Please help settle a score – my husband and I were having a debate over dinner at Denny’s.
Is there a difference between a deity and a higher power? My husband says no. I say yes.
When I Googled “meaning of higher power” there were some conflicting definitions. The first definition was pretty straightforward – “a god or divine being”. One point for my husband.
Then there was this definition:
At its core, a higher power is something that you believe is controlling the universe. It could be nature, the sun or moon, or you can even say the universe, itself. The key is that whatever you choose should be special and mean something personal to you. In the simplest terms, it’s a power greater than yourself.
Is that a point for me?
If there’s a difference between a deity and a higher power, does that mean an atheist can believe in a higher power?
I’m really curious – do any of you believe in a higher power?
My husband doesn’t believe in god but he doesn’t call himself an atheist either. He believes in energy and that all living things are connected. I’m skeptical but in a way it makes sense.
I’m not sure how this deity vs. higher power debate is going to turn out, but it does prove one thing – spirituality can be really messy and confusing. (Probably because most of it is bullshit.)
So tell me what you think – is there a difference between a deity and a higher power, and if there is, can an atheist believe in a higher power?
Don’t forget our infernal friends and allies – do lower powers count as deities? 😉
“is there a difference between a deity and a higher power, and if there is, can an atheist believe in a higher power?”
One of those questions where it very much depends on the definitions at hand.
I personally think an atheist can believe in anything that excludes gods, being a privative term as it is.
I note that there’s usually the implicit assumption that the term is restricted to sapient entities, so for example, the universe doesn’t count, the Sun doesn’t count. But they surely are both more powerful than people.
SF has a goodly number of examples of super-powerful entities that aren’t deities — e.g. Charlie Stross I think coined the term “weakly godlike” to refer to entities that are essentially able to manipulate reality around them in ways we humans can’t understand. The Culture series by Iain M. Banks has Minds, who are basically super-powerful artificial intelligences that are almost there.
(As per a previous post, one could claim Karma is such a power)
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I think is that the term is basically used to walk-back of the concept of deities, much as “intelligent design” is a walking-back of creationism.
The obfuscated version.
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“My husband doesn’t believe in god but he doesn’t call himself an atheist either. He believes in energy and that all living things are connected. I’m skeptical but in a way it makes sense.”
Oh, dear. I don’t want to upset you by dissing his ideas, but not believing in god is the very definition of an atheist.
It’s a bit like saying “I don’t smoke but I am not a non-smoker”.
As for “energy”, there’s a scientific definition of it, and it’s not what the wooists use. As is “force”, for that matter. As are “fields”. etc.
(“The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.”)
I think that in any language, words mean what the people mean when using such words.
That is, in theory I think there could be a few technical people for whom there could plausibly be some higher power that is not a deity, so in that sense, you could be correct. But I think in practice, 99.99% of people would agree with your husband that they are the same thing.
I think the root of the problem was deliberately created by theists trying to confuse the issue. I think the theists knew that it was weak to cast their argument only in terms of their deity, but that was their only argument. So they tried to pretend their argument was broader by pretending it applied to higher powers that were not deities. Even though, in practice, none existed.
In short, theists created confusion by creating a rhetorical false difference between terms that most people feel mean the same thing. So, while I think your point is logically valid, I also think it is not your fault that in this case I agree with your husband. Because lying theists invented the higher power category even though no real person ever uses that term for any non-deity they really believe in.
I “believe in” (or more properly, I accept as valid) the gravitational, strong, and electroweak forces that govern our universe, but I think only a god-believer would ever call those a higher power. That is, nobody uses the phrase for what THEY believe, only for what they ridicule others for believing. I don’t “believe” in science, I accept it, as I understand it.
My career field seems to attract (or create?) alcoholics, and over the past 30 years, I’ve gone to a lot of Alcoholics Anonymous sober anniversary celebrations with co-workers and become familiar with the group. In Alcoholics Anonymous, part of the mantra for the participants is to “submit to a higher power”. If that wasn’t clear enough, another mantra is “Let go and let god”. There’s all kinds of verbal tap-dancing around that fact, but it’s undeniable.
So, to agree with Bruce, in practice, “higher power” and “Christian God” are the same thing.
I’d take is a slightly different direction and suggest that the real distinguishing point, as John alluded to above, is a moral power. That is, something which directs people toward good actions or evil actions. Otherwise the question is rather moot, we know there are forces in the universe which could crush our planet easier than we could step on a cockroach.
So, I submit that the argument is really over whether there is a moral direction to the path of life. Whether morality could be directed by something outside of human ken. In a sense, that’s what I feel the root aspect of feeling spiritual is. That beauty, kindness, justice, caring, and helping others doesn’t just come from our inner selves, but is not only part of our societies and cultures, but extends beyond them to other creatures, the entire world, and by extension the universe itself.
