God: Did He create us or did we create Him?

Is God the product of man’s creative imagination?

Karen Armstrong, in the introduction to her well written book “A History of God"  asks: Is God the projection of human needs and drives? According to her, God was and is still a product of creative imagination, like poetry and music. Karen Armstrong was Catholic born, joined a religious order and became a dedicated nun but was unable to glimpse ‘the God described by the prophets and mystics’. So, she left the convent and became a commentator of religious affairs. 

In her book, Armstrong traces the historical development of the 

concept of God. She talks about the Christian God, the God of Islam, the God of Philosophers, the God of reformers, the Jewish concept of Yahweh and discusses the death of God and the rise of Atheism. The human idea of God has a history since its meaning is different to different groups of people. For her, the statement, ‘I believe in God’ has no objective meaning; it only means something in context. Each generation must create a concept of God that works for it. She concludes with a provocative question: ‘Does God have a future?’ 

So how old is the concept of God?

“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.” – Voltaire.

“If triangles had a God, He’d have three sides.” - Old Yiddish Proverb.

In nomadic pastoral civilizations, God was found not on Earth, but

up above in the Sky. This was a Male God whose voice was thunder and whose anger was expressed through lightning. He was the Sky God who made rain for grass to grow for the cattle. The main sky gods were the Sun and the Moon. It is interesting to note that although very many different types of religions existed in ancient times, they can all be reduced to possess some distinctive core elements: a belief in the Great Goddess, the Bull, the Sky Gods, the need for sacrifices, in an afterlife, and in a soul that survives death and goes either to a place of suffering or to a place of joy depending on how one lived life here on earth. 

The situation changed during the period 750 – 350 BCE. According

to Karl Jaspers, the German philosopher, most of the world's great faiths came into being during this period. Let us briefly examine the God/gods of the different religions at this time.

Judaism ‘evolved’ the idea of a monotheistic God, Yahweh. Richard Dawkins in his book ‘The God Hypothesis’ describes Yahweh's character as follows:

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant 

a character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Those of us schooled from infancy in his ways can become desensitized to their horror.”

The above description bears witness to Karen Armstrong’s 

assertion that God is a creation of man’s fertile imagination fed by the cultural, social and intellectual milieu of the time.

Zoroastrianism introduced gods as abstract concepts.  Zarathustra taught a challenging view of the world as a struggle between good and evil. He is said to have received a direct revelation from the one true god Ahura Mazda. Soul, life after death, resurrection, judgment, paradise, hell, and the devil were all Zoroastrian ideas first, later borrowed by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Buddhism may be thought more as a way of life than as a religion in its narrow sense. It developed as a reaction to the greed and materialism of the newly emerging merchant class at the time of Siddhartha Gautama who left the comforts of a life of luxury as well as his family and wandered the world as a mendicant in search of enlightenment.  All life, for him, was suffering. Only Dharma, the truth about right living, brought one to nirvana, the ultimate reality - freedom from pain. The state of nirvana has nothing to do with the gods; in fact, it is beyond them. By living a life of compassion for all living beings, speaking and behaving gently, kindly and correctly and by refraining from drugs and intoxicants that cloud the mind, one can attain nirvana. 

Hinduism has many parallels to Greek religious practices. Both are steeped in myths with numerous gods and goddesses who have many human characteristics. However, traditional Hinduism is a way of living rather than a way of thinking.

Islam has borrowed heavily from both Judaism and Christianity. Mohammed, considered God’s prophet by the faithful, was resting in a cave outside Mecca, called Hira, in 620 C.E. when he heard voices which he wrote down and collected into the book Qur’an. The message was clear: God is one and there is no other. There is a Judgment day with eternal paradise for the good and everlasting hell for those who go against His will.

Now we come to the God of Christianity. Chapter 4 of Karen 

Armstrong’s book  'A History of God' is titled 'Trinity: The Christian God'. There is a reason for this. Though Christians claim they believe in monotheism, their God is not exactly one; He is three in One or One in Three – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 3=1. 1=3. For ordinary mortals, this is a mystery and that is how the Catholic Church wants it regarded. Do not try to understand it, rather, just believe it! Jesus was a Jew and his initial followers were all Jews who believed in the one God, Yahweh. How and why did the later followers of Christ change to a ‘kind’ of polytheist mode of thinking? 

Apostle Paul, who claimed to hear disembodied ‘voices’ that he identified as the words of Jesus, could come to our aid here. He was instrumental in spreading the gospel to the gentiles who were used to a variety of gods. It was he who realized that the good news of the gospel would have greater acceptance if Christ, the Messiah, was projected as divine rather than human.  Hence, he claimed that Jesus was a pre-existent ‘heavenly’ being; that he was created as the ‘firstborn’ of all creation; that he existed in the form of God and that he was equal to God.

Not everyone agreed. Around 320 C.E. Arius, a presbyter from 

Alexandria, asked: how could Jesus Christ have been God in the same way as God the Father? According to Armstrong: “He (Arius) knew his scriptures well, and he produced an armory of texts to support his claim that Christ the Word (logos) could only be a creature like ourselves.”

This caused such a controversy that Emperor Constantine convened the first ecumenical council of Nicaea in 320 C.E. Here it was declared that the Creator God and Redeemer Christ were one and the Nicaean Creed came into existence.

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things, visible and invisible, and in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God,…begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.

So, now we have Jesus as having the same substance as God the 

Father: hence He is God.  However, the inclusion of the Holy Spirit as the third in the Trinity sounds a bit sneaky. Who is He? What is His role?

Hans Kung, a brilliant Catholic theologian, whose honesty and 

forthrightness regarding some of the Church’s doctrines have antagonized the hierarchy, comes to our aid here. His book "The Catholic Church: A Short History", is closer to the truth than most other books on the subject. According to him, the Second Ecumenical Council of Constantinople, convened by Theodosius the Great in 381 C.E., defined the identity of the Substance of the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Son.  He further enlightens us on the interpretation of St. Augustine (354-430), one of the best Catholic theologians of the era. Augustine did not agree with the interpretation of the Greek Church Fathers. For them, God the Father was ‘the God’. They defined the relationship of God the Father to the Son and Spirit in terms of this one God and Father. Think of a star giving light to a second star and finally to a third star.  To the human eye, though, all three stars appear as one. 

But for Augustine:

The Father knows and begets in the Son his own word and image. But the Spirit “proceeds” from the Father (as the lover) and the Son (as the beloved) “according to the will.”  The Spirit is the love between Father and Son become person: it has proceeded from both the Father and the Son. (Kung)

One cannot but help notice a comparison (albeit a sacred one) to 

human sexual reproduction.

Let us now look at the Apostolic Creed:

I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth,

and in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord, who was conceived by 

the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under …

The Holy Spirit, the third in the Triad, played an active role in the conception of Jesus. Jesus had a virgin birth – in other words, a miraculous non-sexual conception.

Finally, I would like to point out something common to many 

religions: the claim of God’s direct revelations to His chosen ones. E.g. Moses at the time of receiving the ten commandments; Zarathustra’s direct revelation from the one true god Ahura Mazda; St. Paul hearing ‘voices’ which he identified as those of Jesus; Mohammed hearing voices in the cave; there are many others found in the religious holy books. I suppose it is a very clever and unquestionable way of convincing the naïve of selective belief systems!