I can’t say what God is, because I think it’s a confusingly defined word. In order to understand what other people mean when they say, “God,” I listen to others and interpret what they are saying into a definition of God that helps me communicate with them. Based on this, I think that what most people mean when they say “God” is: the universe.
That is, God is all there is. God is responsible for all there is. The universe is all there is. The universe is itself and there is nothing more than the universe. To me, that sounds a lot like the way others think of God.
If the universe were a conscious entity, it would probably know itself to some degree. If man were made in the universe’s image, then we can reverse engineer and make some guesses about how the universe works. In the area of knowing everything, I do not think we could say that a human knows everything about itself—not in a conscious way, anyway.
However, taken as a system, the human body knows itself completely—just not consciously. Functionally, the universe “knows” everything, because it contains everything.
Of course, the above is an attempt to understand the Judeo-Christian traditional understanding of God. Part of the problem is that there are as many definitions of God as there are people, I think. We can group these definitions into various religions, but even within religions, there are many different understandings of the term.
Outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, it gets more complex. In Buddhism there seems to be a God or not be a God depending on your understanding. In a funny way, Buddhism seems to be agnostic about God. You can believe in one or not, Buddhism still can be practiced.
Hinduism seems to have any number of Gods, and most of them, based on my very limited knowledge, seem to represent various attributes of humanity—writ mythic. Personally, I like this kind of God because it is easier to deal with one kind of thing at a time.
Other native spiritualities, such as those of native people in Australia, or the US, and probably other places, seem to have a different kind of way of relating to a God. I don’t know if they’d even describe it as a God. It might be more like the planet or their interaction with their environment. Their focus, perhaps, in a very vague and general sense, is more on their immediate lives and what they need to survive in a daily way. To some degree it is about respect for the world they live in, but I think they get more credit for that than they deserve, since clearly they have a violent and selfish side as well.
Anyway, for me, all this suggests that God is a simple term that represents just about everything. It is a metaphor for the universe, which includes that which individuals interact with most—sometimes the land; sometimes people; sometimes whatever. God is a sense of perfectness of creation or everything as the individual understands it. But an individual’s understanding of creation is limited, so God is that which the individual doesn’t understand about creation.
I think people use “God” as a kind of mental placeholder for knowledge. Or really, lack of knowledge. There is much an individual doesn’t know, but God knows all of it. I think that this idea gives people a kind of security.
Not knowing things is very dangerous. When you don’t know things, you don’t know what might hurt you. People can get very anxious about what they don’t know. Sometimes debilitatingly anxious. We need to get anxious about not knowing because that motivates us to find out—and that enables us to be (arguably) the most competitive creature on the planet.
However, I think our need to learn, while a great asset, can also be a great problem. That is because when we really need to know something and we can’t know it, we get thrown into this horrible anxiety.
Enter the concept of “God.” God is the explanation for all that we don’t know. In believing in God (or Gods), we can quiet our fear of the unknown. We can make ourselves believe that the unknown is not so threatening. We can cope with the unknown while still working to figure it out.
I was just thinking about the idea that “God is unknowable.” I guess we can’t quite say that the unknown is unknowable, because we are figuring out the unknown all the time. On the other hand, there will always be that we don’t know—that which we have not yet figured out. In a way, that is unknowable—because there will always be some unknown.
In the totality of the universe, there is what we know and what we don’t know. For most people, I believe, God resides in what we don’t know.
