It’s a pervasive thought: “speak to us, you mighty God, if you’d have us believe. We are here alone and the devil is ever-believable, for we act him out to one another most vividly.” That devil is a positivist! We like our evidence even at the cost of evil.
But the devil, real as the whip in one man’s hand as the crack upon his brother’s back; from whence comes he? What a predicament, an undeniable agent in the material; if real then created —surely we won’t accept him as suigenerous— but created by whom? If we allow for a creator, an increasingly reasonable parsimony even and especially to our modern physicists (and who is more practical?), then this creator is versed, and loudly so, in evil?
A bit of irony, that: a positively definable devil from a strictly negatively definable creator; not here, not speaking but spoken for by tyrants, an abandoner of his bastard son —a forsaking-creator? It is no wonder mankind, largely holding this materialistic and doubtful idea in turn forsakes such a God.
Only, a subtle detail is here missed: If he left after creating, and if creation itself is undeniable, did he not, could he not have, come into it—into us humans (with our self-evident evidence of being itself within us, practically and positively provable) particularly. We do see it, observe it —this being (meant as the verb); participating in it via our own subjective judgement of good and evil. An equally pervasive thought —so pervasive that we forget it as a fish in the water in which it lives and moves and has its being: He does speak— as sure as we do.
That we are verbal is that we act, as verbs do in our speech; and in so doing, through our speech and action, the proof that we participate as actors of being —and perhaps in Being— becomes clear and self-evident. This becoming is the function of Being: to become. I think this is what God is doing through his creation and that this is evident in our own intrinsic desire to become. The infinitive form of any verb is indeed infinite, as we conceive of our God, the god of Infinite Being. And this is undeniably our nature, for what are we doing at any moment, most essentially, but being. It is absurd, if God can be described as the source of experiential being, rather than as some physical body for which we search but cannot find, for the very reason that being —as we experience through our own subjectivity— is immaterial in its nature, to consider that God “unreal”; for we realize —that is, we make real— this body for which we’ve longingly and mistakenly searched: through both our own physical and verbal expressive act of being by being. Man’s becoming is the manifestation of God—how clever a God is that! A god of creation, in his creation, creating infinitely. To what end would this God create? If being is immaterial, and it seems so, but propagates through the material and into it, then the only pursuit such an infinity might find worthy is an eternal pursuit. In our material finitude we seek the knowledge of and presume a finite end, but the immaterial and thereby infinite being inside us seeks eternity—and our souls’ longing for immortality, however mistaken an understanding of the necessity of material death for such a spirit’s infinite development we may cling to, is evidence, positivistic and personal to each of us of the reality (however quasi-corporal) of this spirit’s existence in us, and thereby Its existence per se.
No, he did not abandon us, his children. We are not bastard sons and daughters. We’ve simply taken for granted this innate being, as all children do, because all has indeed been granted. We are the fruit of this God’s labor in creation, we are endowed by it. We’ve simply misjudged his locality, as a foolish child might imagine his father’s disappearance to his work of a day an abandonment. For, where does your personal father hide his love for you but within? If God absconded, it is my contention that he poured himself into we, his creation. If he does not speak, he the thousand voices you’ll hear today and your own. “The kingdom of God is within”, and this is undeniably a kingdom to which we are heirs, for it is evidenced through each of our own interiority which is the very basis upon which we seek answers to the question “Where is God?”.
Here we have reason for the devils we are unto ourselves; if God is within, such creative force per se bears an equal capacity for destruction. Man manifests both good and evil, and creates and destroys manifestly. What more evidence (in the scientific Positivist sense) have we need for, the evidence is in our own hands. We speak magic words, manifesting our desires, however deep, however dark, however collectively or individually, consciously or unconsciously; we create goods and good and seek the eradication of evil as we see it. We ourselves create; we Ourselves create.
What more could plausibly be desired—even our desire itself is unbounded and eternal.
“I said, ‘You are “gods”; you are all sons of the Most High.’ But you will die like mere mortals; you will fall like every other ruler.”
—Jesus, the Christ
The answer, to mortals, those possessed of being by Being (God) itself, sons and daughters, creators but not the Creator himself, is “eternity.”
Does God speak? As sure as you and I speak—as sure as we be, yes: within us, from us. That we are ashamed by our own mortality and so desire for Being that we envy immortality rather than rejoice that the creation and destruction of the world is only partially our duty is a farcical and childish resentment. No more do we truly want this burden than the infant wants full independence from its parents. This is the day the Lord hath made. We ought rejoice and be glad in it—in Him; for in his Being we live and move and have ours, granted and given; and too often, as children are apt to do, we take this gift as such.