What is God... well, the metaphysical God is dead, so why talk about him? Let's talk about God in a way that doesn't require assertions without evidence. Get ready for a BIG ONE! (Meaning a reeeeally long post - roughly five hours of writing, deleting, and rewriting.)
In your direct and immediate awareness, every occasion "possesses an inside and an outside, as well as an individual and a collective, dimension... These are often represented as I, you/we, it, and its (a variation on the 1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-person pronouns; another variation is the Good, the True, and the Beautiful; or art, morals, and science, and so on - namely... objective truth... subjective truth... and the collective truth...)." [from Integral Spirituality by Ken Wilber]
To illustrate this, I'll use an example that Ken often uses when describing how to re-own your projected emotions. Let's imagine there's a big monster in your dream that wants to hurt you.
You can describe the monster in objective terms: what it looks or smells like, how it behaves. When so doing, you are relating to the monster from a 3rd-person perspective.
You can then mentally sit that monster down in a chair, ask it questions, and imagine what its responses would be. As you talk to it, and listen to it, you are creating a space of mutual understanding, a collective or 'we' space. You have moved from relating to the monster from a 3rd-person perspective to relating to it from a 2nd-person perspective.
Finally, you can take the position of the monster - sit in its chair, as it were - and instead of the monster being the one saying "I want to hurt you!", it is now you who is saying "I want to hurt you!" Psychological healing aside, you are now relating to the monster from a 1st-person perspective.
We can summarize these three perspectives as speaking
about something, speaking
with or
to something, and speaking
as something. Which is what we see Jesus doing in the Gospels: speaking as God, speaking to God, and speaking about God.
So far, this discussion has been centered on the 2nd-person God, which is completely unsurprising, since the traditional stage of Christianity often vehemently denies the existence of the other two perspectives, and this specific type of Christianity is the one that most people in the West are familiar (and often uncomfortable) with.
Actually, many people - Christian or otherwise - seem to think that religion can
only exist at pre-rational stages, which is a point of view that is either uninformed or reductionist; whether it is the former or the latter depends on whether one is aware of the large number of religious people who do not hold pre-rational views.
https://www.pewforum.org/2009/02/04/religious-groups-views-on-evolution/
Now that sounds harsh, but to show what I mean, let's see what the Christian God looks like through the lens of each of the major worldviews that currently exist. If you find that these short, caricaturized descriptions sound like you or someone you know, it's because these descriptions represent ontological realities.
Rather than re-invent the wheel, I'm going to be borrowing liberally from Rev. Paul Smith's book Integral Christianity. Note that, as Paul says himself in the book, these descriptions of worldviews are simplified and exaggerated to help them be more clearly understood... and to keep the book from being the length of a doctoral dissertation.
While Paul is using Integral Theory, he has been a member of many different churches and has visited many more. This is not mere speculation, but first-hand experience combined with an integrally-informed framework. Remember: we are leaving metaphysics behind us.
The bold titles are in the format "Worldview: Strength / Limitation". Every worldview has unique strengths and weaknesses, including the integral worldview and beyond. Integral's limitation is a '?' because its emergence is so recent, and so few people stably inhabit that level, that its limitations are not fully clear - yet. I would venture to guess 'Hubris', but truly integral individuals cherish every worldview, so perhaps that is simply my own personal limitation...
The Tribal Lens: Wonder / Fear
"God is seen as an awe-inspiring, often capricious, superhero who lives up there in the sky. God is responsible for everything and is to be feared and appeased at all costs."
Bargaining is a fundamental way of relating to others at this stage, which is why we see animal and human sacrifices to God from those at the tribal level.
"...We are saved by believing that Jesus died in our place for our sins, taking the punishment from God that we deserve on himself instead and therefore satisfying God's wrath."
The Warrior Lens: Strength / Aggression
"God lives up in heaven but comes down to earth as an avenging warrior mixed with elements of justice and compassion... Like the previous level, the spiritual life is fear-based and this is considered a good thing, as in, 'The fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever.'"
The Traditional Lens: Stability / Stagnance
"At this altitude, God is the righteous judge. 'He' is thought of as a divine being who is separate from creation and is spoken about only in masculine terms when gender-specific words are used... God is thought of in 2nd-person terms only...
...God the Father has the role of the vengeful God whose 'justice' requires a penalty for sin and God the Son, Jesus, has the role of the compassionate aspect of God who takes the penalty upon himself."
The Modern Lens: Autonomy / Materialism
"Jesus said that if we saw him, we saw God. However, Jesus also said that God was greater than he was... If we continue to think of this transpersonal God as a big supernatural being out there, we haven't yet come to the God that is greater than Jesus.
