The Black Swan - Just Mike Just

A lot of the arguments against the existence of God center around what Freud called wish fulfillment, the idea that we want something – relief from suffering, the reward of an afterlife – to be true. Therefore, we imagine it to be true. We invent a God.

One doesn’t have to look far back into history or in the study of sacred texts to realize that human beings have projected many human characteristics upon the deity, whether that be the pre-Christian pantheons or the God of the Bible. This anthropomorphosis is classic projective identification, and it creates human suffering by providing justification for all kinds of terrible, destructive conduct. Based on these justifications, humans, in the name of God, have enslaved and destroyed each other and the remainder of creation for thousands of years. This provides additional argument against the idea of God, but this time on a practical level. Why believe in a Higher Power if it causes so much harm? But is it God which provided the justification, or religion?

God may be a fantasy, and there are fantasies of God which seem to do more harm than good. Yet not all fantasies are harmful, and ‘believers’ report greater life satisfaction and greater happiness and peace overall than those who don’t believe. So, even if these beliefs are human projections, they can serve a constructive purpose.

And then there is the larger question, the bigger issue: What if there was a God beyond all human imagination and projection and fantasy? In other words, just because we may have invented God, doesn’t mean there God isn’t a God beyond our invention. Simply because no one in Europe believed that black swans existed didn’t mean one couldn’t exist. In fact, Dutch sailors exploring Australia found them in 1697. Absence of evidence, the Irish missionary and historian wrote Wiilliam Wright wrote, isn’t evidence of absence.

In a way, our inventions of a Higher Power may interfere with the actual experience of whatever God is. By nature, God lies beyond concepts, beyond our concepts of God. It lies past intellectual understanding. It can only be experienced, not understood. The attempt to understand God interferes with our experience of it. This understanding can be likened to a house which is inadequate for our present needs. The house needs to be torn down. It needs to be razed before a new edifice can be built in its place.

The house stands for our old fantasies, our projections and prejudices for or against something that is itself uncreated. Unlearning must occur before new experiencing can take place.

Simply because we don’t understand something is no reason to reject it, or to deny it. If God is, then it can only be accepted, never sufficiently understood. It may shatter the vessel of our understanding, yet we can open ourselves to it.