only in the negative; evolving concepts of God—these too add breadth to what God may be about.
I’m taken by Plantinga’s expositions, but I remain skeptical in banking my belief on the prevalence of human practice. Many exhort me that to know God is to experience God, to sense the feelings and emotions of belief and worship. But I distrust feelings and emotions, sadly perhaps.
I’ll keep wondering about God, profoundly unsure whether I’ll ever get closer to truth.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn speaks with Keith Ward, Mahmoud Ayoub, Rabbi Neil Gillman, Ananda Guruge, John Leslie, William Grassie, J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, Paul Davies, and Alvin Plantinga in “Wondering About God?”—the 16th episode in the new season of the Closer To Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series (55th in total).
The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Every Thursday, participants will discuss the current episode.

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