Your Nature - Starting A Conversation On Intuitive Understanding of God
Hello World!
My song “Your Nature” is a bit different from the rest of my songs on my debut EP. This song describes part of my own personal journey with understanding who/what exactly God really is. You may believe in God or not, but I want this song to start a conversation about what it means to understand God, and Christianity and religion in general, from an academic perspective.
There has been a major misconception that has circled around in society that being religious somehow means you have a lack of academic & scientific knowledge & understanding. Not everyone outside of religious communities hold this viewpoint, but even some public figures that I look up to in the scientific & academic community do. It honestly hurts. Religious people have been part of academia for its entire history, and for those who would like to think otherwise, I want to work on setting that record straight.
This song isn’t about telling people they’re wrong. It’s about creating an understanding between people with different experiences - religious and secular. That’s why I start with the deep philosophical question of “God, how do I know what you are?” I believe the epistemology of any information one claims is known is important. If we can’t justify our beliefs, then we are being foolish. Recognizing the difference between provable and unprovable statements is crucial in this process.
There’s a phrase which I learned from my academic background which I feel very strongly about: “A model doesn’t have to be correct; it has to be useful.” In this song, I explore a potential model for understanding the concept of God. I pull my concepts directly from the Bible. This is not the place to debate factuality, historicity, etc. of the Bible. In this place, I’m simply going to pick out relevant statements and use them as axioms for my model. So, here we go:
God is eternal (Deut 33:27)
The universe provides a lossy image of God and God’s glory (Psa 8:1, Rom 1:20, Is 55:9)
God is unchanging (Mal 3:6)
It is our responsibility to gain understanding (Prov 4:7)
I make a single observation about the universe - it contains many spherical objects like planets and stars, which fill the night sky. Since this is what we can see every single day in the sky, and since we accept as an axiom that the universe is reflective of God in some sense, then there is some utility to understanding God by comparison to spherical objects.
This analogy is pretty basic, but it does work. Mathematically speaking, spheres have a lot of nice properties. They don’t have a number of “sides” like polyhedral objects do. They have no sides, or perhaps infinite sides if you think about it in the limit of increasing side number along with decreasing side length. They can be described by only a small number of properties: the center, the number of dimensions, and the size. The size of a sphere is the same no matter what angle with respect to the center it is examined from.
And that’s about it. Maybe this all seems way too technical and not very useful, but it provides a reasonable foundation for thinking about religious ideas from an academic perspective. I’m certainly not the first to think this way, but I want to amplify this way of thinking. This silly little toy model is just the beginning of conceptualizing these types of things.
I want to hear your thoughts. Whether you have an academic background or not, what do you think about this way of thinking? Is the model reasonable to you? How do we establish truly useful models of understanding God? Let’s build up some great models together! We’re going to have to scour theological & philosophical literature, along with scientific ways of thinking, but I’m excited to make progress on building a community of people who want to understand God in the most intuitive way possible.
Let’s get to work!
In love & unity,
Asabaal
