Jerry L Martin, Ph.D., D.H.L. is former Chair, Department of Philosophy, University of Colorado at Boulder and Acting Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities. He is currently a contributor to the Good Men Project and coordinator of the Theology Without Walls Project at the American Academy of Religion.
Disease, disaster, aging, death are essential aspects of suffering. “We” live in a physically vulnerable world. That is the essential condition that makes life serious. That is what is wrong with some of these afterlife books.
“They portray worlds without suffering.”
There would be no point.
Go back to My loneliness. Feel it along with Me. The universe has exploded into being, and I scramble to order it. Then there are long eons, though remember that “long” doesn’t mean exactly the same to Me.
The following came to me as God’s experience: “I am dwelling in the vast loneliness. It is the loneliness of a huge figure who does not know He is alone, since the idea of others has not yet appeared, so it is just this huge unexplained emptiness.”
I was beside myself. I had reluctantly given up my happy agnosticism—and for this? I had higher expectations. “Lord, that doesn’t sound like much of a god.”
You are diverting yourself from the task of describing My life because of fears that you will say something wrong and embarrassing. Don’t let your fears guide you. Just listen to Me and dwell within My heart and tell My story from that vantage point.
However disappointing, the voice was still authoritative. I relaxed and, once again, was taken back to the Creation, in (for me) uncomfortably anthropomorphic language.
I am awake. I rise and shrug off the cramps of night. I stretch my arms, move my feet. It is good to be alive. I look at the world, matter, around me. Dead. Nothing there. I am ready for action, for interaction, but there is nothing. Just whirls and splashes and explosions.
Matter has a subjective side, a “within,” that subliminally experiences its surroundings, but that is too limited to interact with, too limited to be satisfying. It is like the story of the tar baby—you can poke it but you do not get much of a response. The Mayan myth of making men out of clay and wood is not far off.
In Popul Vuh, the Mayan creation story, God aims to make men who can “walk and talk and pray articulately.” He first tries making them of wood and then of clay, and finds those don’t work very well.
So I infuse My spirit into matter, as if trying to blow life into it. (Like blowing bubbles) I blow and blow molecules, complex molecules, the building blocks of life.
This was a meaningful image even if anthropomorphic. Even for scientists, the origins of life—even the answer to “what is life?”—is a profound mystery. If there is a God, then surely He would be part of that story, and “blowing life into it” might be about as precise as anything.
“But why did it take God so long—millions of years—to develop life?”
Long? It was the twinkling of an eye. Time is much more relative than you imagine. Those millions of years were no longer than the first six milliseconds of the universe.
“Do you need the world for completion or does the world need You?”
Both. Neither of us is complete or perfect in ourselves. I can only develop a self-consciousness and hence become a Person by interacting with the world and hence with people.
For the first time, the dim outline of an overall story was emerging. If we and God develop together, in interaction with one another, then the drama of history and of individual lives begins to make sense. We are not standing still; we are moving forward together.
I had been told how early human beings first started making marks that represented this or that – the beginnings of language.
“And this helped them to think about those things?”
For the first time, thought can be detached from objects. Plans can become abstract, long-term, not just emergent possibilities inherent in situations, as they are for animals. The response to other creatures can be evaluative, normative. It becomes possible to notice that a particular action falls short of the best or right action, that a particular human being falls short of the ideal human being.
“Zeus had changed into Eros when about to create,” writes the early Greek thinker Pherecydes, and, “having composed the world from the opposites, he led it into agreement and peace and sowed sameness in all things, and unity that interpenetrates the universe.”
“It is an arresting image, Lord, Zeus changing into Eros in order to bring opposites into a unity. Was Pherecydes inspired?”
No, he was not inspired. The particular passage is insightful, however. It reflects the dynamic in the universe, in being, the dialectic of otherness and sameness. There is sameness in all things and I put it there. It is equivalent to order. Otherwise things would fall apart. A similar image is centripetal and centrifugal—there need to be forces of attraction and forces of repulsion.
“I understand that, if the gravitational pull were just slightly stronger, all the galaxies would collapse into a single lump. And, if it were the slightest bit weaker, nothing would hold together. Lord, could gravity, if this makes sense, be a kind of love or an expression of love?”
