The conception of God as a person is natural to common sense and the
popular view is that God is a person in the
sense that He is conscious being having will,
feeling and knowing, in infinite measure of
course as contrasted with ourselves whose
faculties are limited and finite. He is one with
whom one can come into relationships of love and
affection. This savours of course of
anthropomorphism, that is humanism. God is
reduced to human terms and descriptions. God has
been described as beyond all human terms being
immeasurably superior and different. To describe
God or imagine Him to be of the same shape and
form and characteristics of man is wrong
utterly. Saints as well as sages have refused to
reduce God to the level of themselves even when
they had developed relationships with Him.
The real reason may be traced to the fact that God as the all controlling
and ruling principle of the universe cannot be
localized at any one place, or body.
Omnipresence of God prevents localization. But
is personality or the person to be localized in
a body? Normal view is that a person is an
embodied being, physical is appearance and
liable to all the ills and limitations of man or
embodied beings.
The view of personality as unbegum and unending energy of the Universal,
that it is a conscious rational will is held by
certain thinkers. Personality centers round the
possession of conscious will. The arguments
adduced to prove that God has conscious will are
(i) that all actual data are conscious
experiences, (ii) that all physical forces act
on and produce conscious experiences in man, and
(iii) that all evidence for law and order speaks
for a personal mind at work in the universe:
this is course is analogical inference, and (iv)
that the existence of purpose in revelatory of
personal will and the world has purpose. (v)
history of religion reveals that in all branches
of human experience there is some personal God
at work.(vi) the very growth of value
experiences or their emergence reveals the
existence of a Personal God, who is the
determiner of all values. (vii) personalism
includes impersonalism and yields a more
coherent and all inclusive explanation that
impersonalism which cannot produce person.
Lastly the evidence for God as personal consists
of empirical facts of religious persons. This is
about the most important arguments.
Impersonalists claim that God is not personal
and if God is personal he cannot be God.
Disbelief in God is also stated to be due to the fact of evil in the
world. God cannot have created evil, and a
creator God and existence of evil cannot go
together. As pointed out it is an argument
against the all creator God.
Consciousness being neural, it can be shown that conscious will cannot be
an argument for the existence of God. God again
is not necessary for explanations of science,
and is a positive hindrance to the growth of
scientific knowledge. God is superstition not an
illumination.
The personality of God is unverifiable in the sense of knowing Him as any
other sensory object. In fact all law is
impersonal, and the world is governed by laws.
The question of their being a person behind all
laws is a misapplication of the analogy of
state-laws and their making. Man’s demand that
God should be like man leads to the conception
of personal God, and it is a kind of human
arrogance. A human God is no God. Lastly the
concept of personality is not an ultimate
concept as inclusive of all other concepts or as
most valuable. In fact there have been as many
saints and seers who have accepted that the
Ultimate is transcendent to personality or
person.
(E.g. Brahman of the Advaita Vedantia is super personal, if not
impersonal. God is transcendent to humanity and
towards which all humanity moves. The immanence
or God is not identifiable with the view that
God is just human, a struggling conscience or
consciousness like man himself. Ignorance of man
is incompatible with that omniscience of God. A
truer conception of God is that which upholds
all the statuses of God - as transcendent, as
immanent, as incarnation and as guide of man and
the Goal of man. While the Guide of Man and the
Goal of Man are acceptable concepts of God at
the personal-emotional need based level the real
concept of God is that which cannot be defined
and expressed though real. God is a fact of
experience in religious and spiritual
aspirations of the Man and is something more
that what can be defined - to say it is Nothing
is wrong but to say it is Nothingness is more
true. |