Contrast this with the God of Evangelical Christians: “God loves me. I have a personal relationship with Jesus. If I ask from God in prayer I will receive. People who die are going to heaven or hell.”
Understanding emotions is irrelevant to Einstein and Spinoza's god-concept because the God of Spinoza and Einstein is not a person and does not have emotions. The same is true of Spong's God. On the other hand, if one is trying to assess a more traditional/orthodox Christian view (for example, the Evangelical's god-concept), understanding emotions is highly relevant. In fact, one of the defining attributes of the orthodox God is actually an emotion: love.
Evangelicals call themselves “biblical” or “Bible-believing” Christians. Many are proud to claim the Bible as the literally perfect and complete word of God. (In fact, some modernist critics would say that Evangelicals and other biblical literalists engage in “bibliolatry,” or text worship.) Whether right or wrong, biblical literalists like Evangelicals pin their life priorities and hopes for eternity to the god-concept of the Bible writers, and the Bible writers thought of God as a person who not only loves but manifests a whole host of emotions.
“That is ridiculous!” some Christians might protest. “It's obvious that when the Bible talks about God's emotions it is speaking in metaphor.” For several reasons, this argument is weak: Historians of religion and philosophy tell us that theology has a flow that can be studied in the historical record. We have a tendency to project our own intellectual culture, including abstract god concepts, back into history. However, during the Axial Period when the world's great religions emerged, the gods (think Shiva, Zeus, Mithra, Yahweh) were typically person-gods.
If we look at the internal record of the Bible itself, it would appear that earlier documents were taken literally by later writers. The book of Matthew, for example, gives Jesus a literal understanding of Old Testament events.
Literalists say that the Bible was uniquely inspired or even dictated by God to the authors. In this case, claiming that in the Bible God's emotions are simply metaphors makes God a bad writer. A good writer doesn't use metaphors that he or she knows will be taken literally. Communication isn't just about transmission—it is about knowing your audience. Today many, many Christians take the notion of God's emotions literally, as have most of their spiritual ancestors. To say that God was communicating in metaphor through the Bible writers is to say that God needed communications training.
For the rest of this discussion, then, I'm going to assume that “Bible believing” Christians mostly mean what they say when they use words like “God loves you” or “God is disgusted by homosexuality” or “God is grieved by our sin.” We owe it to ourselves to not play word games about life's most important questions. And, barring evidence to the contrary, we owe it to other people to take their words at face value. If we value honesty, integrity, and truth-seeking, we owe it to the world to ask what those words mean.
WHAT ARE EMOTIONS ANYWAYS?
Emotion is an energetic horse that, wild and rampant, brings us all to grief
And Reason must constrain to keep on course, establishing command and being its chief. Yet Reason by itself is hard and cold, lacking Emotion's fires to inflame
That passion and affection which draw gold from cruder ore, which is our human aim.
—Alan Nordstrom (from “Reconciliation”)
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The Bible writers spoke as if God has emotions, and most Christians through history have spoken and behaved as if this were true. But to understand what that means, you have to understand what emotions are. And that requires a small excursion into the history of psychology and the budding field of brain science.
We humans have feelings about feelings. By this I don't just mean that we like or dislike specific emotions—I like falling in love, or I hate being depressed—I mean that we have feelings about the whole idea of emotions, and our feelings about feelings have a long history. After a dark age of authority and dogma and religious fervor, the Enlightenment made rationality supreme. Reason, coupled with empiricism, demonstrably led to advances in knowledge and technology that had been impossible when critical inquiry was suppressed or discouraged. In this context, scholars convinced themselves that emotions were a liability.
By the twentieth century, schools of cognitive and behavioral psychology argued that we could understand (and heal) human beings without paying any attention whatsoever to the affective (the “emotional”) dimensions of life. Ironically, this hyperrationality probably was driven in part by a gut-level distaste for the untamed “female” quality of emotions. In other words, it was driven by an unacknowledged emotion, a sublimated, sexist version of “big boys don't cry.” We now know it to be based on falsehood.
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Cognition without emotion doesn't get us very far. Damage to emotion centers in the brain can mean that even intelligent people can't learn from their mistakes, and they make harmful social and fiscal decisions.
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In his book
Descartes’ Error
, neurologist Antonio Damasio describes one patient who can gather and analyze information almost endlessly without it leading to a preference. For a decision to be made, all of that reason and information needs to create a valence, a positive feeling that privileges one option over others that then directs action.
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As psychologist Marlene Winell has put it: imagine going into a Baskin Robbins and having to choose one of the thirty-one ice cream flavors by rational analysis.
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In fact, this is one of the primary functions of emotion—when we are presented with choices, it guides us toward one among many options.
The basic point I am making is that, in humans, emotions are neither a liability nor some superfluous fluff like the wings on an angel. They are practical mental processes that serve a purpose. And since the God of the Bible is described as having emotions, this fact alone raises some interesting questions. What exactly are emotions? How do they work? What are they for? And how do these details relate to our notions about God?
EMOTIONS DEFINED
Let's start with a definition.
Emotions are evolved, functional feedback processes that serve the well-being of sentient, mobile animals, and social animals in particular.
Consider the parts of this definition.
1) Evolved—Emotions have been subject to selective pressures on our ancestors and therefore can be assumed to increase reproductive success.
2) Functional—Emotions have a practical purpose (or several) in the service of surviving and thriving.
3) Feedback Processes—Emotions are a means of representing information about a changing internal and external context.
4) Sentient and Mobile—Emotions have practical value
only
for creatures that are aware and able to change or move in response to external conditions.
