In the beginning Archives

“God is, in some sense, all. And all is very multiplex indeed.”

June 25, 2018

God is All:

I had been told that God comes different ways to different cultures.

“So any single conception of God will grasp only one of Your aspects?”

Yes, you see the problem. My nature is quite variegated. People see one aspect and not another.

“Lord, are there multiple levels of Being or something along those lines?”

Yes, but don’t interrupt. The story is much more complex.

God is not mind or matter, or even mind and matter. God is, in some sense, all. And all is very multiplex indeed. Even physics has not been able to produce a universe of “atoms in the void.” There are forces, elements, patterns – you need to know more to go on – that go beyond them.

Then add the kind of stuff the morphic fields’ guy talks about …

Rupert Sheldrake, author of Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, performs scientifically controlled experiments to test different explanations of the uncanny ability of some animals to know what is happening far away.

He found, for example, that even if the owner came home at randomized times, the dog was always waiting expectantly about a half hour in advance. He found that the dog responded as soon as the owner formed the intention to return home.

Sheldrake compares the results of these experiments to studies of how birds and other animals can find their way home.

Since standard explanations fail, he advances the idea that these communications travel by way of morphic fields, using an analogy with gravitational and magnetic fields to explain the “action at a distance” that is a feature of these situations.

… and those who talk about organized information and the like – primitive though they may be – and you begin to get an inkling.

I found that organized information and complexity are increasingly important concepts, particularly in biology, but also in cosmology and the social sciences. Traditional science is reductionist, always trying to explain the whole from the action of the parts.

It is also deterministic, seeing one state of affairs as fully predictable from the previous state. It was widely assumed that this model, which has been particularly successful in chemistry and mechanics, could be used to explain all natural phenomena.

The new theories of organization, information, and complexity challenge this assumption.

The whole—whether a cell, an organism, an ecology, or a universe—has some qualities that the parts do not have and cannot explain. New phenomena, such as life and consciousness, are emergent properties that cannot be understood in terms of inorganic elements.

In some cases, such as why the organs of the body have the size and location that they have, the whole can explain the parts better than the other way around. The self-organization of complex systems, their creative responses to their environment, and their emergent qualities are neither fully predictable nor fully explainable by their constituent elements or prior states.

I had been told that God is all, and that all is very multiplex indeed.

These concepts could provide the basis for understanding this multiplexity.

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.

“With life, spirit comes into play.”

January 9, 2017

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.”

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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.

“He tried to impose a spiritual vision.”

February 22, 2015

Spiritual Vision-

Akhenaten may have been the first monotheist.

We have his own words, carved in stone. The young pharaoh reports having been divinely guided to the exact place the Creator had manifested himself at the beginning of the world. It was a plain near the Nile, bounded by hills except on the east, a great amphitheater facing the morning sun.

Akhenaten’s vision was not of many gods, but of one god—a god, with no female consort, who created himself anew each day.

He was called the Aten, or Father Aten, and symbolized by the solar disk. “Thou didst fashion the earth according to thy desire when thou wast alone … thou appointest every man to his place and satisfiest his needs. Everyone receives his sustenance and his days are numbered.”

The Aten is the source of life itself.

“Thou it is who causest women to conceive and makest seed into man, who gives life to the child in the womb of its mother, who comfortest him so that he cries not therein, nurse that thou art, even in the womb, who givest breath to quicken all that he hath made.” The god created the great life-giving Nile for Egypt, but he is a universal god who has placed “a Nile in heaven,” the source of rain, as a “gift to foreigners and to beasts of their lands.”

The Aten was symbolized by a figure of the sun with rays reaching out in all directions.

At the end of each ray is an open hand reaching out in loving kindness, as if to touch with life, and to give and to receive gifts. “Thou art remote yet thy rays are upon the earth,” writes Akhenaten. “Thou are in the sight of men, yet thy ways are not known.” The Aten can also be very near, at least to his spokesperson. “Thou art in my heart.”

It was a breathtaking vision and it shook Egypt from its moorings.

The other gods, he proclaimed, were not gods but idols. Upon his orders, their images were destroyed. In their place was put the austere hieroglyph for the Aten, increasingly understood not as the sun or even the sun-god, but as a distant and unrecognizable divinity.

This was gross impiety to most Egyptians, an insult to the gods.

Akhenaten’s “monotheistic zeal offended their reverence for the phenomena [through which the gods made themselves present] and the tolerant wisdom with which they had done justice to the many-sidedness of reality,” explains Henri Frankfort.

The result was perhaps predictable.

Upon the pharaoh’s death, priests and people alike turned against this strange and remote monotheism. The old statues, temples, and forms of worship were restored. Ahkenaten’s vision was a stunning venture in spiritual understanding but, in the end, came to nothing.

“Lord, what is the meaning of Akhenaten?”

Akhenaten was an extraordinary recipient of My inspiration (and of My) presence.

He was, as all are, bound by his culture and the symbols he had available. But he got the main message—that, in a sense, I am One, that I am not to be equated with the sun or any other natural phenomena, that other gods are lesser or “mere” manifestations of Me or, in a sense, non-existent compared to Me. The problem he ran into is that he was alone in his receptivity. Others were not prepared, were not open. The most spiritual Egyptians of his era were attuned to the old religion and could not jump the traces. It would have seemed impious to them.

“What was the difference between them and the people of Israel?”

The people of Israel were a people.

They—the mass of them—had an intuitive understanding of a Covenant. Remember that the mass of ancient Jews were not faithful, or (they were) faithful only periodically. But they all lived under the Covenant and understood that they so lived. Akhenaten tried to impose a spiritual vision from above, through imperial authority and example. Even his wife did not understand the vision; she followed it out of her great love for her husband.

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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.