Yes, love exists at all levels, just as spirit or soul exists at all levels. At the physical level, it is things like gravity. At the level of human personality, it is integrity; it is the “transcendental unity of apperception” for consciousness (personality). It is institutions and mores for society, balance and harmony for art, and so forth.
Consciousness developed very slowly. The first glimmer is found in the lowest molecules, in their ability to interact with, to respond to, their environment. Whitehead and Teilhard are on the right track in this regard. (Leibniz is not.)
I had to look again at these thinkers to see what God was getting at. Rejecting the mind-nature dualism, the twentieth-century philosopher-mathematician Alfred North Whitehead held that, even at the micro level, every event is a pulse of existence, feeling and responding to its environment. These “prehensions” are not so much states as vectors, arrows pointing to connections with the surrounding world. The Jesuit scientist-philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin spoke of the “within” of things, their interiority, which “appears at the heart of beings”: “Co-extensive with their Without, there is a Within to things.” In every part of the universe, “the exterior world must inevitably be lined at every point with an interior one.” By contrast, the seventeenth century philosopher-mathematician G.W. Leibniz believed that everything in the universe was made of elementary particles that were not matter or energy, but minds, centers of consciousness, each of which internally mirrors all the others. In short, Whitehead and Teilhard believed that physical (or psycho-physical) nature has levels of awareness—and they were on the right track—whereas Leibniz held that there is no physical nature other than points of consciousness.
As God went on, He sounded a lot like Teilhard.
What happens is that reactions have an internal dimension—responding to the environment, the molecule begins rearranging its internal parts and configurations and processes. This is the beginning of interiority. Ultimately, interiority involves the second-order process of monitoring and directing inner processes. But, even at the beginning, prior to the emergence of second-order processes, there is an emerging consciousness. To be conscious is not the same as and does not require self-consciousness. It can be very dim and limited and still be consciousness, because something new and remarkable has arisen—the pre-sentient and then sentient awareness of the environment. Don’t worry at this point about what is meant by “pre-sentient” awareness. Your understanding is necessarily anthropocentric, using human consciousness as the standard by which to understand all forms of consciousness.
Remember that I love you—I love all human beings—without reservation. Ideally, you would love yourself as I love you, as I loved Jesus, for example. But that is not normally possible for human beings, because there are many obstacles.
“But it is possible for a few?”
For some, yes. I have blessed them with the ability to transcend those limitations. They can love themselves fully, and this permits them to love others.
God was telling me about His interaction with the earliest animals, long before homo sapiens.
It is mainly an instinctual unselfconscious rapport that we have. But (I feel) a great excitement at the process of life and evolution itself.
“Why isn’t that enough?”
In a sense it is. Animals do have uniqueness. Each animal is distinct, has its own soul. But they lack self-awareness, and that is true even of cats and dogs and apes. You can interact with them but there is no second-order reflection, hence a very truncated sense of time—just a sense of temporal motion, of passage from an immediate moment-just-passed to a next moment anticipated. And even that cannot be thought about, represented symbolically or made available to self-consciousness.
So I cannot develop solely through interacting with them. It is static, inert. We just are together. I could not become a Person without there being other persons. The personal is essentially interpersonal. Like a child who first lives in an undifferentiated world, in which other people are merely contents of his or her own oceanic flow of consciousness, I needed to separate Myself from other persons. And so I created mankind.
“Lord, how will I get myself heard?”
God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher – is the true story of a philosopher’s conversations with God. Dr. Jerry L. Martin, a lifelong agnostic. Dr. Martin served as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Colorado philosophy department, is the founding chairman of the Theology Without Walls group at AAR, and editor of Theology Without Walls: The Transreligious Imperative. Dr. Martin’s work has prepared him to become a serious reporter of God’s narrative, experiences, evolution, and autobiography. Additionally Dr. Martin has many scholarly publications, and has testified before Congress on educational policy. He has appeared on “World News Tonight,” and other television news programs.
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Listen to this on God: An Autobiography, The Podcast– the dramatic adaptation and continuing discussion of the book God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin.
One day he had an occasion to pray. To his vast surprise, God answered- in words. Being a philosopher, he had a lot of questions, and God had a lot to tell him.