5) Social—Emotions are particularly useful for communal species.
Furthermore, emotions have a physical component, a psychological component, and a behavioral component. Anger, for example, triggers the release of catecholamines like adrenaline. Heart rate accelerates, and blood is directed away from digestion and toward the limbs in preparation for action. Muscles get tense. The object of anger becomes a consuming focus and may well end up on the receiving end of aggressive action. Different physical, psychological, and behavioral components together make up each emotion, and researchers use them to measure and categorize emotional reactions.
WHAT ARE EMOTIONS FOR?
Emotions function as a motivational system. In a very real sense, all human emotions can be thought of as forms of pleasure and pain: they are all either appealing or aversive. We are motivated to seek them or avoid them. As Jeremy Bentham said in his
Introduction to the Principles of Morals:
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.…They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think. In this we are like other sentient beings. All creatures that experience pleasure and pain are motivated to seek the former and avoid the later.
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Affective scientists say that emotion is key in three kinds of processes that help animals, including humans, to survive and thrive.
1.
Adaptation.
Adaptation means being able to respond appropriately to changes in the environment around you. If a saber-toothed tiger shows up at the entrance to your cave, the emotion of fear directs all your focus and energy toward the threat. It prepares your body for a fight. If a husband starts flirting with his neighbor, jealousy may motivate his wife to monitor or block their contact. If a Norwegian farmer feels the first flakes of snow on his face, hemay feel a surge of anxiety thatmakes him hurry to chop more wood or get the animals securely sheltered.
2.
Social Signaling.
Ethologists, meaning specialists in animal behavior, and social psychologists say that in communal species like humans, a second core function of emotions is social coordination.
We
know this because emotions correlate with very overt, consistent, and (to members of our own species) readable body postures and facial expressions that don't appear to serve any purpose other than communication. In a wolf, bared fangs may communicate irritation or may establish dominance. Bowing or tail wagging may signal submission. An animal that can't read these social/emotional signals is likely to do poorly from a reproductive standpoint.
Among humans, our very elaborate control over food production, shelter, health, and so forth requires an equally elaborate social dance. Without emotional signaling it would be impossible for us to have achieved our current level of technological and economic complexity and population density. A child's distress engages us to provide food or tend an injury or seek a distant parent. A friend's hope motivates us to frequent her new business. As Darwin said in
chapter 3
of
The Descent of Man
, “Those communities which included the greatest numbers of the most sympathetic members would flourish best and rear the greatest numbers of offspring.”
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3. Self-Regulation.
Self-regulation is the maintenance of your own homeostasis and health. Some scholars use the term “homeostatic emotions” to describe states like fatigue and hunger that provide feedback on the internal condition of our bodies, but the need to maintain equilibrium is broader than that. Feeling wretched outside in the Seattle rain motivates my chickens to huddle in a window-well to preserve body heat. Dissatisfaction with his job got a friend to make changes and start planning an exit strategy. A sense of emotional suffocation moved another friend to leave her relationship.
Our basic emotional system evolved long before the higher-order reasoning processes, and the two function in very different ways. Emotional processing is faster and more diffuse than rational processing. It activates many body systems—muscles, breathing, blood flow, thoughts, digestion, and more—simultaneously. It creates an orchestrated whole-body response, and the actual conscious “feelings” are just one part of the mix. To put it in the language of evolutionary psychology, “[t]he richly textured representations we experience as feeling constitute our conscious access to a high-bandwidth system of computational devices and program interfaces that amalgamate valuation information with other representations to guide decision making and to recalibrate decisions in an ongoing way.”
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Got that?
Reasoning is more systematic. It allows us to incorporate information that emotions would simply miss—numeric data, for example. Also, reasoning is more flexible than affect. It allows us to adjust to new experiences and situations. Remember, our instincts and emotions were shaped by our ancestral environment and early history. When the present situation doesn't match these, intuition and emotion can lead us astray, so reasoning becomes particularly important as a corrective mechanism, a backup system for checking and averting mistakes.
But even though our emotions may pit themselves against our own interests at times, that doesn't mean emotions should be taken out of the equation. Emotions and reason complement each other. Too little emotion leads to paralysis. Too much floods us, and the emotion itself drives behavior. Moderate levels of emotion play an advisory role and help us to distill information down into a decision.
HOW DO EMOTIONS OPERATE?
The reason that an emotional reaction can happen faster than rational processing is that it literally bypasses the cerebral cortex, the part of our brain that manages conscious thought. That is why we use terms like “trusting your gut” or “gut instinct.” And yet, the brain can't be divided easily into evolutionary layers like reptilian, mammalian, and neocortex, as once was thought.
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In recent years fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) has become a popular tool of neuroscientists. Experimental subjects can be put in an MRI machine and then given cognitive tasks, and researchers can actually see which parts of their brains light up. Imaging of this sort confirms research that has been done with head-injured patients. It shows that the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala play a crucial role in the experience and expression of emotion and, consequently, in decision making.
The field of affective neuroscience has grown and changed so rapidly that for an outsider to the field it can be difficult to keep track of scholars’ best understanding of which parts of the brain regulate what. What is clear in all of this is that emotions are situational appraisals that guide the reactions of physical creatures to the world around them. Just like our limbs and internal organs, emotions are integrated into our bodies. Given external cues, emotion sets off changes (mostly unconscious) in whatever body systems are relevant. Digestion, hearing, muscle tone, cognitive frames, sexual arousal—any of these and more can be called into action. Descartes's great error was that he thought mind and body were two separate entities. In fact they are an interdependent whole, a fully integrated system.