Is God…?

Is God a social construct?

This question is one that has surfaced in a class that I’ve recently started. I don’t like it because it is opaque and could be asking a couple of different questions in actuality. It could be rephrased like this, “Has a god who can be explained as being socially constructed actually been socially constructed in human history?” The answer to this question would have to be yes! In my view this is the god which most atheists reject and which many religious people are in danger of serving. It is a reduced view of God which makes him into something that is logically manageable in order to serve our own ends. This god in question is a weak version of a more consistently defined God. Along these lines, the original question is probably meant to ask something like this “Is it possible for the God who comes to us in various theological traditions actually to be a figure of our collective imaginations?” This deals with a slightly larger and more consistent view of God but not by much, because it still implies that a God, who is necessarily infinite in nature, can be understood and explained completely in finite terms. Even though sociology presents a fine view from which to study human phenomena, yes, it is still finite. It is difficult to explain this to people, I know, but when we ask questions about God, we must be consistent to his necessary nature, namely, that he is unable to be explained completely in finite terms. God implies infinitude in every possible way, something that neither I nor anyone else can lay claim to. The treatment of God from a reduced and inconsistent view is common. Another place it has shown up recently is in a cosmological argument against the existence of God in Dawkins’ God Delusion. He argues that if more complex things are less likely to come into being, then God would have to be least likely thing to exist that we can think of; way less likely than a person, or a clown, or a pony. Again though, this argument presupposes a reduced view of God. In this argument a spiritual and infinite God is bound by the physical laws which he would have necessarily created. So, I return to the original question: is God a social construct? It depends… What kind of God are you talking about?

Explore posts in the same categories: doctrine, Philosophy, Theology Essays

Tags: atheism, God, religion, social construct

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