Formulations of a God that Even Ayn Rand Might Embrace
by
Eric Paul Nolte
Recently, M. Zachary Johnson, compelling composer and author of brilliant books on music, posted this thought on Facebook:
“I recall Leonard Peikoff saying that Ayn Rand once told him she had come up with an argument for the existence of God that was better than any of those anyone had come up with. But when he asked her what it was, she wouldn't tell him. Does anybody remember where he said this?”
David Hayes responded to Matt with the reference and wrote:
"Letters of Ayn Rand," pg. 185, within a letter to Isabel Paterson dated August 4, 1945, contains this paragraph by Ayn Rand:
‘Incidentally, I know some very good arguments of my own in favor of the existence of God. But they're not the ones you mention and they're not the ones I've ever read advanced in any religion. They're not proofs, therefore I can't say I accept them. They are merely possibilities, like a hypothesis that could be tenable. But it wouldn't be an omnipotent God and it wouldn't be a limitless God.’
“Following this, an editorial remark has been added which reads: "[AR never mentioned these arguments again.]
“I don't [know] of a passage of Leonard Peikoff's on the same point.”
* * *
Why would anybody ever be interested in naming a formulation of god that even Ayn Rand might approve of?
It might seem apparent that the very idea of god is so tainted, so fraught with awful history and practice that surely no good can come of trying to nail down a definition that a rational person could live with. Why even try?
I got into a similar spot when I once tried to craft a non-altruistic argument for charity as a sort of “thank you” from me to the universe. I feel deeply grateful for the lucky roll of the cosmic dice that endowed me with a good mind and health that allowed me to work hard and make something deeply rewarding of my life. What did I do to deserve this luck? Nothing. I could just as deservingly been born dead, or crippled, or in a brutal dictatorship. My gratitude inspires me to want to lend a helping hand to deserving others who were not so lucky as I. But to call this impulse “charity” may be wrong-headed because the idea of charity turns out to be so laced with religious calls for mindless self-sacrifice for the lives of others. Ultimately I found the word untenable for my purposes.
But I do have a couple good ideas about what a rational concept of a god might be, and I believe I can show you how these formulations comport nicely with my Objectivist view of the universe.
The most important point speaks to why all the peoples of the world have wrestled with some version of a god or gods. Moreover, these ideas may offer a good tool for outreach to persuade others whose religiosity might otherwise render them deaf to our way of looking at the world.
So let me offer these ideas for your consideration.
A little background first.
* * *
I was born to a communist musician who made of me a “red diaper baby,” as they say of the babies of red-flag waving Marxist-Leninists. It took me decades to recover my mind!
I came of age in the Unitarian Church of the 1960s. Then, as now, an atheist or a Buddhist could be welcomed into the fellowship, but back then their book store still sold copies of Atlas Shrugged along with works by and about the iconic figures of the church and secular saints like Jefferson, Darwin, Emerson, Thoreau, Dickens, William Ellery Channing, and many other brilliant lights.
At that time one could openly profess admiration for Ayn Rand and capitalism without causing Unitarians to suffer a dizzy moral seizure.
This is no longer true!
When I grew up in the Unitarian church, one could still openly advocate a morality of reason, objective reality, individual rights to life, liberty, and the peaceful pursuit of personal happiness and profit through trading value-for-value to mutual benefit—in a word, capitalism. That church is dead.
But, to the point here, I did get something wonderful out of growing up Unitarian, which was the idea that God, or any god or gods, was not irrevocably tied to the God of Abraham—not necessarily an anthropomorphic creator of the universe, not a personality of omniscient or omnipotent powers, and requiring neither mystical nor magical thinking.
Let me explain.
* * *
Why God?
Not, “Tell me why, oh dear God.”
Rather, why is there any idea of a god?
Why this imaginary friend, this bizarre delusion that arose nearly everywhere on earth? Why did an idea of god arise among almost all the ancient peoples of the world?
What gives rise to the concept of a god?
There is no evidence for a god, the anthropomorphic creator of the universe, that will hold water, much less walk on water, so why and how did any idea of a god ever come to mind?
I believe that the idea of a god arose because, for one thing, Homo saps are in the unique position of knowing that we must die.
Now, you can quote literature that says elephants, dolphins, and chimps are also aware of death among their own kind, but there is an unbridgeable gulf between humans and all the other animals: they are adapted to their environment. We must daily wrestle with the challenges posed by our being physically ill-suited to living in the wild—we must adapt the environment to us. It is our uniquely advanced minds that allow us to bend the world to our needs. We are endowed with the unique power to accumulate knowledge and capital.
Humans are the only animals who hold their knowledge in fully developed, propositional concepts, and therefore we are the only creatures who can possibly know of our own impending personal death and grapple with the shattering consequences of this foreknowledge.
The foreknowledge of our own death is shattering because it challenges the very meaning of our lives.
If everything we have ever worked to achieve disappears in the flash of death, then … what’s the point?
If it all disappears with the finality of a falling guillotine’s blade, then what’s it all about?
If all the wealth and knowledge we have acquired, if all the love we have given and received, if all this earthly web unravels and sinks to the bottom of life’s ocean, then what is the meaning of life?
Death levels the Prince and the Pauper, the saint and the sinner, the wise and the foolish. Death shatters us.
This is the point that Forrest Church often made, that all religions have as their animating purpose the search for meaning that arises with the foreknowledge of our own death.
