God Archives -

“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.

Nothing Existed But Me and That Itch

May 15, 2025

I was transferred to another hospital for the surgical procedure. I was met by a technician who said his name and stuck out his hand while looking the other way. Then I asked him to stop standing on my intravenous tube. When it was time to go into the operating room, he snatched away my blanket with so violent a jerk that it would have ripped out the intravenous insertion if I had not by now been on high alert.

Once in the operating room, I was placed on a slab with my arms flat at my side. Medical equipment loomed above, posing an impressive threat. I was not supposed to move. My nose chose that moment to itch. It grew more and more intense. For a time, nothing existed but me and that itch. Then I understood I couldn’t fight it. I just had to live with it until the procedure was over. At that point, the itch disappeared.

“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.

The Essential Condition That Makes Life Serious

January 30, 2025

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.

“I Am Pulling Life Forward.”

January 16, 2025

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.

“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.

“Love Exists at All Levels, at the Physical Level it is Gravity.”

December 26, 2024

“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.

“The First Glimmer is Found in the Lowest Molecules.”

December 12, 2024

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.

“There was a Self, timeless, without reflection, at peace.”

October 3, 2024

“Lord, I don’t understand what existed at the Beginning. It sounds as if you are describing Your own birth as well as the birth of the universe. What were You before the explosion of Creation? A pregnant nothingness?”

A passable description. There was a Self, timeless, without reflection, still and at peace, like calm waters, lucid, not nothing, but not something either. The universe contains many things, not just somethings and nothings.

What kind of Nothingness can explode into Being? Ah, I thought, maybe a Nothingness that is not just nothing, but is the Plenum of Potentiality for All Things. Perhaps the possibility of all things cannot fail to spill over into some actuality.

I could not settle any of these questions in my own mind. All I could do was to continue to ask questions. “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.

“It Leaves Out the Most Interesting Part of the Story.”

September 12, 2024

“Lord, is the theory of evolution correct?”

It is not a bad theory. It is a short-hand that works, but it leaves out the most interesting part of the story. It is like behavioral psychology in this respect.

While Pavlov’s dog salivating tells you something about animal and human behavior, seeing people solely through the lens of stimulus-and-response conditioning leaves out what is really interesting about them. Similarly, the theory of evolution is okay as far as it goes, but leaves out the best part of the story.