The Transcendence of God and the Ontological Nose
“He who planted the ear, does he not hear?
He who formed the eye, does he not see?”
Psalm 94:9
“God is spirit”
Words of Jesus, John 4:24
Consider the nose. We are all familiar with its form and function. It is a part of our respiratory system. With it we can smell flowers. But it also serves another less apparent purpose. It is evidence that God does not have a body.
God is an eternal spirit. This is his essence. Not only does he exist but he is the source of all existence, of all being. He is the creator. So everything that is, he made. He has never not existed. He is timeless. Without beginning and without end. Let us assume, for the sake of a thought experiment, that he has always had a nose. Not an acquired or created nose but a nose that is a part of his essential eternal nature. A timeless nose. At some point (this is awkward to state because God created time and is not in time), he had to ask himself “Why do I have this bodily projection with two passages in it? Why does it do the things that it does? I’ve just always had it.” The nose is ontologically co-existent with God. It is a complex piece of equipment. It has contouring and turbinates and little filtering hairs and all manner of built in capabilities. But the cosmos had not been created yet. Atmospheric gases had not been created yet. Proteins to form mucous had not been created yet. Atoms and molecules, for that matter, had not been created yet. Nor flowers to smell. God is Spirit so he had no need for these physical things. So the nose had no purpose. It had just been always there.
So one day god decided to make a man. And he decided to give the man this same bodily projection, this nose, and also give it a purpose. So God created atoms and gases and proteins. He made the man so he would require atmospheric gases to live. And gravity and metabolism and all manner of forces and principles to make the nose functional and purposeful. One might say that the entire creation was made to accommodate this nose. And God said to himself, “Now, this thing has meaning.” God gave the nose purpose and meaning but he always wondered why he had the nose in the first place.
This same scenario can be applied to the idea that God supposedly had a body as a part of his essence. What this scenario does is simply get the cart before the horse. The nose existed before it had any purpose. It categorizes God as created instead of creator. Critics might quickly reply that God had the nose because there was a spirit atmosphere and spirit gases and God breathed these spirit gases to survive. This means that God was contingent on something external to himself to stay alive. This is not a description of a necessary eternal spirit but of a created being. This is a mapping of the human condition onto God. It is a lèse-majesté. The idea that God is not dependent on a nose does not mean that God cannot “smell.” His sensory capabilities are infinite. He created odors and he knows everything about them, including how they would smell to the human nose. He just does not need a human nose to do this.
But what about Psalm 94:9? This is the kind of scripture that led Herbert W. Armstrong (HWA) to believe that God had a body. But it is human talk for humans to understand. What is technical for us in the created realm is allegory for God in the essential eternal realm. God does not have ears for the same reason he does not have a nose. He is not limited by waves propagated through a gaseous atmosphere that would strike a tympanum and activate hammer and anvil and be converted into the sensation of sound. We can be thankful that he is not limited by hearing as we know it because he would not be able to sort out the myriad of prayers directed to him every day. Those prayers would not even be transmitted across the vacuum of space. David used the term “hear” in Psalm 94 because that was what David understood and what would communicate to his readers. It is just an allegory for God’s actual absolute capability to sense and know all things. His ability to know transcends all physics and physiology based human sensory systems – hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, seeing. Another way of saying this is that God is not dependent on his own creation.
I do not believe that Herbert W. Armstrong intended to diminish God by teaching erroneously that God has a body. I think he just took anthropomorphisms at face value and moved on. HWA has left us no carefully reasoned exegesis that deals with the issue of anthropomorphism. He never addressed the topic of why if God had a human-like body, it did not create crippling limitations for him as he sustained the cosmos. And the idea of an anthropomorphic God was never challenged by members of the WCG so as to lead to a review and revision of the topic. The idea just never received the attention that it deserved because of circumstance.
It is blatantly obvious that the human body was designed to function in an earthly environment - an environment that came into existence when God created the cosmos. Why would God possess in his eternal essence a body that is earth adapted before there was an earth? Was his body designed for some environment? Who then designed his body for that environment? And who designed the environment? Was there something external to God that was already in existence – an environment that required a nose? If that is true, then God is not the creator of all things. Someone else greater than God was in the picture. This line of argument is called reductio ad absurdum.
Submitted by Neo
