Abiding astonishment

In the book God's Presence In History, Martin Buber is quoted as saying this:

The concept of miracle which is permissible from the historical approach can be defined at its starting point as an abiding astonishment. The ... religious person ... abides in that wonder; no knowledge, no cognition, can weaken his astonishment.

This passage gets at what I think is a very important thread in the tangled ball of yarn that is religion: the abiding awe--or astonishment--that comes when we contemplate the question of why there is something rather than nothing. That there is anything at all is a wondrous fact, and no amount of reflecting upon that fact dampens its exhilarating effect on us, or lessens its mysteriousness.

Moreover, note how this "question of existence"--the question of why there is something rather than nothing, of why there should be anything at all--is framed. To talk of "there being something" or "there being anything" is to talk in maximally general terms about the world. We are not expressing abiding astonishment that there is this or that particular thing; it is not that we experience awe because the world is the way it is as opposed to some other less desirable possible arrangement. The source of our astonishment, in other words, is not that we inhabit this or that possible world, but that there are possible worlds. We are celebrating and wondering at the fact that existence exists.

To even conceptualize the world in such a maximally general way requires, I think, a non-trivial feat of imagination. It means really apprehending, in one moment, the all of everything. It is a dizzying experience, and also a frightening one, because apprehending the all of everything naturally leads one to think of the absence of the all of everything--of utter, abyss-like nothingness.

These sensations of dizzying exhilaration on the one hand and utter terror on the other find their religious expression, I think, in the various sensations that God causes in men: the abiding astonishment, the bottomless terror. In religion, humanity's concerns surrounding a maximally general conception of the world--surrounding, in other words, our conception of existence as such--is anthropomorphized, bringing this cluster of difficult and troubling questions into a framework that any human can easily interface with. The question of existence, so elusive before, is now no more difficult to access at a superficial level than some surly authority figure: it walks, it talks, it commands, it emotes, it does stuff in the world (like part oceans).

Of course, many people's conception of God is more refined than a bearded man sitting up in the clouds. If you ask ten different people what their conception of God is, you will often receive ten different answers, each one varying in its degree to which God is conceived as a human-like being or capable of affecting human affairs. However, insofar as God is a window to the abiding astonishment that there is something rather than nothing, all conceptions of God (that are not flatly pantheistic) are flawed--or at least potentially very confusing--because God is a particular thing, and the moment you veer away from a maximally general conception of the world you also veer away from the topic of existence as such. It seems to me that while it is quite possible that a religious person with a sophisticated outlook could be experiencing abiding astonishment at basically the same thing as me but with theological rather than secular/philosophical/analytical window dressing, it is more likely that the God-concept--with all of its anthropomorphic trappings--has led him down a false path to a sort of existential idolatry, where what is generating awe and astonishment is not the higher-order, maximally general conception of the all of everything, but a lower-order conception of a particular possible world: specifically, the possible world in which a being "God" exists that has all manner of amazing and superlative properties.