I’ve been very busy teaching, and so this blog has suffered. So I thought I’d do a short screed of an idea that I have had for some time. I have discussed what a religion is for a while now. Instead I want to ask today, What is a god?
Philosophers have always treated the deity as a high concept entity, something that has the attributes of perfection: all-knowing, all-powerful, omnipresent, omnibenevolent and so on. This is a view of God that is presumed in most discussions of atheism, the existence of God, the problem of evil and the like. But it is a very rare view of God in actual, you know, religions. The religions of the Folk have divine deities of all kinds, ranging from the all-too-human and fallible variety of Norse and Irish mythology, through to the distant and unknowable gods of Epicurus. So what sort of a test should we apply to divinities?
I propose a rough and ready kind of test I call the Greek Pantheon Test: If it would be a god in the Greek Pantheon, then it’s a god. Of course, a number of divinities not included by the Greeks, the Titans, would also be divinities in my book, but that is a matter of restricting divine beings to Olympus, which is a cultic matter. If Chronos were unknown to the Greeks, he’d definitely be included as a god when they were given a description.
This has some benefits, but also some rather counter-intuitive results. The benefits first: it means that we can deal with the sorts of deities that are almost universal, without artificially including or excluding deities as they match some prior philosophical canon, which is in any a case itself the end result of a long history of theological correctness in a particular tradition. Why aren’t the Lares and Penates of Roman domestic religion gods? Why aren’t the spirits of rivers and trees and other spirits of place gods? They act like gods in the ordinary senses, so, they are gods.
Now the counterintuitive outcomes of this test: angels are gods. St Michael is indiscernibly different from Thor or Mars or Huitzilopochtli as a god of war. Saints are gods. Mary and the Evangelists play a role as intermediaries between the High God and worshippers, just as the Vyantaras in Jainism, or the Demiurge in Platonism and the daimones in Greek mysticism. Jinn are gods. They have, as the Disney film put it, “super-phenomenal cosmic powers”. Prophets can also be gods. Ancestors, especially in the Confucian tradition, are gods. Devas in Tibetan Buddhism are gods. Any religion which has superhuman agents in it, has gods, no matter what the philosophically pure elite theology may say.
The Justin Barrett view of gods as “Minimal Counterintuitive Agents” – effectively humans with superhuman powers – ties in with this. A god is a superhero or supervillain. They are like us in all respects except their abilities or some other superstimulus feature. This is the folk view of gods, and it is something that philosophy of religion had better come to terms with sometime.