I’ve been talking about the perception of the world coming suddenly out of nothing. You’ll remember that—in a previous talk—I asked you to close your eyes and listen, and you would hear silence, and then sounds coming right out of that silence. And then I suggested that you use your eyes and see light, shape, form coming at you as a vibration that is preceding out of space. And I pointed out that our logic resists that because we say you can’t get something out of nothing, and that we normally think of all the energetic manifestations of this universe as coming out of the past. We think the things that were there already are producing the things that are going on now. But I was trying to get you to look at it in the other way so that you would see the whole world starting now—instead of in the past—and the past as a kind of echo fading away into memory. And I illustrated it as being like the wake of a ship that trails across the water and then fades out, but the wake is started by the ship in the present. And so, in the same way, I’m moving on to the uncommonsensical idea of the world as a production of energy that is beginning right now and is coming out of the nothing that we variously call space and silence.

But then, naturally, this raises the question: “How on Earth could that happen?” And it has been, of course, the usual explanation that the world is being created by God. In Christian and Catholic theology it is said that God creates the world out of nothing. And I want to emphasize the point in all fairness—to Catholic, and to Islamic, and to Jewish doctrine—that it doesn’t merely teach that God once upon a time started the world and set it going like you would wind up a machine and then leave it alone. All these three religions teach that God is always creating the world, out of nothing, now, and willing it by his divine energy into being at this moment.

But now the difficulty for us all, I think—especially for educated people in the modern world—is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible. That is to say, in church, or in synagogue, we seem to be addressing a royal personage. The layout of the church or of the synagogue looks like a royal court: there is some sort of throne, and we address prayers and requests to the being represented by the altar—or the throne, or the tabernacle—as if that being were a king and were causing this universe in his royal omnipotent and omniscient wisdom. But then, when we take a look through our telescopes and microscopes, or even when we go out in the forest and look at nature, we have a problem. Because the idea of God that we get from the holy scriptures, the Bible, the Quran, doesn’t quite seem to fit the sort of world around us that we see in just the same way as you wouldn’t dream of ascribing a composition by Stravinski to Bach. The style of God venerated in church, mosque, and synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe. And it’s so hard to conceive the author of the one as the author of the other. And, furthermore, it strikes most intelligent people that our traditional religious ideas of God are too primitive. It seems impossible to think that this universe could have been authored by the naïve idea of God as a sort of old gentleman who lives far above the stars in Heaven, seated on a golden throne, and adored by legions of angels. That seems a concept almost unworthy of the sort of universe that modern science has revealed to us.

In other words—I mean, here’s a picture of God. A friend of mine, Richard Borst, photographed this in a church just south of Oaxaca in Mexico, and it shows a very primitive, Indian, Catholic imagination of God the father wearing a triple crown—like the pope. Only: he’s rather young, handsome; he’s not quite the old grey-bearded man—the ancient of days—but there is a serious idol, Christian idol, of God the father almighty. That has become implausible. But also, for many people, it has become implausible that the root of the universe—which the theologian Paul Tillich calls the Ground of Being—that the root of the universe can be, in some way, a person to whom we can relate in just the same way that we relate to other people; and furthermore, a person who cares about us. In the words of Jesus: “Five sparrows are sold for a farthing, but yet not one of them falls to the ground without the Father knowing it. So realize that you are of more value than many sparrows.” In other words, God cares a great deal more about you.

But it just baffles our imagination that there could be this sort of person who cares about each one of us, who is totally aware of every single thing that we are and that we do and, by virtue of being aware of us, creates us. Of course, one thing that is difficult about the idea is that it’s embarrassing. We do not feel comfortable if we are watched all the time by an infinitely intelligent judge. You know how it is in school: when you’re a child and you’re working at some exercise, and the teacher walks behind your desk and looks [at] what you’re doing. Now even if you like the teacher very much, you feel put off by being watched. And that makes you self-conscious and awkward. And so in the same way many people opt for atheism because they don’t want that uncomfortable feeling that they’re being watched all the time. It’s awkward. And if I were God I wouldn’t do it; I wouldn’t want to embarrass my creatures in that way, and so I would leave them alone for a lot of the time.

In fact, I’ve often thought about this whole thing. The kind of God that people worship is, of course, an attempt to imagine an absolutely perfect human being. But it’s a very poor attempt. For example, Jesus taught that if somebody sins against you, you forgive him. And his disciples asked, “Well, how many times do you forgive him?” And he said, “Ninety and nine times,” which is our way of saying umpteen times; always forgive somebody who sins against you. But notice that that is required of a saint. A saint is always forgiving, but it’s not required of God. God will not forgive you unless you apologize, and you have to grovel on the ground if you’ve committed what the Catholic church calls a mortal sin. You’ve got to come to God in a state of great penitence, and if you don’t do that you are liable to be confined in the dungeons of the court of heaven—commonly known as hell—for always and always and always. I don’t think that’s a very nice kind of fellow—I mean, you wouldn’t invite that sort of god to dinner because he would embarrass everybody. Everybody’d be sitting on the edge of their chair, you know, like this! And God would be looking at you in such a way that you felt you were being seen through and through, that all your awful past, all your falseness and lack of authenticity would be completely perceptible to him. And though he understood it, and though he forgave it, he would nevertheless make you feel absolutely terrible. You just wouldn’t want that sort of company at dinner.

