Universal God

1. Abstract

It is a strange conundrum.  Every religion claims there is only one God, yet they all worship different Gods. They even fight with each other in the name of their Gods. This is the harsh reality of our world’s current religious landscape. That means that despite being promoted as One, God is not One. If it were a One God, it would have been a universal God acceptable to all. What is the reason that God is not One despite being One? We have a Christian God, a Muslim God, a Jewish God, or some other God. If God is omnipresent, and God is one, then which one is the Universal God? Is He Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or some other God? Or is it possible to have more than one omnipresent God? Do we have the same God here in Australia and Saudi Arabia? In this essay, I will try to understand this conundrum.

2. Search for a Universal God

We may not have a universal God, but humanity has long yearned for one. In ancient Egypt, the concept of Aten, the sun god, during the reign of Akhenaten, represented a move towards monotheism. However, it was not strictly a Universal God encompassing all other deities. In Ancient Greece, the concept of a single, ultimate reality or principle, such as Plato’s “The One” or Aristotle’s “Prime Mover,” which, while not personal deities, shared some characteristics with the Universal God. Judaism affirms the existence of one God, Yahweh, who is the creator and ruler of the universe. While the concept is monotheistic, there are nuances in how God’s universality is compromised in his covenant with the Jewish people. Christianity, while also monotheistic, introduces the concept of the Trinity—God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Islam strongly emphasizes the oneness of God, Allah, and rejects any form of polytheism or idolatry. Hinduism presents a complex picture of beliefs with a vast pantheon of gods and goddesses. However, underlying this diversity is the concept of a universal God or Brahman, the ultimate reality. All these religions mentioned above, and others not mentioned here, claim their God is universal. Is it so? It does not look like the case because the oneness of their Gods is not all-inclusive. The fact that multiple religions claim the universality of their God testifies to the exclusivity built into their universality. It appears that monotheism does not necessarily translate into the universality of God. A monotheistic religion, believing in one God, does not necessarily believe in a universal God. Their oneness of God has numerous cracks in it. At the moment, we face a paradox: multiple monotheistic religions each believe in their own brand of monotheism. It is what we may call a polytheism-of-monotheism situation. Searching for a universal God, mankind has ended up in what Richard Dawkins calls “monotheistic chauvinism.”¹

3. Cracks in the Oneness of God

Why does monotheism fall short of God’s universality? Let us look for an answer through the cracks in monotheism’s oneness.  All faiths use and rely on symbolism to articulate. Interestingly, this symbolism also highlights the cracks in the oneness of the monotheistic Gods. Symbolism is a fundamental process of the human mind, and religion has inspired much of it in human society. Man’s symbol-making function in religion extends to eating, looking, dressing, and moving about. It is fascinating to see how religious symbolism splits the oneness of God preached by religions. Take the example of food used as a symbol in religion. To quote Hayakawa, “Food too is highly symbolic. Religious dietary regulations such as those of the Catholics, Jews, Moslems, and Hindus are observed in order to symbolize adherence to one’s religion.”² If God is one, why don’t we have the same instructions for eating and drinking? Why does the god of one religion prohibit eating beef, and the god of another religion allows it? Sikhism disallows smoking, but there is no bar on smoking in Islam. Why is eating beef or smoking not banned or allowed to all human beings?

Similarly, other symbolic rituals vary from one religion to another. Why do we have circumcision as mandatory to please God in one religion and not in other religions? Why does the same god ask for the circumcision of women in one part of the world and not in the other part? For example, it is practiced in Africa but not required in India. In matters of dress, monotheistic Gods also gave contradictory instructions to different religions. Women in some religions are required to cover their faces in public, while in others they are free to smile openly. Sikhism asks its followers to keep their hair unshorn, whereas Hindus are not obliged to do so. If God is one, why can’t we have a common dress code for humans?

Conversions also contradict the oneness of God. Proselytization should be irrelevant if we have one God. If we say that God is one, but religions are many, then the question arises: if the destination is the same, why so much fuss about the path to that destination? If we say that one path is misleading and the other is not, how come they lead to the same destination? Hence, there is no point in switching from one religion to another if we have the same God everywhere. However, the ground reality is that we have not only conversions but forced conversions happening all over the world. One religion entices or forcibly converts adherents of other religions into their fold. If God is one, the same God should rule everywhere, and there is no need to convert. Moreover, the question is, why does one God allow these conversions? We can only conclude from this that the oneness of God in monotheistic religions has multiple cracks in it.

