What does God do all day? [2]

This is a continuing of the theme I started last month, and if you have not read that page, please do so. The key point is that the question is one I cannot make go away, and that I know my answer will be incomplete and probably wrong. But I am compelled to face up to it, and I ask you to do so too.

There are very few things of which we can be certain, but here is one: that our choices are real.

This statement is axiomatic, and not dissimilar to the answer Descartes gave when he faced the question 'what can we be certain of?' His answer was - 'I think, therefore I am'. If my choices are not real, if my actions are controlled by another being, or if my actions are random and not controlled even by myself, then even the questions I ask are unreal, even what I am writing here is unreal, and I just do not believe that is so. If I am wrong (and the reality is that I am just someone's puppet) then I am not a human at all, and all the moral problems are imaginary. So I conclude that to be human means to be making real choices, for which I am actually responsible.

It is of course a leap of faith to believe that this 'humanity' I possess is God-given, that this 'humanity', poor though it may be and full of faults, is because I am made 'in the image of God'. Yes, this is a belief and not a demonstrable fact. But it is easier (more logical, and less a leap of faith) to believe that it is something given by a power capable of giving it, than to believe in a massively long progression of events, from some inert and simple chemical structure (obviously not capable of 'choices') being converted by mutational accidents into a being capable of making 'choices'. At what point in this alleged chain of accidents did 'animality' (from the Latin - animus - for a mind) arrive, and how? This question demands more faith than I am capable of. It is not obvious that those who do believe in the progression from inert chemical to 'animality' by a series of accidents have really faced up to the difficulties. For them the alternative difficulties (to believe that we have received our humanity as a gift) present moral problems as well as intellectual ones. The attraction of 'evolution as the whole answer' is that it leaves no lurking moral challenges, no 'Giver' who might care how 'His' gift is used.

So now I have two axioms, two affirmations: that my humanity is real; that my humanity is a gift. And this is where I can begin to answer the question: what does God do all day? I believe that He who gave me humanity (this 'likeness' to Himself) will not take it away. He will not turn me into a puppet. His interventions (if there are any) will leave me with real choices. And we must think about interventions in due course.

Because I am human, I believe He cares about us humans, because I know that (weakly, imperfectly, and not continuously) I do too - homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto as the poet Terence put it some 150 years before Christ: 'I am a man; I consider nothing human to be alien to me'. If Terence, and I, and everyone else I know, can be moved by the joys of others (to rejoice with them) and by the sorrows of others (to be sad with them), then I have part of the answer to my question: God has divine joys and divine sorrows, the nature of which I can only guess at, but which are real joys and real sorrows.

Today some of things I will do (or not do) may give the Source of all Joy something to be glad about, and some may give the Source of all Sorrow something to be sad about. But He is not indifferent, of that I am sure. Nothing human is alien to Him either.

But does God intervene? Is He bound up helplessly as a passive observer, and nothing more? And - if He does intervene - how does He intervene? These are the next questions, and they will be attempted at my next posting. Till then let us, dear reader, hang on to one simple idea: that God is bound up, involved, in what we do, and don't do. Just the conscious awareness of this makes a difference - at least it does to me.