Opinion Sur Joven

The magazine editor’s question left me thinking for a moment. “Is there room for God in the Internet era?” My first attempted answer came from the logic of faith. We, believers, consider that, as the prophet Isaiah said, “the whole Earth is full of His glory”. So, if He is everywhere, how could there not be room for Him? From the traditional monotheistic viewpoint, at the beginning God (who is infinite in time and space) wondered if there was room for the world. This is a key paradox in the Jewish mystique. If God embraced it all (because He is infinite and His glory fills the world), then there would be no room for anything else. Ancient mystics answered that God, when creating the world, had to contract; otherwise, there would have been no room left for anything that was not Him: no space would have been enough. Instead, if there was a place immense enough to contain God, then God would no longer be God, because His nature is not to be able to be contained or limited.

But, notwithstanding all these dated philosophical notions, it occurred to me that the best way to find out whether there is room for God in the Internet era is to precisely ask the Net. Checking whether the Network of Networks has room for the King of Kings, as God is called both in Jewish and Christian sources. Google, that entity that is hard to define but sees and knows it all, showed 531 million sites where God can be found, if we use the word “God” for the search. If we use “Dios” (his name in Spanish), He appears in 72 million websites, always omitting similar or repeated results.

The question, then, is no longer whether there is room for God, but where we can find Him. And since I am a postmodern man, I needed no compass or maps to know where to start. Google Earth, Google Maps or a GPS system in any cell phone would help me find Him. But, much to my surprise, I ran into a message that read “Your search did not match any results”. That is, despite my hypothesis -that there is room for God in the Internet era- had been confirmed by Google, no one could help me find that place.

This is not new. Throughout history, many men searched for God, but very few (perhaps no one) were able to find Him. Albert Einstein used to say that “God does not play dice with the universe”. And although I do not know if that is true, I would dare to say He does play hide-and-seek with us. That is perhaps one of the clearest images I have of the Divine: God as someone who plays hide-and-seek to stimulate our desire to find Him and our sense of questing. A well-known rabbinic saying states that “no place is devoid of His presence”; however, I am affirming that, in these times -like in all other times-, it is hard for us to perceive Him.

This dichotomy related to the Divine is one of the strongest doubts in the life of any person of faith. Whoever believes faith is about certainty, actually has quite a weak faith. Certainties, as such, are refutable. At some moment of history, the belief that the world was flat and supported by turtles was a certainty. At some point of science, the certainty was that everything orbited the sun, and whoever said otherwise was at risk of having their head roll away like any other planet in the Milky Way. However, certainties have always been verifiable, and therefore questionable. Faith is an experience dominated by doubt, by the eternal quest of something we will never finally understand, because that is precisely Its nature.

To believe is to essentially doubt To believe is to surrender to an experience where we continuously face something modern man has always tried to be deprived of: mystery. Far from being a weakness derived from our imperfection, mystery is a sublime sensation that allows us to further understand our humanity. Perceiving mystery allows us to know we are incomplete, imperfect; to witness the fact that there is One who exists and we cannot see, but we can only perceive His works, His word and His creation. Thus, He disciplines our ego and allows us to be more conscious about our humanity.

In times when we can access almost anything through a click, in a dynamics where knowledge can be reached by any ‘user’ and any place of the world can be navigated mounted on a mouse, faith constantly reminds us that there is an impossibility to understand everything. Even if we can walk the streets of any place (including those we would not be able to visit unless virtually), some places cannot be visited even with the newest GPS.

But there is something else. The Internet era threatens humanity with the risk of isolation: in a world where we are all ‘connected’, our bonds are more likely to disappear. Relationships are reduced to contacts, and friendships to small rectangles on the side of our Facebook page. I would even dare to say we will soon be ready to present a new modern theorem (a sort of Pythagoras’ Theorem of the Google era) stating that the relationship between the amount of ‘friends’ in Facebook and the amount of friends in real life is inversely proportional.

Biblical prophets imagined times of redemption as those during which “Every man will sit under his own vine and under his own fig-tree”. These times we are living in, on the contrary, find each of us sitting in front of the screen of our personal computer. It is precisely in this context that faith is revealed as an immensely valuable tool to preserve those relationships between humans that are not meddled by technology. Religious experiences derived from faith are mostly communitarian and require real contact, not a virtual one. Therefore, the consequence of faith is the necessity of a communitarian life that, for now, cannot be replaced by online life. And even when this happens, even when at some point an Internet-based mass or virtual meditation appear, the man of faith will always have an advantage upon the Google world isolation: he who believes in God is never alone.

Illustration: Bárbara Dana

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