4. What Causes it?

What causes these cracks? Does the multiplicity of religions cause it? This does not seem to be the case. Here are a couple of examples. Nabeel Qureshi has written a book called “Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus.” In this book, he relates his journey from a staunch Muslim believer in Allah to finding himself “walking boldly by His Spirit of Grace and love, in the firm confidence of everlasting life given through his Son.”³ He discovers in his journey that, as opposed to Islam, the god of Christianity is the real God. If God is universal, then why should there be a difference between Allah of Islam and God of Christianity? One might think the problem arises because different religions have different concepts of God, and that one is correct and the other is wrong. However, sometimes, believers of the same religion get conflicting instructions from the same god. In his Second Inaugural Address (March 4, 1865), Abraham Lincoln said: “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged.”⁴ Abraham Lincoln was talking about the American people; some of them opposed slavery, and others favoured it, despite all of them being Christians believing in the same God. This shows that even a shared religious text cannot prevent people from holding different, opposing interpretations of their beliefs to justify their actions. Apparently, one religion allows people to nurture two sets of opposing moral behaviours. Surely, God cannot pass on these contradictory instructions to His adherents if God is One. This behaviour is not restricted to Christianity but is extant in many religions. For example, some Hindus eat meat, while others do not. The disparity is not limited to moral behaviour; sometimes it reaches ridiculous extremes. Abdus Salam, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979, had the words “First Muslim Nobel Laureate” engraved on his tombstone. The word Muslim was removed from the epitaph by the Pakistan government under pressure from mainstream Islam because he belonged to the Ahmadiyya sect of Islam.⁵ The believers in the same Allah refuse to treat each other as Muslims and yet claim to be followers of the same Allah.

5. History Of God

To delve deeper into the subject, let us peek into what is called God’s history. This will give us some valuable insights into our subject matter. It is a contradiction of the sort that God has a history. By definition, an immortal and universal God will have continuity, not history. The God who dies and reincarnates cannot be a universal, immortal God. However, such a God will definitely have a history. Nevertheless, the history of God we come across is the history of religions. In their little booklet, The Lessons of History, Will and Ariel Durant observed that “One lesson of history is that religion has many lives and a habit of resurrection.”⁶ History is witness to the fact that once a religion and its God die, they get reincarnated into a new religion and a new God. From primitive tribal animism to paganism, polytheism, and monotheism, religion and God have lived many lives. The history of God that scholars discuss is, in fact, the history of humans’ understanding of God over time. The cracks into the oneness of God are, in fact, the cracks in the human understanding of God.

Human understanding of God has also given birth to the debate of whether God created man or if God is a human invention. It is interesting and illuminating to find that this debate is as old as the concept of God. Contrary to popular belief, the idea that man created God is recent; in his book And Man Created God, Robert Banks traces it back to 800 BC. “The first to broach the idea of human beings having created gods were a number of Old Testament Jewish prophets from the eighth century BC onwards.”⁷ Robert Banks mentions Philo, the Jewish philosopher, who regards the creation of such gods as human fancy, spreading ignorance and mischief. The human fancy is still active and fertile, giving birth to many more ideas about the idea of God. In modern times, the human invention of God has been described as a product of human wishes by Ludwig Feuerbach, as a substitute for oppressive conditions by Karl Marx, as a projection of repressed desires by Freud, and as a symbol of human potential by Erich Fromm. In her book, A History of God, Karen Armstrong treats God as an Idea and God’s history as the history of human ideas. “It seems that the idea of God is remarkably close to ideas in religions that developed quite independently. Whatever the conclusions we reach about the reality of God, the history of this idea must tell us something important about the human mind and nature of our aspirations.”⁸ Karen Armstrong says in her above book that “creating gods is something human beings have always done. When one religious idea ceases to work for them, it is simply replaced.”⁹ Atheists use this argument to deny the existence of God. In a way, the history of God is also a history of heretics. After some time, the old idea of God is replaced by a new idea, and the one who proposes this new idea is called a heretic by the believers in the old idea. “Some of the greatest religious spirits have been heretics – not least, the founders of great religion.”¹⁰

6. Meaning of Life

The history of the idea of God, in fact, traces the footprints of the human search for meaning in life. The meaning of being human. In his book “In God We Doubt,” John Humphrys remarks that “for all their differences, there are a couple of propositions on which atheist and believer can agree. One is that their dispute goes to the core of what it is to be a human.”¹¹ It is this search for meaning that prompts mankind to try different ideas, both theistic and atheistic. This search for the meaning of being human is the road to realizing the Universal God. This is the yearning I mentioned at the start of this essay. Both religious and irreligious ideas attempt to understand the meaning of being human. It is in this that Schellenberg justifies being sceptical of religion in his book, “The Wisdom To Doubt,” saying that the kind of “skepticism about religion of the sort I have defended may very well represent a positive step forward instead of a step backward, intellectually speaking, and that it may in a deep sense be wise to acquiesce in doubt about ultimate things.”¹² In his view, it can open useful intellectual vistas. Humans are both rational and spiritual animals. Being rational and spiritual are not necessarily mutually exclusive; they can be complementary aspects of being human. Describing the spiritual, John Hick calls it the fifth dimension, which, when “responds to the reality underlying and transcending everything, we are able to be aware of that reality.”¹³ The idea of God came along the path in our search for the meaning of what it is to be human. Religion is the byproduct of this search. In the concluding remarks of his book, “Religion for Atheists,” Alain de Botton says,” Religions are intermittently too useful, effective and intelligent to be abandoned to the religious alone.”¹⁴ History is witness to the fact that Religions become useful only when they emit a universal message of a universal God.

