Often [. . .] people break into such craziness that they aren't even embarrassed to profess they believe what they can't understand--as if faith consists more of mouthing words than of the mind's comprehension, and belongs more to the mouth than to the heart.
--Peter Abelard
Some of us have been violently anti-religious. To others, the word "God" brought up a particular idea of Him with which someone had tried to impress them during childhood. Perhaps we rejected this particular conception because it seemed inadequate. With that rejection we imagined we had abandoned the God idea entirely.
--Alcoholics Anonymous
Peter Abelard (1079-1142)
Especially throughout European-based history, discussion between people about God has recurrently tended to focus on the question of whether God exists or is real. Some self-identify as "theists," from the Latin word for God, and assert the proposition that God does indeed exist. Others self-identify as "atheists," and assert the opposite. Yet a third long-standing camp self-identify as "agnostics"--from the negative prefix a- plus gnosis, the classical Greek word for "knowledge"--and claim not to know one way or the other. Yet just what is the very idea of God in the first place?
Truly to answer that question, we would need to perform what we might well call a "phenomenology of God." That is, we would need to put out of play our ordinary concern with asserting or denying or professing ignorance about what we take to be the assertions that God exists or that God is real, and focus instead on a very different, preliminary question--one we simply assume or presuppose has already been asked and answered whenever we indulge our taste for arguing about God's existence. We would need to bracket all such propositional disputation and instead focus our attention—which Malebranche, a Cartesian philosopher-theologian of the 17th century, once said was "the natural prayer of the soul”*—on a very different question. We would need to ask: Insofar as something presents itself in someone’s experience as God or pertaining to God, just how does it present itself?
That question does not ask whether God exists. Rather, it asks the preliminary question indispensable to any clarity in asking or answering any question pertaining to God’s supposed existence. It asks: Irrespective of whether we say that God does or does not exist, or that we don’t know, just how does something present itself in anyone’s experience, if it presents itself therein as God or pertaining to God? If we don’t already clearly know the answer to that preliminary question, then we simply do not know what we are talking about when we talk about the existence of God, regardless of what we might say on the matter.
To do a “phenomenology of God,” the first question we would need to ask is thus not the question of whether there really is any God. Rather, it is the question of just how what presents itself to someone as God or pertaining to God does indeed present itself. How does what presents itself to me or anyone else as God or pertaining to God differ, in the very way it presents itself to us, from what presents itself as something else—something other than God or pertaining to God, something not God or of God at all, like a piece of chocolate cake or a Big Mac?
How would we answer that question?
If we once truly asked it—didn’t just mouth the interrogative sentence, but genuinely let that question call us into question ourselves, interrogating us and demanding we answer—how would we respond? Or would the question, once it truly took hold of us, strike us dumb? And if it did strike us dumb, where would God be then?
Truly to address the question at issue—that is, truly to let it address us—would take us into the very heart of the phenomenology of God.
* * *
In the posts I have been making every two weeks since September 23, I have been making contributions toward just such a phenomenology of God. The relevant posts in order of their appearance are: “What Stands Alone,” “The Very Seat of Sin,” “Veneration, Venality, and the Venerable,” “For God’s Sake,” “God, Selfhood, and Selfishness,” and “The Problem with Theisms.” All can be accessed at this blog site.
*To determine whether Malebranche was right, we’d also first have to figure out what prayer and soul themselves mean, instead of just presupposing we already know.