WHAT IF GOD WAS ONE OF US?

What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Tryin' to make his way home?

I have always had an affection for Joan Osbourne’s hit, “One of Us.”  The song made it to No. 4 on the charts in 1995 and was nominated for Song of the Year at the Grammys.  But I seldom hear it played any longer, perhaps because it was something of a novelty piece.  Still, the song has stuck with me.  I like how it manages, through whimsy, to project an interesting philosophical idea—the notion that God, like us, is something less than all-powerful.

It is standard Christian dogma that God is omnipotent.  But even were God to exist, couldn’t he be like “one of us,” just with more—but not absolute—power or knowledge?  What is the basis for thinking that God would be truly omnipotent (or omniscient or omni-benevolent, for that matter) anyway?  After all, the Hebrew god started out as just one of any number of local tribal gods, competing with other deities—not always successfully—for human allegiance.  It was only in the course of God’s evolution from the Hebrew tribal god to the greatest tribal god and ultimately to the only god that he apparently acquired certain more powerful qualities.  See, e.g., The Evolution of God, by Robert Wright.

But there is no reason that God’s evolution would have had to take this course.  After all, that is not the course that other cultures, such as the Greeks, the Romans,  and the Norse, took with their deities.  They maintained a tradition of numerous gods, each with his or her special realm and powers—and weaknesses.  Moreover, even as to cultures with a single god there is no logical need to invest that deity with omnipotence.  And, frankly, investing the Christian God with omnipotence only leads to the thorny problem of theodicy, of trying to explain how an omnipotent deity could have designed a world filled with pain and suffering.  See my essay, “Theodicy: The Problem of Pain and Suffering.”

Nor is there any particular necessity for a deity to have an interest in human affairs.  The Greek philosopher Epicurus, as well as his Roman devotee, Lucretius, believed that there might be gods but, if so, those gods had no more interest in human affairs than we might have in the affairs of an ant colony in a neighbor's field.  See On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius.

So what if God was one of us?  Just imagine for a moment a deity that somehow managed to get things started, culminating in the world we have today, but that this deity does not have the power—or perhaps the interest—to intervene in the ongoing affairs of that creation.  What if such a god did not care about and was not looking for any obeisance?  How would that—should that—affect our goals and aspirations, our moral code, or the meaning we find in our lives?  

Speaking for myself, it wouldn’t make any difference.

© 2018 John M. Phillips