Book Review - "Your God Is Too Small"

[Irishman]

Okay, sorry it took so long to get back to this; real life intervened.

Part Two is where the book shifts direction, from criticizing other “weak” or “erroneous”, i.e. “small”, conceptions of God, and tooking toward how to conceive of God as being big enough.

Now I will preface this by saying my guess about where he would take this could have been toward a more modern, ecumenical, more vague, less God God. But he didn’t do that. Instead, he doubles down on the Christian concept of God. Basically, the point of this book was just to whine at people that he thinks don’t get it. Anyway…

Part Two: Constructive.

Now he starts trying to defend what he calls “An Adequate God”. Adequate is a somewhat amusing choice of a word - it almost sounds like an oxymoron.

1. God Unfocused - Start by attempting to appreciate the “size” of God.

He must not be limited to religious matters or even to the “religious” interpretation of life. He must not be confined to one particular section of time nor must we imagine Him as the local god of this planet or even only of the Universe that astronomical survey has so far discovered. It is not, of course, physical size that we are trying to establish in our minds. [snip] It is rather to see the immensely broad sweep of the Creator’s activity, the astonishing complexity of His mental processes which science laboriously uncovers, the vast sea of what we can only call “God” in a small corner of which man lives and moves and has his being.

He goes on to say we can’t stop there with a vague, “unfocused” God that is de-personalized. We can’t just build up a mental concept of virtues like Goodness, Truth, and Beauty and worship a source of Supreme Values. It is not a person that we can relate to or have a relationship with or rely on it as a source of strength and hope or whatever.

In this respect, I give him credit. To my mind, I can’t see the value in conceiving of God as just some depersonalized vast compilation of values. There doesn’t seem to be a point in giving that a label “God” that carries along with it a lot of conceptual baggage. The baggage gets in the way of what you mean, and gives people the wrong impression, through their own preconceptions. It seems more of an attempt to pretend to be one of the group and give yourself something you can think of when other people are talking about God, so you can fit in.

Anyway, he goes on.

Thus we can see the dilemma, though often unconscious, of many modern people outside organized religion. If they use their minds and imaginations they cannot help seeing that if there is a Supreme Being He must be infinitely vaster than our forefathers’ conceptions. The more they know, the more science reveals to them, the wider grow the mental horizons and the more inadequate grow he old little gods. And yet this vastness seems to de-personalize God more and more until he becomes a vague unfocused Abstraction.

In the face of this dilemma, many abandon the idea of knowing God, and pin their hopes and apply their energies to the “progress” of the human race.

Here he seems to be speaking about Humanists and Humanism. There is some truth to what he says, God seems inadequate so move on to something else. He continues his argument to try to show why this won’t work.

He proposes that humanity continues to progress, to develop, and to grow more healthy and wise as a species. We improve psychological methods and whatever, and conquer Nature by scientific knowledge. We resolve all tensions and maladjustments of personal relationships. Then what? Except eventually the Earth will become uninhabitable. It will be destroyed by becoming too cold or by a collision or by the Sun swallowing it or by giant leprechauns (ok, he didn’t say that).

That means that the total result of human progress, of every effort and aspiration and ideal will be annihilation in the deathly cold of inter-stellar space. And there is nothing more to come.

I suppose we can forgive him of not anticipating space travel and eventually the idea of colonization, that one day humanity will find a way to move off Earth before the Earth is destroyed. I suppose I could be generous and extend his argument to the eventual heat death of the universe. At some point, everything that is what we know of humanity and life and being will be consumed in the ultimate end of everything. Then he says

But if the end is nothing, sheer non-existence, surely no reasonable person can regard it as an ideal to command the whole loyalty of an adult mind and heart.

Well, here’s the problem: it doesn’t matter if an ideal is worthy of commanding an adult mind and heart. There is this little matter of determining what actually is, first. If there is no God, then believing in one won’t make any difference to this ultimate end, this destruction of everything and the apparent ultimate meaninglessness that it engenders. “Oh my, there’s no point, because it’s all for naught.”

Sure, if you’re going to believe in a God, then believe in one that is worthwhile. But this argument so far doesn’t really give much to go on.

2. A Clue to Reality - Here is where he really gets things bass-ackwards, IMO. He argues that the discovery of the atom bomb proves that matter is destructible. Therefore, we live under the shadow of universal disintegration. But because spiritual values are incapable of being weighed and measured, they are incapable of physical destruction.

IN the light of the probable ultimate fate of the planet and of the present (far more impressive) threat to human life, we are driven to reconsider whether after all there is reality beyond the physical, measurable reality. We begin to wonder whether the whole position is not now the reverse of what men once thought. They used to talk of the “spiritual” values as shadowy and unsubstantial, and the physical as solid and “real” and reliable. They are beginning to see that the opposite may well be true. We can certainly see evidence of the universal destructibility of matter: perhaps it is after all true that “reality” lies in another realm altogether, and that its values are not unsubstantial after all.

[snip]

After all, if it should be true that the nature of reality is spiritual and is it only quite temporarily and incidentally involved in matter, it is not unreasonable to want to know something of the Spiritual Being behind the Scheme of Things.

That’s right, he’s just tried to turn reality on its head and argue that because the universe is made of matter and matter can be destroyed, and therefore the universe seems that it will eventually all be destroyed, there must then be a spiritual reality that is beyond the physical, and because the spiritual is not solid and material, it is impervious to destruction, and therefore more real. :eek:

What a load of hooey. He does nothing to demonstrate the existence of this spiritual world except state that it is the qualities of spirit and personality. Basically, whatever vague notion of an ethereal, dualistic spiritual realm is out there is justification that this realm exists, and therefore, is more real than the hard matter of life.

I keep restating it because it is so mindbogglingly preposterous and unsupported by what he has given us. He goes on.

And on those unimaginative people to whom the spiritual has always sounded fanciful and unreal, it is slowly dawning that the physical world which is so real and tangible to them is most uncomfortably unreliable. A man used to be able to reckon on a good number of years of active material life, which were a most efficient buffer between him and the naked spiritual realities which in his more vulnerable moments he suspected might be true. Now his buffer of material things has been shown to be far from dependable. At any moment he might be pitchforked into the world of the spirit. His anchors are slipping, and if he feels the need of anchorage (and who, at heard, does not?) he must find it in the world of the spirit – he must find God.

Okay, I guess I have to count myself as “unimaginative”, as the spiritual sounds fanciful and unreal. Telling me I might die at any moment and the whole of the universe evaporate really doesn’t do anything to make me feel that spiritual realm is any more real than I did before, and it does not send me scampering after some uber-ghost.

And, just for good measure, he restates:

NOTE. It must not be supposed that what we call spiritual (and which is at present invisible) is less “solid” than matter. It may well prove, since it is indestructible, to be in a sense, more solid. It is only our peculiar way of looking at things which makes a man’s muscles, for example, appear more solid than his personality. This idea of the real world being more “solid” is most ably and ingeniously worked out by Dr. C. S. Lewis in his fantasy of Heaven and Hell: The Great Divorce.

That’s right, he just doubled down on the idea. Hey, I have a counterargument: since what we call the “spiritual” is all imaginary and thought structures, it resides purely in the minds of us material humans, and when all the material humans disappear in a cloud of ultimate evaporation at the poof of the universe, all those imaginings and thought bubbles will evaporate with them. Thus, the “spiritual” is just as destructible as the material world, and your God is nothing more than a fantasy dreamed up by a goober with a fear of dying and daddy issues.

---

I’m going to take a break from this now to give it time to settle in. This post is getting long already, and we’re only done with the second chapter of this section.