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“Any religion that does not allow for this aspect of My presence is missing something.”

October 30, 2025

It sounded as if there were something true in polytheism. Abigail’s father had also been a philosophy professor and I married into his library, which included Martin P. Nilsson’s Greek Popular Religion, a classic on ancient Greek polytheism.

According to Nilsson, anything that had potency or an aura was regarded as holy. Spirits lurked inside striking features of the landscape such as trees, forests, lakes, and mountains. River crossings and cave entrances would be marked with stones or statues.

“Were these valid responses to You, Lord?”

You lump them all together.

We would have to take them one by one. You see them as generic types of actions. I see them as specific communications or acknowledgements. One person looked at a stream and saw the current of My energy running through it and marked the spot in homage. Another was superstitious and marked the spot for good luck.

Some were fearful and thought they might drown crossing if they did not place a token on the bank. Some actually stopped and prayed or meditated or sang a song of praise. These are very different kinds of communications, with different degrees of reality.

If your question is whether streams and mountains and so forth do in fact embody My presence, the answer again is not so simple.

Of course, everything embodies My presence and it is always a good thing when someone pauses to acknowledge that. But some things do embody it more. There is truth to the sense that I am more distinctively present in aspects of energy and force than in matter that is relatively more inert. We would have to go into physics, into the physics of the future, to discuss that in detail.

At particular times, I am especially present in a certain place or to a certain person.

It is not mere superstition that causes (people to) pause before the fact of death, for example. That is a moment and place of particular interaction between Me and the deceased and their survivors. However, there are some dramatic elements of nature, such as lightning, that might be appropriate symbols for divine power but are not in fact times and places of special presence or interaction.

But, in general, did polytheism respond to a divine reality? Yes, it did.

And any religion that does not allow for this aspect of My presence—My presence in nature, in objects, in places, and in forces—is missing something.

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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.

He was a lifelong agnostic, but 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.

“With life, spirit comes into play.”

October 30, 2025

With life, comes spirit:

For millions of years, before there was life, there was just God and a barren universe.

“You felt all alone?”

Yes, I wanted more. In retrospect, the inanimate years feel very lonely. The emergence of life is a delight. With life, spirit comes into play.

Wonderful to see amoeba, moss, and so forth. The frogs (and other creatures), each with a soul and personality, each in a sense in tune with God. I can play with the animals, “walk among them.” I love their myriad forms. I am not alone anymore.

The creatures that began to stir on the earth are amazing, more amazing than anything that had yet occurred in creation.

They move on their own, they have “internal principles of motion” as Aristotle said, have dramatic lives—even the worms and fishes.

There is birth, growth, death, mating, offspring, colonies and flocks, emergent social orders—ideality as well. There is telos and purpose, success and failure, standards of perfection and imperfection.

And, over time, further developments in the species, a most amazing, creative ramifying of the evolutionary ladder.

New species emerge that could not have been imagined before. Your paleontology tells the story: the first horses could easily fit into the palm of a hand, and so forth. Can you imagine the spectacle?

“Yes, I think I can.”

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. In addition to scholarly publications, Dr. Martin 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.

He was a lifelong agnostic, but 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.

The Parts Can Communicate with the Whole

October 16, 2025

“Lord, I feel you want me to do more of the mystical stuff, ‘entering’ You and so forth.”

Yes, and you can remove the scare quotes. There is nothing strange about it. That is how the universe is. The parts can communicate with the whole. It is no more mystical or mysterious than your ability to move your arm.

Actually, since Descartes introduced a sharp mind-body distinction, how the mind moves the body has been a philosophical mystery. But, in actual life, it is not. The parts can communicate with the whole and vice versa. But I had never thought of the universe that way.

I continued to have experiences of divine indwelling and partial union with God. Now that I am used to them, they do seem similar to getting lost in an experience. God mentioned music as one example, and we all know that feeling. Sometimes you are not something separate, standing back and noting the music—you are immersed in it with your whole frame, without reserve. However, the more radical, “dissolution of self” mystical experiences—I may have had them two or three times—make me uneasy and I avoid them.

The Creative Spiritual Edge

October 15, 2025

The Creative Spiritual Edge

Buber was saved from the brink of suicide by reading Immanuel Kant. Unsolvable questions arise, Kant argues, from trying to reason about space and time as if they were characteristics of reality in itself. They are really just forms of our experience, he says. This reassuring view gave Buber “philosophical peace.”

There now came to Buber “an intuition of eternity,” not as endless time, but as “Being as such.” I moved deeply into myself to get some sense of what this might mean. I felt a great rushing, gushing, like a geyser, welling up inside me and rising up through all tiers of reality, an energy or life-force, creative and growing, but much more basic and undifferentiated than these terms would suggest, as if it were the very Being of these forces, running through the whole of reality. It rushed, expanded, created, grew not just outwardly but in a vertical dimension as well, from the primordial base up to the creative spiritual edge. It was, in some sense, erotic energy from bottom to top, with no level, not even the most elemental, ever eclipsed. The vision ended, I slumped back in my seat, breathing hard.

Einstein’s theory is child’s play.

October 2, 2025

Einstein’s theory is child’s play.

My nature, the true nature of the universe, of Being, and My relation to human beings, to their role and destiny, is complex. Einstein’s theory of relativity is child’s play by comparison. An adequate understanding cuts across some of the categories human beings find most natural, though they are really profoundly “unnatural” (and I mean that in the eerie sense). They are warped; they often represent disorders of the soul, distortions of Being.

I Too Can Only Grow Through Suffering

September 25, 2025

Karma is the Hindu idea that actions, both good and bad, have consequences for a person’s character and fate.

Human beings must learn a lesson. They are not in this life to sit in the lap of luxury. It is a challenge, a test. They can only grow through suffering. I too can only grow through suffering. The main suffering is through the consequences of their own actions. That is the most intense suffering, the kind of suffering that leads to suicide.

There Can Be No Love Without Difference

September 17, 2025

“Lord, Pherecydes also says the world was composed of opposites.”

There can be no love without difference, no harmony or balance without opposing items or forces, no magnetism without the magnet and its object, and so on.

Mystic merging is not quite right. You (people) need to live out your lives in relation to, in concert with Me, but it would serve no purpose, karmic or otherwise, for you to get lost in Me, like a drop of water in the sea.

I knew that I wanted to love Abigail, not to merge into her, or to have her merge into me. There is not just unity, but creative tension as well.

I am the medium through which man understands the world.

September 11, 2025

I understood what the point of interaction meant in the context of physical causation, of one billiard ball striking another, but here God seemed to be saying that He was the point of interaction—almost like the portal—through which we understood the world.

“Lord, what do You mean by point of interaction?”

I am the medium through which man understands the world.

“Is mind the medium?”

Yes.

“Lord, are You saying that, in addition to the human mind and the natural world, there is divine mind somehow essential to the act of understanding?”

The answer I received addresses, though in an unusual way, one of the deep mysteries of philosophy. How is it that consciousness relates to or “intends” an object such as the Liberty Bell? For example, what is it about a thought that makes it the thought of the Liberty Bell? The thought is “in your head” and the Liberty Bell is in Philadelphia. What “connects” them?

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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.

He was a lifelong agnostic, but 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.

“The Eternal Already had the Potential to be a Person.”

September 4, 2025

“Lord, what was there before? What motivates the act of creation?”

I received the following words and images which I recorded in my notes.

“A feeling of loneliness, of searching, reaching—not yet a Person. Expanding into the great emptiness of Nothing, which is ‘infinitely empty’ far beyond (far more empty than) empty spaces. ‘Who am I? What am I? Am I an I? What is an I?’ A chaotic feeling of the infinite rushing at the edges.”

“Lord, why did eternity ‘shatter’ in this way? Did the still, self-sufficient stuff explode?”

I received the sense: “Brittle, crystalline, too perfect, static, isolated, removed, alone, bored, incomplete. The eternal already had the potential to be a Person but could not do so without creating time.”

And I also got the feeling that God desperately wants to be understood.

If It Weren’t For the Honor of the Thing …

August 28, 2025

I remembered Abraham Lincoln’s story about the man who was tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail. “If it weren’t for the honor of the thing,” the man said, “I would rather have walked.” And I had seen the war movies, “You will have the honor of leading the assault.” Some honors aren’t worth it.

I did feel the honor. God was about to put His seal on this role for me, a role more suitable for a real Elijah. I felt a swell of pride, as I was being told this, and immediately the line went dead. Ego had broken the connection.