Is God Really Necessary?

6 minute read

Religions are so much a part of the fabric of the social and moral fabric of the universe that questioning whether their subject matter is real seems almost perverse. But the God Question has been pondered for millennia inspiring some of the world’s best-known works of art, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; the Blue Mosque of Istanbul,; Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus, Beckett’s plays; John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme; With Or Without You by U2. The list could take days.

If you were born in Ireland in the ’70s or ’80s, it’s fairly safe to assume you were brought up Catholic, at least notionally if not one hundred per cent in adherence to doctrine. Like many of my friends, I went to a Catholic National School for primary and a convent for secondary. Under the keen guidance of the nuns, almost all of our classes began by saying the Hail Mary.

I went along with the program and went to mass, sang hymns, fasted on Good Friday, and all the usual stuff until I hit around fourteen and became more interested in hanging with my friends. My parents were more observant but never pressured me to go to mass. I took God for granted until I systematically studied philosophy at university and things began to unravel.

When you stop and think about it what exactly does it mean when you say you believe in God? Is it a man somewhere up in the sky who has a file on everyone and decides whether to cure the terminally ill based on nothing but his whim? Is God a power-tripper who from time to time rustles up a good tsunami just to keep people on their toes lest they get too complacent about their place in the Divine Order? Perhaps it’s a kindly grey-haired granddad type who answers the prayers of those who whether by inner disposition, outer behaviour or sheer good luck, deserve his compassion? Does God know all your secrets whether you go to confession or not, does he know the hows and whys of everything?

I’m not sure that my Catholic education ever afforded me a robust description of who or what God is beyond the Holy Trinity: God the Father, Jesus, son of God, and the Holy Spirit. This trinity was presented as an unshakeable reality, an indisputable fact of the universe. Where God himself came from was never really answered beyond stipulation. But if God created the world, who created God?

Many religions have a central conception of God as having three fundamental characteristics: omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence. Meaning God is all-powerful, think of tsunamis, earthquakes and healing miracles; all-knowing, he’s got your future mapped out and knows everything that is to be known, and is always loving and kind. So God is the ultimate superpower and loving force in the universe who can do anything and knows everything.

Even if you buy this line of thinking you’re going to run into problems as soon as you actually observe the world around you. Earthquake wipes out over half a million people in Indonesia? Oh well, maybe God was flexing his muscles. A two-year-old child diagnosed with rare uncurable cancer? Guess God was having a bad day. Women in Afghanistan relegated to third-class citizens and publicly beaten by the Taliban? Well, maybe God just doesn’t like women.

You see where this is going. Philosophers and theologians call it the problem of evil, if there is a god and God has the attributes which make him different from any other being, he is all-knowing, all-powerful and always prioritises our best interests, then how can we explain suffering, random cruelty and natural disasters like earthquakes, fires and tsunamis?

It’s enough to make your head hurt or have you reaching for a strong drink to dull the thinking mind. Or renounce the whole caper and embrace atheism.

We in Ireland don’t have to go too far to wonder whether organised religion is missing something on the God front. The Catholic church has been revealed as a hotbed of corruption, cruelty and degradation. Not to mention an instrument of shame where sexuality is concerned and a central force in sublimating all things sexual in Irish society.

The scandal of the Magdalen Laundries which housed and virtually imprisoned ‘fallen women’ using them as unpaid labour and sequestering them from the rest of society made global headlines and has been the subject of many TV shows and films.

A few facts.

‘Fallen women’ was an arbitrary label applied to young women and girls who had become pregnant out of wedlock, were considered flirty or promiscuous, or simply too beautiful. The existence of such women and girls was deemed threatening to the fabric of Irish morality, heavily enmeshed as it was with Catholic doctrine, patriarchy and restrictive roles for women. What better solution than to lock these miscreants away and use them as a source of free labour. This was done by orders of nuns with the full cooperation of the State.

In 1993 a grave containing 155 bodies was unearthed on land owned by the Sisters of Charity in Drumcondra, the site of a former Magdalen Laundry.

Last year an investigative commission confirmed that 978 children died at a mother and baby home run by the Bon Secours Sisters in Tuam. Their bodies were buried in a decommissioned sewage tank. Amongst those almost thousand deceased children, 796 were babies, innocents who were supposedly in the care of Catholic nuns.