The supernatural theistic God is the God that is rejected at the modern rational level... The God of the modern mind, in integral terms, is viewed primarily from a 3rd-person perspective. The idea of God can be studied and reflected upon, but a distinct supernatural God which one can personally relate to is not needed in the laws of the universe... Relating to God in 2nd-person practice often appears to resemble the traditional level too much to be taken seriously by the modern viewpoint. A 1st-person perspective of seeing human beings as divine may also be seen as unreasonable because even Jesus is usually not seen as divine."
Yes: there are Christians, quite a few in fact, who go to church yet still recognize that a Creator God is not necessary to explain the laws of physics, and who also think that Jesus was just a very good person. This may be news to some!
The Pluralistic Lens: Relativity / Aperspectival Confusion
"Concerning God, [Marcus] Borg says 'God is not a supernatural being separate from the universe, rather God (the sacred Spirit) is a nonmaterial layer or level or dimension of reality all around us. God is more than the universe, yet the universe is in God. Thus, in a spatial sense, God is not 'somewhere else' but right here.'
... Panentheism reigns in the postmodern church as a way of understanding God. It is succinctly described in Acts 17:28 where Paul in Athens quotes from a local poet who says, 'In him we live and move and have our being.'
...The postmodern church has moved away from the idea that only they have the truth. While God may be defined by Jesus, God is not confined to Jesus. At the modern level, other religions are tolerated. At the postmodern level, they are warmly embraced. Not only are they welcomed, but all spiritual paths lead equally to God, however that spiritual goal or God is defined."
The Integral Lens: Embrace and Clarity / ?
"Every event, moment, person, and object in our lives can be seen [as the expression of Divine Mystery] from the standpoints of 1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-person. Looking at God in this way gives us what I call the Infinite Face of God... The Intimate Face of God... and the Inner Face of God..."
(Infinite Face of Christ)
"Christians often do not know, as scholars do, that 'Christ' is not Jesus' last name. 'Christ' is a title, a description of Jesus...
In the Gospel of John, Jesus proclaims, 'I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to God but through me.' This statement has traditionally been understood as limiting the path to God to the human person Jesus... But Jesus taught a theology of oneness, not a theology of separation. So how are we to understand these words of Jesus?
At the integral level we see that Jesus was speaking as the Cosmic Christ, the Universal Mind of God. This passage is not about the human Jesus but about Jesus' vast God consciousness... the Universal Presence of God. Christ is the pattern that connects all things for 'in Christ all things hold together.'"
(Intimate Face of Christ)
"The Cosmic Christ was realized and manifested in Jesus... If we have only the Cosmic Christ without the human Jesus, we have left the intimate connection to humankind found in the historical Jesus... We are without a concrete model, a prototype of the new humanity."
For me personally, the Buddha is an emotionally powerful Intimate Face of Christ. He realized his true nature and expressed that understanding via compassionate action in much the same way as Jesus. Thinking about it sometimes chokes me up in a way that thinking about Jesus doesn't, probably because of all the time I've spent rejecting Jesus' story as pointless babble.
(Inner Face of Christ)
"In Paul's wondrous words, 'Christ in you, the hope of glory,' ...
This echoes the single sentence of Paul that defines the gospel in the clearest and most concise way, 'I live, yet not I, but Christ lives within me.'
Jesus leads us within to our own Christ consciousness when he says that the Kingdom of God is within... We become conscious of the Universal Cosmic Christ as our True Self in 1st-person perspective through the awakening of our minds and hearts in Christ. The goal is not to be a Christian but to be a Christ!"
So with the integral level of Christianity, we have come full circle with the three basic 'zones' of awareness (I, you/we, it/its). And now I will venture an answer to the question "What is God?", an answer grounded in experiential data.
God is the Ground of existence, from which manifestation springs moment-to-moment. God is the Process of evolution, through which existence becomes more and more self-aware. God is the Goal of existence, the radical self-recognition of timeless and ever present Mystery.
Something that has been said here, and has been said many times elsewhere, is that there is no evidence of God's existence, and therefore God does not exist. This is a false statement for two reasons. First of all, lack of proof is not proof of nonexistence - lack of proof is not proof of anything! To declare otherwise is simply bad science. The second reason that the statement is false is that there is, in fact, proof of God's existence.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104310443
The essence of this article is really very simple. One must first take an
injunction, then see what
phenomena appear, and finally
verify your experience with others who have taken the same injunction. If you want to know whether there is a such thing as a cell wall, you must look through a microscope and compare what you see with others who have also looked. Fundamentally, there is nothing different about verifying God's existence except that God's existence is disclosed primarily through subjective means rather than objective means.
However, with advances in technologies such as brain scans and EEG machines, we are now able to verify objectively that a specific interior state is being achieved when someone prays or meditates. I am actually very surprised that EEGs were not used in the study described in the NPR article.
