Well, is there? I myself would be very happy to answer with an emphatic negative. Temperamentally, it would suit me well enough to settle for what this world offers, and to write off as wishful thinking, or just the self-importance of the human species, any notion of a divine purpose and a divinity to entertain and execute it. The earth's sounds and smells and colors are very sweet; human love brings golden hours; the mind at work earns delight. I have never wanted a God, or feared a God, or felt under any necessity to invent one. Unfortunately, I am driven to the conclusion that God wants me.
God takes a hand as history's compere, turning it into a soap opera, with ham actors, threadbare lines, tawdry props and faded costumes, and a plot which might have been written by Ted Willis himself. God arranges the lighting - Spark of Sparks - so that all the ravages of time, like parched skin, decaying teeth and rotting flesh, show through the makeup, however lavishly it may be plastered on. Under God's eye, tiny hoarded glories - a little fame, some money...Oh Mr M! how wonderful you are! - fall into dust. In the innermost recesses of vanity one is discovered, as in the last sanctuaries of appetite; on the highest hill of complacency, as in the lowest burrow of despair. One shivers as the divine beast of prey gets ready for the final spring; as the shadow lengthens, reducing to infinite triviality all mortal hopes and desires.
There is no escape. Even so, one twists and turns. Perhaps Nietzsche was right when he said that God had died. Progressive theologians with German names seem to think so: Time magazine turned over one of its precious covers to the notion. If God were dead, and eternity had stopped, what a blessed relief to one and all! Then we could set about making a happy world in our own way - happy in the woods like Mellors and his Lady Chatterley; happiness successfully pursued, along with life and liberty, in accordance with the Philadelphia specification; happy the Wilson way, with only one book to take to the post office - one book, one happiness; happy in the prospect of that great Red Apocalypse when the State has withered away, and the proleteriat reigns for ever more. If only God were D.H. Lawrence, or Franklin D. Roosevelt, or Harold Wilson, or Karl Marx!
Alas, dead or alive, he is still God, and eternity ticks on even though all the clocks have stopped.
One of the most effective defensive systems against God's incursions has hitherto been organized religion. The various churches have provided a refuge for fugitives from God - his voice drowned in the chanting, his smell lost in the incense, high purpose obscured and confused in creeds, dogmas, dissertations and other priestly pronunciamentos. In vast cathedrals, as in little conventicles, or just wrapped in Quaker silence, one could get away from God.
Unfortunately, this defensive system has now proved to be a Maginot Line, easily by-passed by hordes of happiness pursuers, some in clerical collars and even mitres, joyously bearing a cornucopia of affluence, and scattering along their way birth pills, purple hearts and other goodies - a mighty throng whose trampling feet clear a path as wide as a motorway, along which God can come storming in.
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