God's point of view Archives -

“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.

“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.

“Think in a Different Way”

March 27, 2025

“Lord, I have the feeling that you want me to read and think less, and to listen more and just write down your story.”

Don’t stop thinking, but think in a different way. Don’t work so hard to figure everything out, to make it rational, to make it fit your categories. Just listen and think through the implications of what I tell you.

“But, Lord, some of what I learn from You comes from worrying over what you say.”

Sometimes yes, but often no. Sometimes your questioning just gets in the way. The main point is to open your mind, to try to understand what I am saying on its own terms, and to see ways it might be true or understandable to you.

If something doesn’t make sense to me, how can I supposed to “see ways” to make it understandable? How do you get to that vantage point?

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.

“Neither of us is completer or perfect in ourselves.”

January 9, 2025

“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.

A Self Requires Another Self

September 27, 2024

Early man I can communicate with. So it seemed to Me at first that I could communicate with them directly, that I would not be so alone. Hegel was right: A self requires another self in order to define itself. Early man I can communicate with.

Rene Descartes had based his philosophy on the cogito, the thinking I, an isolated pin-point self. Two hundred years later, German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel argued, in The Phenomenology of Mind, that a sense of self is possible only through an encounter with another self.

With man, I can send dreams, give intuitions, stir love, frighten if necessary. I began to develop My arsenal of ways to deal with man. But I too am primitive and undeveloped. I know little about how to be effective in bringing man forward.

“I Breathe Life Into Matter.”

May 12, 2024

God continued,

I breathe life into matter, and matter starts responding. As one translation of Genesis puts it, I “flutter over the waters” and nurture, incubate life. And I am filled with joy. It is like a child picking up a harp and being surprised to find that strumming it makes beautiful sounds—and delightedly playing with it.

At the beginning, the cosmos was My playpen, My garden of delights. It was beautiful, dazzling. I could play it like a vast organ, but one attached to laser shows and fireworks.

“The Great Apes Are Wonderful Creatures . . . So Close But Yet So Far.”

February 1, 2024

“And so, Lord, You call forth the first human beings?”

Yes, the first inklings, forerunners, of man. The great apes are wonderful creatures, full of intelligence, energy, and drive. But it is frustrating to interact with them. They are so close and yet so far from having full interactive personalities. They have teleological urges but they are only effective, for the most part, at the biological level. Their social life is rudimentary and their spiritual awareness is diffuse and inarticulate. They lack a symbolic order. They can’t project ideals beyond the sensual. They can’t respond to Me either.

“But they evolved?”

The transition to early man is both slow and sudden. Remember what the first two years of a child’s life is like, and (then) imagine each day to be a century. In a sense, nothing is happening. One day looks much like the last, and there is no single great leap forward.

So imagine My excitement when the first protohumans arrived. At first, you couldn’t tell them from animals but I could see their potential. They didn’t have language but their sounds and marks had representative purposes. They could connect one thing to another, one thought to another. They could remember their past and replay it in their minds. They slowly developed a sense of the future.

“A Step in the Right Direction”

January 11, 2024

Nilsson says, “Another step in the development of polytheism was thinking of the great forces of nature (such as sky and seasons) and of human life (such as love and death) as gods.”

Yes, and the same story applies there. It is quite apt, and not incompatible with understanding a single divine reality behind them all. In fact, seeing them as gods—as personal beings with desires, plans, loves, and so forth—is a step in the right direction, of acknowledging that God is a Person and one with whom one can interact.

“Lord, did the polytheistic response affect You in any way?”

Oh yes, in many ways. When someone sensed My presence in a place and responded respectfully, it increased My awareness of My presence there, and of what it was about Me that evoked and deserved respect.

Then I was given an analogy.

Sometimes someone might be the pillar of a particular institution and not realize their distinctive role until a crisis. And they notice that everyone rallies around them or sees them as their savior or seeks their advice or expects them to get them through it. In a sense, they were the pillar all along, but it was almost latent and not fully actualized until the occasion arose and they saw it reflected in the eyes of others.

I gather that God’s experience was something like that.

“Let Me Tell You What the Story Is.”

September 7, 2023

In a few days, I asked again about God’s story.

The story begins with creation, the evolution up to life, animals, early man. Then to the very ancient communications that require language and memory.

They (My communications) occurred rather simultaneously, and each communication was tailored to and by the recipients. So the precise sequence for telling My story is more a question of narrative strategy than of accuracy or significance.

“But I will have to tell a story that makes sense.”

That makes sense to whom? Let Me tell you what the story is. I am burgeoning forth, reaching out to matter, plants, animals, activating their interiority, giving them direction.

As I have explained, I grew as a Self in response to the interiority of others, and I wanted to communicate, interact, more fully and at a higher level. This (communication) is somewhat possible with early man, who recognized My presence in nature, in life, and also heard, if somewhat dimly and inchoately, My other promptings such as conscience, (the sense of) right and wrong, fine sensibility, appreciation of nature and beauty, love amongst creatures, and mystical union.

“The Soul’s will is the will of God.”

August 18, 2023

I tried to step back to see what question my “soul” would ask. “How can I merge with You? I’m not sure if that’s the best way to put it, Lord: be at one with You, at rest with You, at one with Your will?”

The question is adequately formulated. The goal—one way to describe the goal—is to be at one with God, the God of All. At bottom, the Soul’s will is the will of God. The Soul is at one with God.

It is not that you and I are literally the same substance, the same particular. It is that we are “at one,” in perfect harmony, and not accidentally so. It is in the nature of what the Soul is, that it is at one with God. Remember that these metaphysical (philosophical) categories are crude and inadequate in the first place.

Back to your question: how can you become at one with God? Of course, the answer is that you already are—your Soul, that is. The task is to come to realize that this is so, to realize it not merely in theory, but in intuitive, felt understanding, in your emotions and feelings, and in practice.

“That’s the goal, Lord? It sounds simple. The one-ness is already inside. All we have to do is to bring our conscious selves along.”

That is right. It is the simplest thing in the world. And everyone, at some level and at some moments, knows it, at least glimpses it. But it is very difficult to actualize in practice. The empirical world—the world of desires and the senses—seems so real and is so powerful that is extremely difficult to redirect one’s energy.

And the empirical world is real, in its own way. The world is not an illusion, a mirage. If it is a mirage, it is one from which you can drink water. No, you must respect the empirical world while at the same time emancipating yourself from it, not letting yourself be identical with your interests in this world.

So the world of our experience (and desire) is quite real—it is the arena in which we live our lives and loves, joys and sorrows. In spite of that, we should not let ourselves be ensnared by it.