An Answered Question.

 Annabel asked me, apropos of nothing in particular, why I didn't believe in God. No-one has ever asked me that before. After a few minutes of deep thought (!) I replied that as far as I was concerned, every possible concept of God was a limiting thing. I know that there is a mystery at the heart of existence, but any attempt to discuss that was bound to be wrong or at best misleading. 

Let me try to explain:

                                             

This picture, by the Eighteenth Century English artist William Blake, is the Ancient of Days (one of the Old Testament names for what became described by the one word "God").

This rather bald statement hides a complex web of allusions and, in Blake's inimitable fashion, asks us to listen to and take into account his complex mythology. It isn't really "God" at all, it's a depiction of Urizen, Blake's name for the Archetype of the organiser of the Universe, a sort of architect or site manager of it. Blake thinks of Urizen as very much an underling.

What I think we miss is the polemic behind the image.  We tend to see God, the Ancient of Days designing and building his universe. He's using rationality, mathematics and logic as his tools. This is the way we've been taught to see God, a mixture of the wisdom of age and rational creativity. He's concentrating hard on the task in hand and he's crouched over his dividers with all the confidence of Christopher Wren setting out St Paul's Cathedral more than a century before this was painted. To help us to understand this image, here's another fabulous picture from Blake:

You'd be forgiven if you thought it was a young Urizen doing his homework from the College of Universe Building. There are the dividers, the focussed crouch, the oblivion of his surroundings. This is Newton, the all-English, orchard sitting hero of rational thought and natural theology, the co-creator with Leibniz of the arcane mysteries of calculus, the mathematics of change and time. Except there was no mystery and certainly no arcanum. Calculus was just hard sums and open to everyone prepared to put in a bit of effort.

And here is the crux. Rationality takes away mystery, whether mundane or cosmic, and puts it firmly and irrevocably in the human sphere. This is what William Blake was railing against in his "Ancient of Days". His world was teeming with inequalities, cruelty, and exploitation which suffused his poetry. Don't forget that instruction by God to Adam to dominate and subdue nature.  It became an excuse and rationale for all kinds of imperialism, patriarchy and violence to the world. Rationality, Natural Philosophy (Science) and Mathematics drove Enslavement, Industrialisation, and ultimately Doré's slums. 

For Blake, we could do better. Jerusalem could be built, it was our choice...

This is the God I don't believe in. But I do believe in mystery....

The mystery I acknowledge is simply the unlikeliness of existence, of a universe that is so amazing that even a drop of pond water teems with life, and what is even more astonishing is that there is an organism that is writing this! 

In my teens, thanks to a widely read and musical Mum I became aware of poets who had recognised this joyful wonder and tried to communicate it. Wordsworth, Traherne, Longfellow and Herbert hinted at it in stumbling words. Beethoven, Richard Strauss, Handel explored it musically. Like most children in our small village I went to Sunday School and was well versed in Bible stories, and because it was a Methodist Church in the North, I was encouraged to sing the magnificent Wesleyan hymns with gusto and enthusiasm. As I got older I got involved with Bible classes and began to wonder when it was that someone in the Church would take me aside and talk to me about wonder, mystery and contemplation. No one ever did. What I did hear was the talk of exclusivity of our particular tradition.

Then I came across a book called Mysticism by Fred Happold who wrote about Religious Experience and its similarity in every culture in the world. I was astonished at what I found inside. Julian of Norwich wrote of a nurturing female god holding the world in the palm of her hand wrapping it in love. A medieval anonymous chap wrote about the cloud of unknowing where rationality just doesn't work. Hildegard wrote about being a feather on the breath of God. Theresa of Avila wrote that God was within. Hindu scriptures told about the depth of being human being identical to the power suffusing the Universe. Buddhists wrote about.....well,  nothing and emptiness. The delightful Islamic story of the religious journey in the Conference of the Birds was mentioned. And good old Thomas Traherne was there too writing about the simple joy of being alive in an enchanted world. It blew me away, and continues to, to think that all over the world and throughout history men and women (and that plurality was and still is extremely important to me!) have explored the Universe not with the Enlightenment tools of human logic but with humility, compassion and joy at being alive in this enchanted world. At this time I needed to make some life choices and I liked drawing, I wanted to make people's lives better and I was quite practical. I applied to Aston University Architecture department and got accepted.

I failed as an Architect, but still enjoyed drawing and design so I got a job in the City Architect's Department. In the office where I worked I met Wilf, about twenty years older than me and a wonderful guide and friend who lent me all sorts of newer religious writings, Thomas Merton, Alan Watts, Douglas Harding exploring Eastern traditions (this was the early seventies and I definitely had hippie leanings!). We had endless discussions over the drawing boards..... One day I just decided I wanted to return to Uni and study Religions. So I did.

Lancaster in 1973 was THE place and, thanks to an essay on David Hume's demolition job on natural theology's Argument For the Existence of God Based on the Design of the Universe, I got accepted.

In my first year I came across the metaphor of the blind men and the elephant.

A Great Prince (Aren't they all?) was trying to settle an argument between two priests about some doctrinal matter to no avail. So he blindfolded five of his trusted courtiers and brought in an elephant he'd conveniently been given which no-one had seen. He invited the courtiers to come and feel the animal and describe it. 

"It's a bit like a rope with a tassel on the end."

"No, it's stout like a tree trunk and has some smooth bits near the floor."

"You're wrong. It's smooth and hard and shaped like half a crescent moon."

" For goodness sake. It's a huge snake with a funny head."

"Flat , floppy and flappy obviously..."

But my all time favourite metaphor is the mountain with many, many ways to the summit. Some are well trodden paths that are marked. Some routes are difficult and dangerous. Some are a hard slog and some are easy, but the summit is the same for all. And don't let anyone tell you that their way is the only way: it's yet another throwback to religion backing up imperialism.

I still believe that all humanity shares an impulse to explore the mystery of existence and our place in the Universe. Sadly the tribes of argumentative men (mainly) disputing whose god is the true god have given this fundamental side of humanity a bad press.