I could continue to discuss how nuns sold babies for adoption by Americans and profited from the proceeds. Or how paedophile priests acted with impunity and full protection of the higher echelons of the church, but perhaps that’s enough.

What of organised religion in the face of such revelations? I’m not suggesting that all, or even most Catholics endorse such moral violence on the part of the church. On the contrary. But I am suggesting that maybe the Catholic church is more about power structures and profiteering than God. I mean, where would Jesus fit in at the laundries and septic tanks, the unmarked graves and babies sold for profit?

Jesus was a profound teacher. A radical who preached love and tolerance, forgiveness and compassion, who preferred the company of prostitutes, thieves and societal misfits over the decorated priests who enforced the status quo and wielded the coffers of wealth. But does that make him God? Why do we need him to be?

Do we need ideas of sin and guilt to supercharge our morality? Many people locate their moral compass in their religious upbringing and faith, but that’s not necessary. You can be an atheist who believes that the universe was birthed by a big bang and that the world as we know it with all of its splendour and beauty is the product of millions of years of evolution. This means that we ourselves are the product of evolution, that our consciousness derives from physics, not from a Divine Creator. If you do believe this, you’ll be in good company. Most scientists do. Many philosophers too.

You don’t need to stipulate God to have a successful theory that explains the origins of the universe, nor for morality. You can base moral claims on reason, rather than faith, on dictates like the Golden Rule: do onto others as you would have them do unto you.

But you can also base morality on things like empathy, compassion and fairness, on wanting to make the world a better place, on love itself. No need to invoke God for that. You also don’t need to bring God into the matter when you gaze at the night sky resplendent with stars. You are seeing the glory of the cosmos itself. What more could you want?

These days it seems that lots of people identify as ‘spiritual but not religious.’ I think I understand but maybe I don’t. What exactly does it mean? Can you have God without religion? What would that look like?

Perhaps we could think of spirituality as connectedness. Connectedness to the world around us, to each other, to ourselves, to something bigger and more abiding than any of us. Maybe ‘being spiritual’ is more about belonging in the universe than it is about believing in an all-powerful God. Maybe a spiritual life is characterised by a sense of wonder and mystery, a pervading awe at the magnificence of life from a baby’s first steps, to the majesty of the Cliffs of Moher, to the elegance of mathematics.

What would a spiritual life devoid of love be like? Does that even make sense? When we put love at the centre of our lives, things feel different. Kindness and benevolence become first principles. It doesn’t mean our humanity becomes perfected, the mistakes will keep on coming. But it does mean that we commit to growing, learning from our mistakes and doing better. For ourselves and for others. So that there’s less suffering, more happiness and joy.

None of this is to say that believing in God and having an active spiritual life can’t go together. For many people they do. But they don’t have to.

Nothing about being a good person, living a life of deep meaning and purpose and having a sense of mystery and wonder at the universe requires God.

And, the pull of prayer is real. Particularly during rough times and when you’ve been raised in a dominantly Catholic culture. When my Mam died in the hospice 23 years ago within moments of her slipping away one of our oldest family friends was in the room with us and led a decade of the rosary. Even though I longer believed in God, I joined in. Of course I did. The recitation was somehow comforting and I know my Mam would have wanted us to offer prayers. But the ritual was important too, it provided some sense of meaning or sanctity, a way to instantly mark her departure from this world.

People will never stop praying and if so doing provides some comfort during difficult times, that’s a good thing. But believing in an all-powerful God up in heaven who sees everything and knows all there is to know? Not so sure about that. The evidence certainly goes against it. Just look at the suffering and tragedy in the world, maybe even in your own life. Brutal, I know.

But maybe this a reason to care more, to love more. To appreciate the good times, to dance with abandon and savour every bite. To cherish your friends and laugh uncontrollably. Maybe the mystery is that we ourselves exist in this glorious world full of splendour and beauty, joy and sorrow. Perhaps life itself is sacred and God is everyone around you and you yourself?

Take it from the great mystic poet Kabir:

Don’t go outside your house to see flowers.
My friend, don’t bother with that excursion.
Inside your body there are flowers.
One flower has a thousand petals.
That will do for a place to sit.
Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty
inside the body and out of it,
before gardens and after gardens.

Dearbhla Kelly, August 2022