7. Humanism and The Universal God

Is this universal message a message of humanism? In his book The God Argument, A.C. Grayling argues for humanism as a replacement for religion, arguing that humanity can reap a rich harvest of insight from its cumulative experience. The learning is that “humanism is premised on humanity’s best efforts to understand its own nature and circumstances.”¹⁵ However, even as humans, we are a divided lot. Our actions determine what we believe in. What footprints do we leave in the world as human beings define our existence? If we treat a part of humanity as lesser humans, then humanism cannot be a universal religion. The good thing is that advances in modern science have yielded results that debunk many myths that divide humanity. The human race sprang from a common ancestor, making us all brothers and sisters. According to geneticist David Reich, the common ancestor of the human race has been traced back to Africa using DNA data. Tracing the family tree of human history, it has been found that” the deepest branch of the tree – the branch that left the main trunk earliest – is found today only in people of sub-Saharan ancestry, suggesting that ancestors of modern humans lived in Africa.”¹⁶ It may be hard to believe that an African, a Chinese, an Indian, and a European have the same forefathers in Africa. However, it has been proven by science. The environment caused the visible variation between races over many centuries. Geneticist Cavalli-Sforza writes in his book Genes, Peoples, and Languages,” The diaspora of Africans to the rest of the world exposed them to a great variety of environments, from hot and humid or hot and dry environments to temperate and cold ones, including the coldest ones of the world, as in Siberia.”¹⁷ This change in environment caused differences in skin colour, eye shape, hair type, body, and facial form. Exposure to a new climate inevitably triggers adaptation to it, and the resulting changes in skin colour, eye and nose shape, hair type, and other facial and bodily features. Science has irrevocably proven that we are all one family. However, the universal God cannot be confined to humans; it encompasses everything in this universe, from bees to black holes, flora, and fauna. Humanity is only a tiny part of its existence. So even though humanism is a right step in the right direction, it does not lead us to our destination.

8. Universal God

We have seen that the God of all monotheistic religions fails to qualify as a universal God. Humanism falls short of being a universal God. Then what is a universal God?

8.1 Reacting to the ontological argument about the existence of God, Kant famously argued that existence is not a real predicate, meaning that it does not tell us anything about God as a predicate tells us about the subject in a sentence. However, the existence of a Universal God is the whole meaning of its existence. It is the only meaning of its being. Kant also argues that the existence of God is “the necessary condition of the possibility of the summum bonum.”¹⁸ In the case of a universal God, this summum bonum or the highest good is not aimed merely at us humans but at the entire creation, which is the expression of the existence of God

8.2 In Western philosophy, the concept of God that comes closest to a universal god is the Spinozian monistic God. Spinoza encapsulates his views in the phrase “Deus, sive Natura,” meaning God and nature are identical. “Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.”¹⁹ Nature here is more than flowers and fountains. It is the totality of existence, encompassing everything from bees to black holes. The Spinozian God is often criticized as an “impersonal substance of nature, with no will, no freedom, no concern for human beings.”²⁰ This is what makes it the Universal God. It transcends humanity and embraces universality.

8.3 The anthropomorphic God and the universal God are contradictory and mutually exclusive. The incarnation of God implies its absence from the world, which necessitates its incarnation. Universal God is ever-immanent in the universe.

8.4 The usual epithets attributed to God, like omnipresent or omnipotent, are irrelevant in regard to the Universal God. For example, what is the point of saying that God is everywhere when there is nothing except God?

8.5 The universal God and science are not antithetical. In fact, science is a way to admire the Universal God. As science discovers the mysteries of this universe, it instills a sense of wonder and awe in humans. The more we know, the more amazed we are. The more we know, the more we become aware of our ignorance. All this fills us with a sense of the divinity of the unseen.

8.6 Universal God is not just an idea. It is a fact of existence. It is in the universe and beyond the universe. If we deny or ignore it, we do it at our own risk. Universal God defies any nomenclature, is immortal, was never born, and will never die. The Universal God was there before the universe began; it is here in this universe and will be there when this universe dies. Universal God is the one and only creator. Being religious is to be awe-struck at his marvelous creation. All human knowledge, religion, science, and the arts are attempts to unravel the mysteries of God’s existence. Humans are designed and destined to continue their never-ending journey to know the Universal God in its entirety.