God: Personal or Impersonal

I'm in an ongoing, friendly discussion with a very good friend about whether God is personal or impersonal.

He and I look around us and draw different conclusions. He looks at an eagle catching a fish and observes that for the eagle, this is good. For the fish, this is bad. Since something had to die for something else to live, he concludes, whatever God is, God is amoral. My friend sees God somewhat like electricity --- an impersonal force.

I look around and see that things cooperate: seasons, night, day, weather, everything in my car that makes it run. If anything in our eco-system goes wonkety, other things go wonkety --- just like the human body. The human body is an amazingly intricate creation that depends on everything working together, cooperating.

When I look at things around me, I see intelligence behind them. To me, intelligence infers a sense of self, and therefore a sense of personal-ness.

God is that which, even when we stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

I think when we're on top, so to speak, doing well within-and-of-ourselves, it's easy to believe in an impersonal God. We don't need a personal God from that vantage point.

When our world gets turned upside down, an impersonal God doesn't salve the human soul. Only a personal God does that.

Is God personal or impersonal? Truthfully, there's no way to know. Anything we say is an opinion. Perhaps the way we answer the question says more about us than it does about God.

There is one thing, though, of which I'm convinced, we do become like the god we believe in.