You may think it’s frivolous of me to say this, but don’t forget that the pictorial image of God that people have in the backs of their minds—even if you’re a very sophisticated philosopher or theologian—that primitive pictorial image has a very strong influence on your feelings about religion, about the universe, and about yourself. So it’s just for that reason that the traditional idea of God has become implausible to many people, and that modern Protestant theologians (and even some Catholics) have been talking recently about the death of God, and about the possibility of whether we could have a religionless religion. That is to say, a religion which does not involve belief in God. What, in other words, would become of the Gospel—the Gospel of Jesus Christ—if it were shown that Jesus’ own belief in God were unnecessary and invalid? What would remain of his teaching, of his ideas about caring for other human beings, about social responsibility, and so on and so forth, if the idea of God simply evaporated?

I think that’s a pretty wishy-washy kind of religion. I mean, if you’re going to say that this life is fundamentally nothing but a pilgrimage from the maternity ward to the crematorium—and that’s it, baby! You’ve had it!—I think that indicates a singular lack of imagination. I would like to look at the Death of God theology in an entirely different way. I would like to say that what is dead is not God, but an idea of God. A particular conception of God has died in the sense of becoming implausible. And I find this a very good thing because—well, it’s a principle of Jewish theology, and later of Christian theology, that it is always a mistake (even a sin, if you want to call it that)—and I want to interpolate something here as to the exact meaning of a sin. The Greek word in the New Testament for a sin is hamartánein (ἁμαρτάνειν), and that means to miss the point or, as in archery, to miss the mark. And therefore, from the mosaic Ten Commandments comes the idea that it is a sin—that is to say, a missing of the point—to substitute an idol for God.

Now, the picture I just showed you—as I said—is an idol. But those primitive Mexicans—even they don’t seriously confuse that particular image with God. The danger of it is, of course, they may think of God as something like that in their mind’s eye. They may think of God in the form of man. But the images that have been made of God or of the gods—out of wood and stone, and in painting—have never really been taken seriously as actually what God is like, and nobody has confused the actual image, say, of a Buddha such as you saw at the beginning of this program. Buddha is, of course, never identified with a god because Buddha is a human being. But these images are never seriously confused with what they represent any more than a Catholic confuses a crucifix with Jesus Christ.

So the images that are pictures, statues, and so forth are not really very dangerous. The dangerous images of God are those that we make not out of wood and stone, but out of ideas and concepts. You see, an idea is abstract. So St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, defined God as necessary being: he who is necessarily. Now that is a philosophical concept; God is being. But that concept is an idol because it confuses God with an idea, and because an idea is abstract it seems something very much more spiritual than an image made of wood or stone. And that’s just precisely where it becomes deceptive.

Likewise, many people think that the Bible is the authentic word of God, and therefore they worship the Bible and make it into an idol. Disregarding the ironical remark of Jesus to his contemporary Jews “You search the scriptures daily, for in them you think you have life.” [?] said later, “The letter kills, but the spirit gives life.” And so whatever you put—as an image or an idea—in the place of God necessarily falsifies God.

Now, a lot of people say, “I don’t think I could face, in life—I don’t think I could face life unless I could believe in a just and loving God.” It strikes me that that kind of belief in God is actually a lack of faith. You see, the word ‘belief,’ in Anglo-Saxon, comes from this Anglo-Saxon root lēaf; I would as lēaf. And lēaf means ‘to wish.’ So belief really means ‘a strong wish.’ When you get up and say the Creed,

I believe in God, the Father almighty,

Maker of heaven and earth,

And of all things visible and invisible.

you are really saying “I fervently wish that there exists a God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth,” et cetera. Because if you really have faith you don’t need belief because faith is an entirely different attitude from belief. Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is, for example, like when you swim: you trust yourself to the water, you don’t grab hold of the water when you swim. And if you go stiff and tight in the water and try to catch hold of it, you’ll sink. You have to relax. So in the same way, when a cat falls off a tree the cat doesn’t go stiff all over in a state of tension—that is to say, a state of holding on—the cat relaxes, it falls heavily, thumps the ground with its tail and isn’t hurt because it relaxed. So the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging, of holding on, so that you could say that a person who is a fanatic in religion—who simply has to believe in certain propositions about the nature of God and the nature of the universe—is a person who has no faith at all, because he’s holding on tight. And so, when we sing hymns like “Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee,” these aren’t hymns of faith. Or even Luther made such a thing about faith, but he wrote a hymn in German—Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott—“A mighty fortress is our God.” That’s not a hymn of faith. A person of faith doesn’t need a fortress. He’s not on the defensive.

