My God

I would like to have a God. I think. I would like there to be a God, creator and shepherd that I could call mine. This God does not need to be mine in any Personal Assistant sense. I would be happy to share this God with everyone, but this God would be mine in that this God would know me and everything and be responsive to me.

Why would I want such a God? Maybe I would find out if I try to picture the God I would like. What would my God look like? How would this God behave? And would there be just one God, or many? Would there perhaps be a plethora of Gods, one invested in every possible thing? Would this God be able to perform miracles, and I mean real miracles that suspend the workings of the laws of nature and substitute them for the autocracy of a divine will? Or would this God work cleverly within the laws of nature, setting up the right conditions so that extra-legal miracles would not be necessary? Would this God have to be a mystery God, something incomprehensible and forever transcendent, or would this God be knowable? Would we be able to chat and give each other advice? And, as we are busy asking questions, we might as well broach this difficult one: would this God have a gender? Would She be female, or He male, or transgender, a They, with a capital t? Or is my God a mere it, a principle, a beginning, a law unto itself that includes the universe as its perfect self-creation?

The more questions I ask, the more I am convinced that the God I am looking for might be a friend or a wife, or indeed some stranger who’s Good foreshadows itself. I might see God in everything. Everything would have to be a manifestation of this God, that is, if this God is truly a creator. Otherwise, I would have to search for an even deeper God, and having found this God, I would have to search for an even deeper one, and so on, ad infinitum. No, my God would have to have been the Cause of all, if cause is what I am looking for. The cause and product, in fact. Otherwise, this God would be only a part of the whole, and what kind of God is that? I can see I am becoming twisted up in my own wishes.

But what do I need a God for? Reassurance? Comfort? Fatherliness or Motherliness, Friendliness, Brotherliness? I suppose I would love a wise God to advise me what to do. But this surely means that this God could be me when I am being wise in what I do? So what I need is wise people who can give me advice and teach me wisdom. The kind of God that can give me comfort is the kind of father figure God whom I cannot believe in, even though I sometimes speak to such a God whom I then address with a He or a She, whatever the occasion. And such a God is comforting. I make such a God not in my image of myself but in my image of what a God like that should be. And so God takes on the shape of whoever I would really like to talk to about this or that that is bothering me. Mostly, my wife takes on this role, and she is wise, but no God, surely? Angel definitely, but God… I don’t think she would like that.

I suppose I would also like a God to avenge me sometimes, when I am very angry. Imagine seeing all the strong men of this world, the big autocrats and all their smaller and cheaper versions, being turned to stone by divine will! Oh, the sheer joy of self-righteousness! But imagine that would really happen, what then would my reaction be? Imagine I prayed to My God, and suddenly all the strong men of this world would turn to stone. What then? Would the next generation of strong men be sufficiently warned not to try to fulfil their potential as stupid dictators and underminers of democracy? Would I be tempted to see if God could do more for me on this score, maybe get rid of all the people I have an occasional problem with? Most importantly, would such an avenging God be wise? Wouldn’t the wisest God not be a Spinozan God who kept quiet in his perfection, allowing us to make a mess of our lives, even if that mess is, in fact, sub specie aeternitatis, an expression of the perfection of the world, allowing us ways to find accord with that perfection, or not? I couldn’t rely on a wise God to avenge me; such a God would avenge me by giving me wise advice without having to turn his creations into other kinds of creations. Autocrats will die of old age, and the world will find a way to survive with and without them. If we choose to make other people’s lives, or indeed our own, a hell, then God should stand by and let it happen. God could have chosen to make us more like pebbles or fruit flies, who, as far as my limited knowledge about these things stretches, operate more like sentient but not so much as sapient machines. I could only rely on a stupid God to avenge me. Would I want my God stupid? No.

© Jacob Voorthuis, 2026. Please cite Jacob Voorthuis as the author, The Theoria Project as the title and the page address as the location. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, under the following terms: No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.