how involved is God?

[cellio]

Well, all right. Maybe I will write more tonight. (I was going to watch West Wing, but Dani has already gone to sleep.)

I suspect that most people who believe in God believe in a God who intervenes, who (potentially) responds to individual prayer, who involves himself at least a little bit in each person's life. I'm not really any different here except to the extent that we might differ in degree. But there are problems with believing this.

We've all heard people say things like "it's a miracle I was running late and missed my flight on that plane that crashed". Some of those people are in fact attributing it to a miracle -- divine intervention. But I can't accept that in those cases. If God wanted you to miss your flight, doesn't that mean that God wanted the people who were on the plane to die? If you go down this path, then every death, every injury, every setback has to have divine origin, because you can't credit God with the good parts without also blaming him for the bad parts. And we become nothing more than puppets.

One standard hedge for this problem is to look for the hidden good in bad situations. Sure, sometimes it's there, and it's happened to me -- getting laid off only to get a better job, breaking up with someone only to find my life going in better directions that wouldn't have been possible within the relationship, etc. But it's hard to see hidden good all the time; some things are just bad no matter how you spin them.

On the other hand, if God is aloof and completely uninvolved in our affairs, then why bother to pray? Are we just fulfilling commandments to pray in certain ways because God will smite us if we don't? Yes, religions have been built around intimidation alone, but I don't think of myself as belonging to one of them.

Maimonides believed that God set the world in motion, including "programming in" certain miracles ahead of time (like the parting of the Sea of Reeds), but that he doesn't exert any control now. I don't understand Maimonides well enough yet; I can't tell if he's saying that God's preprogrammed world includes certain rules, like "prayer of this sort elicits this response", or if that's something I'm just reading into it. Any acceptable solution, both to me and to Maimonides, has to preserve free will. There's a difference between "if people pray [X] then [Y] will happen" and "people will pray [X] and [Y] will happen". We were given commandments and told to do them; I think that means God wants us to choose to do them of our own free will, else he could have just made robots.

Pre-programmed rules sound reasonable intellectually, but when I pray every morning and ask (among things) that a certain friend be healed of her cancer, I don't think I'm just activating a rule that might or might not produce the desired outcome. I think I am actually petitioning God, who might (or might not) take action as a result of that petition. But if I believe that, then I am forced to believe that if my friend doesn't recover then it's because God wanted her to be sick, and I don't want to believe that.

Of the Jewish prayer that is petitinary (rather than praise or acknowledgement), the vast majority is communal petition. There is very, very little of the form "please do such-and-such for me". (And, you'll note that the rewards and punishments spelled out in the Torah are largely communal -- crops, strength of the nation, land, and so on.)

I guess it's the old immanent-versus-transcendant debate. I believe God is both, even though that's hard to reconcile, and even though I'm not yet able to answer some of the consequences of that, like why one person was on that plane and another wasn't. But, I am convinced, I have experienced the immanent God, so I can't accept a God who is never involved. (No, I haven't heard voices or anything like that -- but I am convinced that my path to Judaism had an external origin and that I got some nudges along the way.)

Maybe I should actually go find a copy of Kushner's Why Bad Things Happen to Good People, which I have never read.

This doesn't keep me up at night, but it is an as-yet-unaddressed issue in my theology, and every now and then something reminds me that it's there.

Comments

[almeda.livejournal.com]

I'm an unassociated deist; I have some things that feel right, in my head, so I believe them. I believe God (to pick a useful word-descriptor) is somewhat more complex than just a Prime Mover -- that is, that he doesn't simply sit there and make everything that is in the world happen, just as it is, crashing this plane, sparing that person. I think he's less imminently involved than that, if for no other reason than that this is *our* world, and we *do* have free will.

Have a (probably bizarre and unhelpful) analogy: imagine you have a hamster. Let's call her Josie, just because it's shorter than 'the hamster'. You buy her a nice cage with lots of ramps and a water dish deep enough to wade in and a snuggly bed and things to chew and crawl through and a running wheel. You put Josie in the cage. You watch her play, and smile, and sometimes pet her, and sometimes put more things in the cage to see what she does with them. Are you *making* the hamster run the wheel? If it missteps and falls off the top ramp to land on the bottom of the cage and look all confused, did you do that?

See what I said about bizarre and maybe unhelpful? But it feels true to me. Many things happen because they *happen*, because people are like that, and people make them happen. The hamster chooses. However, some things happen because they are a test, I think, or maybe that's a bad word. A test implies there's a right answer. Some things happen because you gave the hamster a new toy, or a puzzling object, and you wanted to see what it did. And sometimes the hamster can't handle it. You bring the kitty up to look into the cage, and the hamster shrinks back against the wire and shrieks. It smells the new object and freaks. All the concatenation of stressful things in my life builds and builds until I have to curl up in a ball in bed, close my eyes, and *reach out* towards God, with just a simple request: help me. And every time I've really needed it, he(/she/it/they/bar) has.

This is what I believe. Discussion welcome. :->

[cellio]

Your analogy is not unhelpful; quite the opposite. Ironically, I've used it myself, but usually with children rather than pets. :-)

God does not control our individual actions; God set a universe in place, gave us tools to manipulate it, and sat back to watch. Tools like intellect, curiosity, abstract thinking, emotion... He gave us these tools for a reason; we're expected to use them. We have free will, so we can do that.

Yet, I still think it's possible to have a more personal relationship -- not at the level of "please help me get an A on tomorrow's math test", but more at the level of "please help me to be a better parent" or "please help me be more compassionate" or the like. (I believe these because of personal experiences, not because of rigorous analysis.) Perhaps God helps with paths but is not concerned with individual stops along those paths.