Oh! My God!

God To The Transparent Ironist (TI) : Do you believe that I exist?

TI : Here we go again! It depends pretty much on who you think you are. If you are that reality that sustains the world from moment to moment keeping it from falling apart into absolute nothingness and is active within and through it trying to remove from it all forms of suffering, I affirm your existence. If, however, you are anything short of that, your existence or non-existence is simply, as we say, an academic dispute that can (and must) be postponed until we have done our own bit to reduce one another's suffering.

God : Do you believe in life after death?

TI : If post-mortem existence will be one when the suffering of all human beings will be removed, that is a life that I look forward to. The basic point, however, is that I also believe in life before death.

God : Do you believe that I shall send those who do not turn towards me into eternal damnation?

TI : That you may very well do; indeed, given the occasional lapses in your wisdom, there are times when I fear that you are going to do just that one of these days. In that case, however, you are no better than a bloated cosmic Patriarch who is so easily rebuffed or wounded by those who reject Him that He delights in their lasting perdition. You are not, I hope, a second-grade school teacher who, offended by her pupil's refusal to trust in her teaching, banishes her forever from her ministration. Surely, if you are truly infinite you can do better than such a human master by working in the world until the end of time when everyone has arrived at a lasting communion with you, if indeed this is the ultimate end that you have proposed for the created order.

God : Do you believe that the pervasiveness of suffering in the world disproves my existence?

TI : No, it does not, for I accept that suffering is a mystery whose depths I cannot penetrate with my human mind. However, I am also pretty much sure that I would not be writing this if I were dying of cancer or going through some other agony, and to such people you have a lot of explaining to do as to why it is better that the world exists 'in the first place' than it does not. What difference does the existence of the world make to you? Why is it a valuable thing for you that a world exists?

God : So you think that I, God, can be tried at the court of human reason?

TI : Yes, and No. Yes, because the scandal of the presence of apparently gratuitous suffering in this world remains a stumbling-block for me even when I wish to affirm your omnibenevolence. I have not yet found a reasonable and convincing explanation as to why you had to create or produce the world, what difference it makes to the plenitude or fullness of your infinite Being that a finite world exists through your sustenance, and how the temporal experiences of suffering and miserable human beings in this world add to the richness of your immutable existence. In spite of all these questions, however, I also do not have the confidence that the human mind is a resource powerful enough in itself to categorically affirm what cannot exist in principle. It may be the case that in some way that I simply do not know all our human experiences 'make sense' from some transcendent perspective, a perspective to which I have no access. I do not deny the existence of such a perspective (only affirm that I have not attained it so far, that is, in the year 2005), and to this limited extent, I also hold that you cannot be tried at the court of our finite reason.

God : Do you pray to me?

TI : I pray that you shall remove the suffering of the world, both in this existence and in the putative post-mortem one. Now if it turns out that you do not exist in reality, and that I have been praying all this while to a shadowy entity, it will not change anything so far as the suffering of human beings is concerned, though it will lead me to greater despair. But if you do exist, I hope that you shall answer my prayer in whatever way you can.

God : Why are you not a member of any specific religious tradition?

TI : Because I fear that if I join any religious group, I shall perforce have to blaspheme your name. The ultimate blasphemers of you are not those who deny your existence but those who claim that you are so much like an ordinary human school-teacher that you can be overwhelmed with ire, fury, and wrath at a finite creature's inability to trust in you.

God : But I have indeed appeared to one of my servants in the desert and told him that those who do not follow him and thereby return to Me shall be punished. Do you dispute this?

TI : No, I do not; you may indeed have manifested yourself to such a servant of yours. But if it is indeed the case that those human beings who, for various reasons, are not able to trust him and consequently in you shall have to endure everlasting torment, I would say that the very purpose of creating this world is defeated. For surely, if you created the world in spite of knowing at the moment of creating it that a significant proportion of humanity would move away from you, my finite human reason cannot but see this creation as a colossal waste. Why would you wish to create a world associated with suffering, the suffering of those who shall eventually reject you, when you could have remained perfectly blissful in your solitary existence? I do not deny once again there might be some reason from your so-called God's-eye-perspective, but what this reason could be completely baffles me.

God : Which is more important to you, the extirpation of suffering or the attainment of Myself?

TI : Surely, the former. But if the former is possible only with and through the latter, then I seek both, and see no contradiction or opposition between the two.

God : Do you believe that the history of the world is moving towards a goal under my governance?

TI : If the goal is the complete removal of all forms of suffering of all human beings, this is a goal that I affirm and shall strive towards with your assistance. I do not, of course, know that this state will be realised in the future. But I hope that it will be, and it is in this hope that I live now and it is in this hope that I shall die. It is to the extent that our human experiences are ambiguous and can be 'read' either way that I remain an ironist : I do not disagree, for example, with the vituperations and the complaints of atheists against you, and yet I do not quite agree with them thoroughly either; what religious believers say about you strikes a deep chord in me, and yet I ultimately part company with them on various issues. Some Old Master had once said with Gallic despair : Man is condemned to be free; as for myself : I have been condemned to be an ironist.