What Kind of God Model?

Abstract

In this final chapter we look at some of the insights that we have gleaned about the world, mankind and God. The religions differ about creation, soul, incarnation, nature of God and so on, so there is not a common essence. But they agree, apart from Theravada Buddhism, that there is a spiritual presence in the world and we are related to it. The world emanates or has been created by God and there is agreement that its values delude and cloud our understanding of beauty, truth and goodness. In most of the religions there is a theistic strain which we prefer in putting forward a model of what God is like.

It seems to me that if the word ‘God’ is to be of any use, it should be taken to mean an interested God, a creator and lawgiver who has established not only the laws of nature and the universe but also standards of good and evil, some personality that is concerned with our actions, something in short that it is appropriate for us to worship. This is the God that has mattered to men and women throughout history. Scientists and others sometimes use the word ‘God’ to mean something so abstract and unengaged that he is hardly to be distinguished from the laws of nature … but it seems to me that it makes the concept of God not so much wrong as unimportant.

Stephen Weinberg