(Footnote: Forrest Church was for many years the senior minister of the First Unitarian Church in Manhattan, a prolific author who edited the arresting and wonderful volume, The Jefferson Bible, which shows how Thomas Jefferson was as close to being an outright atheist as one could be in the 18th century without getting burned at the stake.)
You can say that the idea of god was humanity’s ruse, our self-deception, an aspect of whistling past the graveyard on a moonless night, pretending that though we must die, we don’t really have to die because we can imagine an afterlife in which we persist forever with everyone we ever loved.
You can say that we would all be vastly better off without this pretense, this profound lie, and that embracing reality clear-eyed and brave is always more life-serving than self-deception and cowardice. I agree.
And yet, there is another aspect of the reason that Homo saps ever dreamed up the idea of god.
If by the idea of god you mean the impersonal force that somehow animates the universe, well then what’s wrong with that?
I believe that it’s obvious that something is going on in the universe! Some impersonal force or forces energize everything. We do not know what all these forces are. We do know that these forces are real, we do know what many of them are, and by declaring that we do not know what all of them are, we leave open the possibility for discovering them as they become available to us. By our profession of a certain ignorance here we inspire those who have the goods to go sniffing down that road in search of better answers.
So this is the idea of god as the impersonal force that animates the universe, and surely this is a plausible explanation for why the idea of god might have arisen in the context of early Homo sapiens, before the rise of science. This explanation also speaks to the point of why people might still turn to the idea of god when they wonder, awestruck about the yawning sea of ignorance that yet lies not so far off the shore we know and on which we live today.
Here’s another idea of god that even Ayn Rand might entertain as tenable:
Suppose, by “god” you mean the state of mind to which you repair when you feel aware of the cosmic sweep of the universe, when you confront the awe-inspiring beauty of the earth that is available to anybody who pays attention to the amazing phenomena of life and the world.
Think of the astonishing displays of light and its refraction through all the mists of cloud and water.
Think of the soul-shaking power of a thunderstorm felt up close… or as experienced from inside the belly of the beast, as I myself have seen it up close and first hand as an airline pilot! My god!
I think of what I often saw in my 35 years as an airline pilot, plying the high choir loft, miles above the haze layer—when I would sometimes turn down the cockpit lights just to gawk at the stunning spectacle of all those stars on a moonless night! I think of the many times I saw huge, mind-boggling displays of light, wriggling and dancing in the firmament, the aurora borealis seen from seven miles high while nearing the North Pole! Oh, my god!
If by “god” you mean the state of mind by which you engage with the enduring mysteries of existence, who can argue with this? Nobody knows it all! What is the universe? Where does it come from? Or is it that by simply being everything that is, the concept of the universe does not admit to such a question?
Is the universe finite? Is it infinite? Either one of these propositions once inspired outright dizziness in my mind and those of many others. Is the universe eternal? Doomed to destruction by heat death and the second law of thermodynamics?
Everything in the universe is finite—it is what it is, independent of our wishes, fears, doubts, illusions, prayers, delusions, blindness, or indigestion. So if everything is finite, surely the universe as a whole must be thus limited. And if the universe is finite, as Socrates might have put it in the fifth century BC, surely the universe must have a boundary. If the universe has an edge, surely you could throw a javelin through it! And if you can throw a spear through the edge of the universe… then… what’s on the other side?
But if the universe is infinite, this would contradict the nature of everything we know about anything, because everything is finite… everything is definite, something specific. It is what it is, whatever it is, and surely to be infinite would have to mean being open-ended, without limit.
Now, there are rational ways to deal with these apparent problems with the idea of the infinite, but you can plainly see that the matter begins with an intellectually vertigo-inspiring conundrum, like so many things dreamed up by the ancients (think of Zeno’s paradox, for another related example of the problem of the infinite.)
Think of what life must have been like to our ignorant ancient ancestors, cowering before the fear-fraught facts of existence—the storms and earthquakes, the predators and mysteries of the night and day! My god!
* * *
All right, now we have some ideas of god that may be tenable.
We have god as the impersonal force that animates the universe.
There is god as the sacred hall of our awe and wonder at the beauty and power of life and the world.
We have god as the chapel to which we repair when we wrestle with the enduring mysteries of existence.
But there is still a big problem here because by calling these ideas “god” we can find ourselves cast adrift in intellectually shark-infested waters!
Why? Because the idea of god has a long and tainted history! We cannot employ any idea of god without risking association with some of the worst craziness that has ever infected the human race!
So why bother with the idea of god at all? Why not just call it science or poetry or music?
Because we also want to engage people in the world with fact-based values by which to guide us towards harmony with everybody on the earth who can be reached by the power of life-serving reason and evidence.
So much of the world is wedded to some formulation of Dostoevsky’s notion that without a god everything is permitted. They say that unless there is a god dispensing rewards and punishments, it’s all subjective, and only moral relativism is available to us.
But as Objectivists know, there are facts of reality to which we can appeal for moral guidance towards a life of unfolding happiness, a vision like the world as Ayn Rand saw it, and in Aristotle’s Eudaimonia.
So maybe these secular formulations of god can serve to engage those who now believe in some version of god.
Maybe by our employing these secular conceptions of god, some of these believers might be persuaded to move away from the false and destructive idea that faith offers an alternative to reason. (Remember that faith denotes a belief in the truth of a proposition in the absence of evidence, and so it can never be an efficacious alternative to reason.)
By the path of offering some rational formulations of the meaning of god, we may be able to persuade more people that reason, logic applied to the evidence of experience, gives us the rational alternative to thinking about values, morality, and happiness. This outcome would benefit us all.
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