God knows what lives in me in place of me

Fri Dec 29 2023 13:50:25 GMT-0600 (Central Standard Time)
Listen to this as you read.

Ted Chiang has a story called "Hell is the Absence of God" about a world where angels appear on earth. Unannounced, in a burst of blinding light, an angel will come down from Heaven. He performs miracles, healing people's deformities and terminal illnesses, but he also causes casualties, killing or maiming people from the shockwave caused by his arrival. And then, as unexpectedly as he appears, he returns to Heaven.

When someone dies, their soul leaves their body, and spectators can watch it travel either up to Heaven or down to Hell. Heaven is eternal bliss and fulfillment, while Hell is just as the title describes, a world identical to Earth but without God or the possibility of making it to Heaven.

The story follows a man whose wife is killed by an angel's arrival, sending her soul to Heaven. The man struggles to understand why his wife died, why God has decided to take her from him. He knows that if he ever wants to see his wife again, he has to not just accept God and His decision to kill his wife, but to praise Him for it and devote his life to Him. He knows God is real, he knows God is good, and yet he can't understand Him.

The World is a Text

I believe in God because I believe I can see Him in the beauty of the world.

I was once backpacking in the Sierra Nevada when I came upon a small glacial lake with a stream trickling out of it. The lake was surrounded by lush, green grass and thousands upon thousands of wildflowers. The sky was perfectly blue, rimmed by the mountains, which held onto the thin air and stopped it from floating away. I walked to the shore of the lake, and I was immediately overwhelmed by a profound feeling that I shouldn't be there. Not just that I didn't belong in this place, but that this place's beauty should efface me. It was so beautiful that I wanted to kill myself.

When I took a class on Wittgenstein in college, I found him so smart that after each class I felt like vomiting. In the class's discussions, we would arrive at a point where our "spades would be turned," where language was no longer capable of taking us, and we'd gesture into the void. But, what remains the most profound miracle, is that in that void of nonsense, we could still exchange something. Something in all of us understood that which could not and cannot be communicated. The best name for that something is God.

Every time I've watched The End of Evangelion, I've cried and been put in a daze for a few days. No piece of art has better captured the miracle of life––that is, social life, human life––than the scene of Shinji finally releasing Asuka's neck from his grip, letting her live. All we can ever do is stop ourselves from choking each other, but the fact that we do is a miracle.

God is what makes life worth living, and He exists in all things. I believe it is our duty in life to try to see Him in all things, and appreciate the world around us fully.

To appreciate the world is to interpret it, for even labeling something as uninterpretable is itself an act of interpretation. This should not be understood as an attempt to enclose the world, but as engaging with the world in the same way one would engage with a text. The same intellectual humility, excitement, wonder, and care that characterizes close reading ought to describe all our actions in the world.[1]

What distinguishes the world from all other texts, and why we are forever indebted to God, is that we don't just read it, but write it ourselves.

Religion

The question, then, is how to read this text, and, thereby, how to write it. This is what every religion seeks to answer, and it is exactly in doing so that they fail to appreciate the world.

There is no single "correct" interpretation of a text. Perhaps needless to say, the author's intent is irrelevant. I return to Chiang: What can one tell the protagonist of the story to convince him to praise God? If God came down and told him why He killed his wife, would he be satisfied?

An author might provide his own interpretation of his text, but he is no more correct than anyone else. Anything he could add is just more text to interpret. Every holy book makes a claim to transcendent truth, an interpretation of this world that is beyond the world itself. But these books are still part of the world, even if they are the word of God. And, perhaps more importantly, we are part of the world. All we can ever do is interpret these books, and our interpretations will always be human. If God spoke directly to us, why should we have the audacity to think that we would understand him? In fact, God does speak directly to us––His words take the form of the world.

To put a book or ideology or theology in front of the world, to valorize its truth as more real than the truth of the world, is to denigrate that world. I believe in God because I can see Him all around me, in everything that is good and beautiful. Why would I deny that truth in favor of one particular set of words?

This is not to say religion cannot teach us anything about the world. Rather, the beauty and knowledge of religion, like all beauty and knowledge, are testaments to God. Every holy book has stood the test of time and has imparted wisdom to generations upon generations of people. We should feel reverence for our ancestors. But we cannot see our ancestors, we can only hear their echoes and see their footsteps sunken into the ground. The marks they have left are but one part of the world.

To live our best lives, we must see the world as it is, in its entirety, not constrained to the pages of a book or the dictates of a religion. To write the book of the world, we are best served by trying to read and understand as much of it as we can. Then, it is left to each of us, alone, to decide how to act.


  1. "In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine." - Vladimir Nabokov ↩︎