I admit that I don’t believe it, morality appears to me to be historically rather fluid, but I can postulate scenarios where there is such a external source of morality and humanity just hasn’t listened very well.
Setting aside the far more difficult problem of what morality is, could there be a force in the universe which pushes people toward goodness? There is no physical evidence for such a force, but there are a lot of writings which suggest that such a force does exist. Does this force have to be conscious, like the usual depiction of deities? I don’t see why that would be a requirement. Gravity, a force we can measure, doesn’t appear to have any consciousness but it affects us all.
One important question is; would it require worship? One thing I many people seem to think, religious and atheist, is that deities require (nay demand!) worship. My understanding of most religions is that at the core the worshiping and prayer is about respect for the deity, not to meet some obscure need of the deity, or to charge up the deity like a faith battery. Worship acknowledges the strength of the deity, the power and pervasiveness of the deity. There is nothing which prevents people from making a public acknowledgement of the force of gravity; worshiping it, as it were. Making a intercessory prayer to gravity does seem a little silly.
Would it give demands to humanity and punish those who refuse to obey those commands? Again, it would depend on your point of view. Gravity certain makes demands on humanity, but it doesn’t actually punish people, the demands gravity make on people cannot be refused. Challenging the demands of gravity doesn’t make gravity upset, it’s not conscious and doesn’t care. Challenging the demands of gravity may cause pain simply because it is inescapable.
So, I believe you can postulate a ‘higher power’ which acts on the moral plane, affecting everything in the universe, nudging us toward truth and beauty, a gradient of good you could say, which is not conscious and not a deity. It wouldn’t care if individuals tried to defy it, it would exist nonetheless. It would not need to be worshiped, but acknowledging it’s presence might help people accept that it exists. Clearly it would not answer intercessory prayers.
However, there is no evidence for such a higher power. Both this hypothetical higher-power and deities are postulates with no evidence to support their existence. In that sense, there is no difference between this hypothetical higher-power and a deity. The attributes of a deity, whether a bearded man in the sky or a ibis-headed god of librarians, matters little compared to the overwhelming lack of evidence for their existence. The feature this higher-power and deities share, no evidence for their existence, dwarfs those differences (conscious or non-conscious, all-pervading or contained in a form) in how we define them.
Could an atheist believe in this version of a higher power, without any evidence that it exists? I suppose so. It rather depends on your definition of atheist. A strict definition of atheism would allow it, a broader definition might have trouble because one of the attributes assigned to deities is that they provide moral direction. An unproven, overarching, moral force in our universe is taking a single attribute of a deity and suggesting it exerts a force on everything in the universe. Which moves this idea adjacent to godhood, something a slightly broader definition of atheism than just the denial of deities would reject.
Bruce @3:
I don’t “believe” in science, I accept it, as I understand it.
I don’t really understand the reluctance of many atheists to use the word ‘belief’ in this context. If you are confident that science will continue to explain more and more about the universe, how is that not belief, or even faith? I suspect many atheists somehow see ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ as tainted by long association with theism. But they don’t have a monopoly on those words.
@5 “I don’t really understand the reluctance of many atheists to use the word ‘belief’ in this context. If you are confident that science will continue to explain more and more about the universe, how is that not belief, or even faith?”
Do they though? My grandfather was an atheist, and I think he believed that. I sometimes get the impression it’s the “new” (as in the old… and not the newer “A+”, or perhaps the current, or whatever…) generation of atheists that conflates “faith”, “belief”, “conjecture”, and “hypothesise”.
I believe in a higher power. Really glad I married her.
I dont believe in deities. I do believe in a higher power because I am one. As for faith, faith is the excuse people give for believing things when they dont have a good reason to believe it. If they had good reasons, they wouldnt need faith.
It’s the same thing, really. 12-Step Cultists like to make a distinction between the two in order to sucker in their victims, to push the idea that it’s “spiritual, not religious”, so I really don’t trust anyone who thinks a “higher power” isn’t a direct reference to a god.
I’ve only heard “higher power” used in the context of 12-step groups; and for them it means “whatever you can imagine as something greater than yourself that cares about you and wants you to recover.” It could be a deity, of course, or it could also be, say, the group you’re in, since a group of people helping you to recover is a power greater than your own power to do so alone. It’s a deliberately vague phrase meant to allow each person to choose/figure out/imagine their own meaningful “higher power,” rather than accept something that doesn’t work as well for them.
So you’re right on this: deities are merely a subset of all the available “higher powers.” Whether the whole concept is worth anything…that’s another question entirely.