And so, in the same way, when churches are designed like the royal courts of kings. You know, in the royal court, the king sits with his back to the wall—which is the position (or used to be the position) of the altar. And around him he would have his courtiers and guards, and their place, of course—in the church design called a Basilica, which means the court of a basileus; a king—the bishop sits at the back in his throne, and all his attendant clergy stand around him like his guards in the royal court. But why is this? A king stands with his back to the wall because he rules by force. And when his subjects and his courtiers approach him, they prostrate themselves, they kneel down—why? Because that’s a difficult position from which to start a fight. And so, are we projecting the image of a frightened king upon the Ground of Being, the Godhead? We are, you see. Or, in a Protestant church, the furniture all looks like a courthouse. The minister wears a black gown, and it’s the same black gown as is worn by a judge. And there are pews and pulpits and all the familiar wooden boxes of court furniture. And the minister, like the judge, throws the book at you! He preaches the law laid down in that other idol of God, the Bible.

But does God need all that? I mean, is God somebody who takes this aggressive attitude, either of the king in the court where all the subjects must prostrate, or of the judge who bangs the gavel and says “Bah bah bah bah bah?” This is ridiculous. And a God so conceived is an idol and manifests the absence of faith of all those who worship him, because they have an attitude of trust. They cling on to these rules, to these conceptions, and have no fundamental give to life.

Now, in a certain way, you might say that a good scientist has more faith than a religious person. Because a good scientist says “I want to find out what is the case. My mind is open to the truth, whatever that truth may turn out to be. I have no preconceptions, I may have some hypotheses, I may have some notions in my mind as to what the truth might be, but I’m going to test it. And the test is: I will open all my senses to reality and find out what that reality is.” But then again, the scientist runs into a problem because he knows that whatever comes to him as reality depends on the structure of his instruments and the structure of his senses, and behind the structure of his senses the structure of his brain. And that’s himself. So he has to have—back of all that—an act of faith in his own brain, an act of faith in himself that his physical organism—or his mind, or whatever you want to call it—is indeed reliable and will show him reality, truth, what is.

So unless there is a basic and primordial act of faith in yourself, and you can’t ultimately check on yourself, you have to believe your senses, you have to believe your reason, your logic, your intelligence. So you have to have faith in that even though you can’t check it. I mean, it’s not like your mind’s a radio and you can go in and screw in a connection here and fix up another connection there, and so be quite sure—you always have to trust.

And behind all that, you see—behind the brain, just as I’ve shown you before; behind your eyes—there’s the blank space, the unknown, the unseen. And therefore one could say that the highest image of God—which is the unseen behind the eyes, the intangible and invisible which is space, out of which come all the stars—we can say, yes, that is God. But we have no image of that. We do not know what that is. But we have to trust it. There’s no alternative; there’s no way out. You can’t help trusting it. You’ve got to! But, you see, that trust in a God whom one cannot conceive in any way is a far higher form of faith than fervent clinging to a God of whom you have a definite conception. And that conception can easily be wrong—and even if it’s right, clinging to it would be the wrong attitude, because when you love someone very much you shouldn’t cling to them. I don’t want to hug my wife so tightly that I strangle her. And mothers shouldn’t love their children so much that they strangle them by smother love. It comes out in the story in the New Testament when Mary Magdalene, who loved Jesus very much—she’s said to have seen him after his resurrection, and she immediately ran to cling to him and he said, “Do not cling to me.” It’s translated in the King James Bible “Do not touch me,” but the Greek word άπτομαι means ‘to cling to.’ “Don’t cling to me!” DOn’t cling to anything of the spirit. It’s just like, “Don’t cling to water” because the more you grab it the faster it’ll slip through your fingers. Don’t cling to your breath. If I breathe in and hold it and say, “Aah, I’ve got this breath now. But I’ve got to hang on to it because breath is life,” you know, you’re going to go purple in the face and strangle[d]. You have to let it go, you let your breath out. That’s the act of faith: to breathe out. “Whew.” It’ll come back. Actually, the Buddhist word nirvāṇa means ‘breathe out.’ Because letting go is the fundamental attitude of faith.

Now, it isn’t as if Christians hadn’t been aware of this. One of the most fundamental source books of Christian spirituality was written—oh, somewhere in the 5th Century; maybe the 6th Century—by a Syrian monk who gave himself the name Dionysius. I’ve recently translated this book. It’s called Theologia Mystica, “Mystical Theology.” And you can get it from your paperback bookstore. This book is a very strange document because it explains that the highest knowledge of God is through what he calls in Greek agnosia, which means ‘un-knowing.’ He says that one knows God most profoundly and most truly in not knowing God. That means: just in the same way as your sight comes out of an unseen, so when you know that you don’t know, you really know. And you really know because knowing that you don’t know is a state of mind in which you have let go of your efforts to grasp hold of life with your intellect.