God, by James O'Fee

Last Sunday, Ray Keene posted a blog ‘GOD AND CHESS BY RAY KEENE ( FOR JAMES)’.

Keene suggested an analogy for God. Before computers, Grandmasters would rack their brains to analyse positions correctly. In their first meeting at the Varna Olympiad in 1962, Bobby Fischer drew with World Champion, Mikhail Botvinnik. In his book ‘My 60 Memorable Games’ [London, 1969], Fischer claimed that he was winning at one point and threw away the win. Botvinnik claimed that he always had the draw in hand and passed the problem over to a young student, Garry Kasparov, to prove the matter.

Later in life, the same Garry Kasparov once challenged his rival, Anatoly Karpov, to an ‘analysis match’. Kasparov wanted to prove that, not only was he better than Karpov over the board, but that he was better at analysis, too.

Today, Keene reports, all grandmasters do to find the ‘chessic truth’ of a position is feed it into Fritz (a successful computer program). Nor is Fritz, David Levy claims, the best computer program around. He thinks it might only achieve 6-8th in the World Chess Computer Championship, were it to compete.

Keene suggests that computers have now achieved a God-like position in chess analysis, once thought a distinctively human activity.

In the 1960s the book Honest to God had an enormous success. The author was the Liberal Theologian, Dr John Robinson(1919-83), Bishop of Woolwich. Robinson sought to demystify God. He wanted to destroy the picture of God of an old man with a beard living up above us in the heavens. Still today theological liberals continue to pour scorn on the analogy.

In reply C.S. Lewis observed that it was impossible for us to think of God, except by analogies. Lewis wrote in The Observer of 24 March 1963 –

‘The Bishop of Woolwich will disturb most of us Christian laymen less than he anticipates. We have long ago abandoned belief in a God who sits on a throne in a localized heaven. We call that belief anthropomorphism, and it was condemned before our time. There is something about this in Gibbon.’ [C.S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide, Walter Hooper, London, 1996, page 115].

The use of analogies, while inevitable, contain dangers.

Jesus used to pray to God as ‘Abba, Father’ [e.g. Mark 14:36] . The conventional Jewish picture had God utterly powerful and remote from humanity. Isaiah was granted the vision of God the tail of whose robe filled the Temple [Isaiah 6:1]. The Jewish High Priest was allowed to enter the Holy of Holies in the Jewish Temple, thought to be Jehovah’s dwelling-place, on only one day in the year (the Day of Atonement). Even then, the High Priest had a rope tied round his feet so that, in the case of his death or incapacity, the other priests could drag his body out of the Holy of Holies to avoid entering the Presence themselves.

Yet here was Jesus addressing God as ‘Abba’ – which is closer to ‘Daddy’ than ‘Father’ in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke. The idea was so revolutionary that Saint Paul and the Apostles retained the Aramaic word ‘Abba’ in his letters along with the Greek word for ‘father’. ‘Abba, Father’ [e.g. Romans 8:15 and Galatians 4:6].

Jesus taught clearly that God was Spirit and could be confined to no physical place.

‘God is spirit. .....The day is coming and is already here, when God will be worshipped in spirit and in truth’.

The New International Version of the Bible has in John 4: 23-24 -

"Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.

God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth."