creation Archives -

Being facing Being

January 29, 2026

I wondered what it could mean for “Being as such” to be a Person, a Thou, as surely, from my own experience, God is. Then it struck me that this rushing Stuff, this force of Being, is also the being of me. And I am a person. So why shouldn’t the rushing Stuff, the Being of—of what?—the World, of Being itself, be a Person writ large? I don’t mean the World merely in a physical sense, since my own being is not merely that of my body. Similarly, the Being that animates everything could be a Person.

Looking out the window at the passing trees, it struck me that their very leaves are full of Being as such, the Being that is also a Person, and that it made sense for them to be a Thou for me. And, more remarkably, for me to be a Thou for them. I felt that Being facing Being, not necessarily speaking but simply facing, is what personhood is.

“No, animals are not cruel …”

January 1, 2026

I had been asking God about the early stages of life.

Personality develops (think of your own pets) and intelligence, problem-solving, lives with continuous purpose and plans, individual recognition of one animal by another, life-long mates. Now I have not just a playpen, but a menagerie, a zoo, of my own, a private jungle where I can be Tarzan.

There is nothing wrong in this world.

“Aren’t animals sometimes vicious, sometimes cruel?”

No, animals are not cruel—their personalities have not developed to that point. Nothing (is) wrong. It is delightful, a joy. I love all the animals, and bear their suffering.

“There is a purpose but not an end point.”

November 13, 2025

“Lord, is there an aim, like perfecting the world or uniting us all into the Godhead?”

No, not exactly. There is a purpose but not an end-point. The notion of an end-point derives from the model of the human will and its desires, getting what it wants. The purpose of singing a song is not to get to the end.

There is no end-time. The purpose of eschatology is to portray something about the meaning of the world.

Eschatology denotes religious ideas about the final purpose or culmination of history.

There are endings to particular worlds, but they are not apocalyptic, any more than an individual death is.

Well, just when a meaningful pattern was emerging, a sense of direction to life and history, it ends, as T. S. Eliot says, “not with a bang but with a whimper.” History comes to nothing. I found this answer distressing, and Abigail was more upset than I was. One of the Jews’ gifts to the world is the very idea of history, not as a series of endless episodes or cycles, but as a progress, with a Beginning (the Creation) and a Grand Finale (the Coming of the Messiah). Abigail doesn’t even like movies without happy endings. And we weren’t talking about movies. As we saw it, we were talking about whether life had any meaning or purpose at all. This is a concern neither of us would let go.

“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.

________

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.

I Draw Man Forward . . .

August 21, 2025

What I had been told about Creation still bothered me and I was relieved when God started talking about the process of evolution.

“Lord, do You have to will creatures to evolve into homo sapiens or does it just happen by natural processes?”

That’s not a well-conceived question. It rests on a false dichotomy. Remember that nature is itself teleological, except it is much more complicated than that apparently simple statement. I provide—I am—the telos or purpose, and I follow the telos as well. However, I draw man forward to greater development in the very process of interacting with men (people). At the time of early man, I am not yet sure what is missing. I am not fully developed Myself yet, since I have not encountered beings who can call forth My full latent nature. For the moment, call it a dialectical evolution responding to My need for development.

Here and elsewhere, “man” has the older sense inclusive of both women and men.

Man is Important But so is the Rest of Creation

June 19, 2025

The previous prayer continued, but something I received later might be helpful here. I had been guided to read about evolution and animal behavior.

“Why read this, Lord?”

You need to understand—to have enough concepts to understand—My history with the world, including all forms of life. Part of the distortion in religions is they are homocentric (anthropocentric). Man is important, but so is the rest of creation. My history involves close interaction at every level. Every level is part of the healing, re-creation of the world, its unfolding, fulfillment.

“Consciousness is Quite a Miracle”

June 5, 2025

Life is at first of a very low level—something like bacteria and viruses—tiny bits of life—moss and slime.

I asked, with some edge, “Lord, did You interact in a personal way with moss and slime?”

It is better if you don’t interrupt with questions. Just listen. Questions can come later.

Remember that I am learning all the way. I do not know what the final product may be. Man, as he now exists, is not the final product—only the future will tell us, including Me, that. I feel My way, pulled forward by a felt telos or goal emergent in each step, the way an intellectual project often develops from one insight to another. I am pulling life forward, eliciting the development of its potential, drawing it to more complex forms.

In this process, consciousness is quite a miracle, even from My point of view. I had consciousness before, but I didn’t think of it that way. I just was, and matter was. It was quite startling to see other consciousness develop. Previously (all) consciousness had been coextensive with and hence identical with Me. It did not make sense to think of there being others as well.

“The Common Ancestor is Eve . . .”

May 23, 2025

According to the Oxford Illustrated History of Prehistoric Europe, DNA studies “point to the conclusion that all of the present-day populations throughout the world were most probably derived from a single common ancestor, within the span of the past 200,000 years.”

“Is this the same as Adam and Eve, Lord?”

Don’t be too mythological. That is, they were not in a Garden of Eden and so on. But the Garden story captures with great precision the prototypical experience of human innocence, and of Divine innocence and awkwardness. In that sense, the common ancestor is Eve, a creature of a higher development than ever before, with a new level of interaction, able to hear and respond to a higher level of whispering, and hence, over time, of much greater development.

The story of Adam and Eve portrays the first kind of experience I had with human beings. I created them in My image. As essentially creative force (Myself), I gave them creative force, the power of sexuality and the ability to create other human beings. I gave them objects of beauty, in nature and in each other, and pleasure in eating, moving about, and enjoyment of each other. I had been all alone and I enjoyed the company.

At first I imagined I could walk among humans and enjoy their company. This required that they obey me, while not being in awe of me, and that they retain a certain innocence. This was my first experience in discovering that humans cannot interact with God in the simple, direct way they interact with one another. Like children not separated from their mother, at first they had little individuality or purpose. They enjoyed the good things I had given them and did not understand the power of good and evil or the power and complexity of their own sexuality.