God and Truth

In the last section, I looked at ways that The Internet can fulfil our deepest spiritual needs; arguably sometimes doing this more adequately than mainstream religions. In this section, I wish to consider how God relates to truth and knowledge and how the better comprehension and feeling of universal citizenship that The Internet can provide brings us nearer to what has traditionally been meant by God.

The Internet can be seen as blazing a trail through, or simply ignoring, provincial and national boundaries and potentially seeking out truth wherever it resides; that it correspondingly can also be a vehicle for bigotry, rampant commercialism or pornography cannot be denied either. This is in the nature of new media developments. They provide new potential for both good and evil. But we do not necessarily decry the printing press because it spreads the sinful and scurrilous more widely too! Instead, we tend to assess the overall impact of such developments on civilization and education. One of the features of The Internet is that it makes it difficult to suppress knowledge. It opens our eyes to everything that we may, or may not, wish to know. It bears resemblance perhaps in this respect at least to the Hindu God Kāli; taking on the forces of ignorance.

Each of the main religions recognizes knowledge as to some extent crucial to finding God. It is no coincidence that synagogues, mosques, monasteries and cathedrals have always been centres of learning. Muhammad's saying: 'seek for science, even if it be in China ' is pertinent in this connection. Provincialism is not in the nature of what we understand by God or of The Internet. The idea that God's domain is the whole earth – his providence extending over everything – is a common theme to the prophets of the Old Testament: 'they are the eyes of the Lord, which run to and fro through the whole earth.'[1] There may be no better analogy for God's providence extending over everything on earth than The Internet. Jonathan Sacks argues that printing, by providing everyone with access to knowledge, created the possibility of universal citizenship [2] This is the kind of mantle that The Internet, at its best, takes on too. We may not accept that God plays any part in such Internet developments as Wikipedia where knowledge on every conceivable subject is pooled and shared but we should acknowledge that such generosity of mind is in keeping with the understanding and enlightenment that most religions encourage in their adherents. Such opportunities to share a comprehension of our world encourages egalitarianism, self-belief, selflessness and what Spinoza would call more adequate ideas. These are the kind of qualities that are most associated with religious enlightenment too.

We might also draw a comparison here with the tendency of certain religious institutions both to instil their own values and to withhold knowledge. Where knowledge is open, this kind of restriction on knowledge and behaviour, where power results from ecclesiastical position or ivory tower hierarchies, becomes more difficult to sustain.

Spinoza's position is that as we become more enlightened, we become nearer to God.

Since God has adequate knowledge of everything, our own ideas are adequate in so far as we share in the infinite intellect ... the more adequate my conceptions, the more I reach beyond my finite condition to the divine essence of which I am a mode.[3] Of course, there is no automatic enlightenment associated with The Internet and the commercialism can be overbearing and insidious too. But The Internet is nevertheless a repository of knowledge and wisdom such as the world has never known; much of this resource being available without cost, almost instantaneously, and to anyone with an Internet connection.

Clearly, not everyone would accept that the access to knowledge and the opportunity to learn almost anything that the Internet offers has anything to do with God. Feuerbach's position, for instance, is that, although there is no God, religion plays a part in our self-understanding and therefore has value to this extent at least. The Internet, under such an analysis, helps us to learn about our world, helps us to comprehend others and gives us insights into ourselves. This argument that an idea of God is desirable even if the empirical evidence for God doesn't stack up, can always be made of the God worshipped by every religion. But this position does not discredit an Internet God to any greater extent, in my view.

In this section, I have considered some of the ways that the truth and knowledge made available to us through The Internet can be argued to be of assistance in providing us with adequate conceptions, such adequacy of ideas being necessary to divine contemplation too. The final section is a continuation of this idea in that it assesses some of the ways that God can be seen as within us rather than beyond us. This relates closely to the knowledge, enlightenment and understanding that a connected world can help to imbue.

fn1. Zechariah 4. 10, King James Bible, 1611 fn2. The Dignity of Difference (London, 2002) pp. 134-135. fn3. Scruton, Roger, Spinoza (OUP, 1986) p.69.