Divine Imperfection

Did gods create humanity to fulfill some divine purpose that we ourselves can only guess at, or did we create gods to explain the things that were beyond our understanding?

This is entirely my opinion, and I realize that people of deep religious convictions may find it offensive. I can’t help that, nor can I change what I believe. Nor would I. Faith is a tricky thing, and any time you challenge someone else’s you’re tap-dancing in a mine field. If you object to what I believe, I’m sorry but that makes no difference to me. If you object to my expressing such thoughts, fuck you.

In the beginning there was imperfection.

From the first moment that we, as a species, became aware of the world we lived in, it was obvious that it was full of imperfections. The world we found ourselves in was imperfectly suited to support us, and we ourselves were far from being perfectly suited to live in it.

In spite of this (perhaps because of it) we have always sought the approval of our deities, beings whose purposes and desires we can only really guess at, beings that we are required to obey nonetheless, beings which may not even exist save in our own minds. We looked around at the world that was trying to kill us and imagined beings that gave us a purpose for being in it, a purpose that we readily admitted that we were incapable of understanding.

There’s a problem with this. We like to believe that our deities are perfect beings, and that we are but pale imitations if that perfection. (Christianity works this way, anyway.) But if we are the creations of perfect beings, shouldn’t we also be perfect? Is a perfect being capable of shoddy workmanship?

That’s an interesting question, and leads to several others. Could we have created our perfect deities, when we ourselves are so clearly imperfect? Clearly not, and that might seem to argue in favor of the existence of a divine creator or creators, but it begs the other obvious question: Are perfect beings capable of creating imperfection? If they and their works are perfect, then how can anything they create be anything less than perfect? And if their works are imperfect, doesn’t that argue against their being perfect? Doesn’t that argue against the very concept of divine perfection?

The usual argument used to get around this dilemma is the “God-works-in-mysterious-ways” argument; the idea that divine purposes are so far beyond our understanding that we shouldn’t even try to comprehend them, but meekly accept their divine wisdom unquestioningly. This idea has the advantage of being impossible to logically argue against; neither can it be logically supported.

One way that the “God-created-all” hypothesis appears to work is if you discard the notion of divine perfection. You can still claim that God (or whatever/whoever) exists, you can even claim a divine creation, but you can’t claim that your god or gods are perfect. That, or you have to abandon “God-created-all” and accept a divinity separate from creation, and the very idea of such a thing is anathema to most people who accept the god hypothesis. Such thinking leads to a more convoluted theology then most people can accept, in any case.

These are difficult concepts that require serious thought, and humanity as a whole has never been terribly keen on too much thinking. We usually create divinities to manage the difficult bits for us, and we never worry because that’s the deity’s job and we just trust that they’re doing it.

If I’m right about that, then our “perfect beings” can be no more perfect than we are. We are forever creating gods that are merely reflections of ourselves, with all of our weaknesses intact; then we give them the responsibility of controlling the aspects of our world, indeed of our very lives, over which we have neither understanding nor control.

I find it ironic that humanity would create divine intermediaries of perfect wisdom and understanding; personifications of concepts that we knew were beyond our own imperfect understanding. It was inevitable that these constructs would possess all the foibles, faults, and inconsistencies that humanity itself is plagued by.

This, then, is the question: Did we, being imperfect beings, create for ourselves divine beings just as flawed, or did flawed deities create us in their own imperfect image? I can only answer that for me: I think that we are imperfect beings seeking perfection that we can never find in ourselves, so we imagine that perfection in beings that exist only in our imaginations. In other words, we are imperfection forever in search of a perfection that we can never understand, about which we can only hypothesize.

None of which really matters. Such beings as we might imagine would be neither more nor less worthy of reverence than we ourselves. Perhaps when we go looking for a powerful being to explain something we cannot understand, the first place we should look is in a mirror. And while we’re at it, it might be a good idea to turn the mirror over to see what’s behind the reflection.

The Blues Viking
The opinions expressed here are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.