Different religions call God by different names: Yahweh, Allah and Jehovah among others. A family therapist and a Presbyterian clergyman, however, is going beyond these, and thinking of a time when God did not have a name at all.
William Morrow, a family and marriage therapist based in Florida, theorised that life was simpler back at a time when human beings did not have a name to call God yet.
"Of course, every religion has its own name for God: Yahweh, Allah. So I am thinking that there must have been a time when God didn't have a name, which probably made it simpler," he said in an article in The Gospel Herald.
Morrow—who also wrote the book "The Rain Doesn't Fall Straight Down: A Positive Slant on Marriage Relationships"—even implied that naming God could have led to some discord during ancient times.
"No religious wars, no theological debates. It would have been easier to focus on the spiritual connection to whatever force in the universe we just knew was there," he said.
Nevertheless, the therapist imagines a world without a name for God to be something of pure spirituality.
"Too bad we can't turn the clock of history back to the earliest human experience of the Great Mystery, where thoughts were not well-formed, and there were just bare-naked experiences," Morrow said.
He thinks before God was named, human beings just saw Him as a loving and benevolent force.
"Before God had a name, there was a universal yearning for the meaning of all that could be experienced. It's like developmental psychology/anthropology thrown back to its roots," he said.
While his statements are a bit abstract, Morrow has one thing he is sure of: that human beings are going to search for God no matter what.
"I think we humans are hard-wired for searching for truths beyond the five senses. It's just part of who we are," he said.
