What I Talk About When I Talk About God

I can’t stand vague language. It’s the writer in me, the person who values communication that is both precise and concise. A lack of specificity drives me nuts.

You know, wimpy passive-voice constructions like “Mistakes were made.” (Made by whom, dammit??)

Rambling work emails that fail to diagnose the problem, fail to clarify next steps, fail to make clear who the stakeholders are.

Almost any use of “very.” That word is just the worst. It’s such a lazy way to raise the stakes on a description. (The character wasn’t just mad, he was very mad. Good lord.) It’s not necessary 99% of the time… and the other 1% is debatable.

But, in my mind, the English language is at its most vague when we start using the word “God.” This is a word/name that is ubiquitous, yet has a broad range of meanings, depending on the audience. Often the person using it has a much different understanding than the person hearing it (or reading it). For example, the astrophysicist Stephen Hawking ends his bestseller A Brief History of Time with this sentence:

If we do discover a theory of everything...it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would truly know the mind of God."

Many people might read this and think that Hawking understands God as they do. Perhaps as a character from the Bible, a figure in the sky who takes an interest in human affairs, a personal being with likes and dislikes. That isn’t what Hawking is referring to. He’s not religious and he uses the word “God” as a stand-in for the laws of physics. For him, to “truly know the mind of God” would mean that we have a deep understanding of the cosmos.

Albert Einstein used the word similarly, in one famous letter writing that God “does not play dice.” (He was referring to the weirdness of the quantum theory, which he found unsettling.) Religious fundamentalists seized on this as proof that the world’s most famous genius was on their side. This so bothered Einstein that he clarified his beliefs as follows:

I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

The quote above is a good summary of my own understanding. This is a departure from how I used to think, when I had a more traditional view of religion. But people change. For me, God is Ultimate Reality. God is the spark of consciousness that somehow emerged in our remote corner of the galaxy 13 billion years after the Big Bang. God is the universal constant, the laws of physics that hold all this chaos together.

My concept of the divine has changed quite dramatically, but the word I use has not. It’s still God. The name is a throughline, a constant that connects my past self with my current self.

It can also connect people. “God” is the universal translator. If I’m looking at the night sky with someone, and they say, “Isn’t God amazing?” I will say, “Absolutely.” In that moment, it doesn’t matter if we define the word differently. What’s important is that we’re sharing a moment of human connection. The malleable nature of “God” allows for that. It’s a word for everybody, for the spiritual and secular alike. Nobody owns it. Nobody can offer a conclusive definition of it.

I remember that final sentence of Hawking’s book because he referred to God. It’s stuck with me for years. If his editor had removed any mention of the divine, the sentence wouldn’t have been memorable.

The name of God is a conduit for wonder. Every culture and language has their own version of it. These names are a shorthand for the reverence and bewilderment our species feels as we try to navigate the whirling space rock on which we find ourselves. This distinctive feeling – a kind of confounded awe – is what unites us. Some people direct it towards a specific character from a specific book, others direct it towards the Milky Way.

But whether we’re raising our hands in church or looking through a telescope, the impulse is the same. It’s a desire to be part of something larger than ourselves.

So, while I normally dislike vague language, I’m glad that “God” is such a fuzzy term. It’s almost magical, how the same word can have so many different meanings to so many different people. It works as linguistic connective tissue, holding us together.

That ambiguity, that fuzziness – it’s a good thing.

I’d even go so far as to say it’s very good.