We often associate the sense of helplessness we feel when facing questions too vast for human comprehension with the concept of “God.” Religions, including Christianity, often label the bewilderment felt at these dead ends as “frustration before God.” However, we must take a step back and ask a cold, hard question: Why must that vastness be “God”? Is this perhaps a forced logical conclusion—a product of deep-seated religious bias or ego-inflation?
The Convenient Label of the “God of the Gaps”
The history of humanity is a history of naming the “unknown.” When we didn’t understand lightning, we needed the wrath of Zeus; when we couldn’t explain the origin of the universe, we needed the card of a Creator. Even though modern science has reclaimed many mysteries, there still exist “macro-discourses” that remain unexplained—the edge of the universe, the beginning of time, the origin of consciousness. Religion takes this “gap” where human intellect fails to reach and plasters the name “God” over it. Cynically speaking, however, this may be a lazy conclusion. Attributing the awe of the cosmos and primordial mysteries to a personal “God” is no different from getting stuck on a complex equation and handing in an answer sheet that says, “the rest is God’s will.”
Vastness is Merely Vastness
The fact that the universe is expanding, that space-time warps beyond a black hole, and that a primordial spark existed billions of years ago is inherently overwhelming. Feeling small in the face of this magnitude is a perfectly natural phenomenon. But is it necessary to paint over this with emotional and religious interpretations like “frustration” or “submission”? Imbuing vastness with personal meaning—believing that this entity is watching me or that I must be broken before it—might actually be a mutation of “humanity’s latent ego-inflation,” a desire to be the protagonist of the universe. After all, imagining a God who is interested in me (even if only to break me) is more comforting than facing an indifferent and cold set of cosmic laws.
What Remains Once the Frame is Stripped Away
What remains if we completely strip away the religious frame of “God”? A much more transparent and honest “existential awe” remains. Questions about who I am and where this vast order came from are sublime enough without borrowing the dogmas of a specific religion. In fact, when we delete the word “God,” we become able to view the world more objectively. It is not a frustration characterized by surrender to someone, but rather the humility of an explorer standing before a vast ocean of truth.
Closing Thoughts
In the end, the phrase “reaching God and falling into frustration” may be nothing more than a translation of the “vast unknown” into the language of religion. While some may call it God and kneel, others will call it the mystery of the cosmos and pick up a telescope. The important thing is the fact that we are standing before that vastness, not an obligation to attach a specific religious label to it. Even without forcing the concept of God into the picture, the world is sufficiently mysterious, and we can be sufficiently humble. Perhaps true intellectual honesty lies in discarding the pre-filled answer sheet of “God” and enduring the bewilderment of that overwhelming vastness exactly as it is.
The Intellectual Property of Min Jin-sung
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