{"id":98,"date":"2007-10-16T01:01:01","date_gmt":"2007-10-16T01:01:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/conversationswithgod\/2007\/10\/in-response-to-richard-dawkins-1.html"},"modified":"2007-10-16T01:01:01","modified_gmt":"2007-10-16T01:01:01","slug":"in-response-to-richard-dawkins-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/conversationswithgod\/2007\/10\/in-response-to-richard-dawkins-1.html","title":{"rendered":"In Response to Richard Dawkins-Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

I believe in God because I have had a conversation with God. That is, I have had an inner dialogue with an essence and a source that has brought forth information I would never, could never, have dreamt of on my own. That conversation has made it clear to me that God is a process \u2013 the process of Life Itself\u2014and that, therefore, the words God and Life are interchangeable.
\nI am sharing all of this as the beginning of Part II of my “debate” with Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion<\/em>. (See Part I in yesterday’s blog.)
\nGod is Life, and Life is God, and there is no separation between the two. But not just physical life. God is metaphysical life as well. That is, God is that which is larger than the Life we see in physical form all around us. I propose that it is from this Unseen Form that all physical life as we know it emerges, and then, yes, evolves \u2013 and that as Life forms evolve they come to know themselves consciously. That is, they become self-conscious. They not only become aware of themselves, they become aware that they are aware of themselves.
\nFurther, I believe that as they become aware that they are aware, the part of themselves that lives in this Awareness also becomes aware of how to use that Awareness \u2013 which is a non-physical attribute of the highly conscious \u2013 to produce physical attributes and manifestations in day-to-day life. And I believe that the highly conscious can, and have, produced such manifestations with consistent and predictable results.
\nHow does the Power of Positive Thinking (to use the wonderful phrase of the late Rev. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale) work if there is not something other than the physical, which acts upon the physical? Or is it Richard Dawkins\u2019 point of view that…<\/p>\n


\n…such things never occur, and cannot, unless there is a cause in physicality?
\nIf that is his idea (and I wish not to put words in his mouth), then I have to tell him that from the evidence of my eyes and my own experience, he is profoundly mistaken.
\n\u201cOh, well, if you are going to define God in that way, then I agree,\u201d I can almost here Richard saying (but with, perhaps, a trace of a scoff). \u201cIf you are saying that God is life, then how can I disagree? God, by that definition, must exist, since life itself clearly exists! But,\u201d I can hear Richard going on patiently (or, perhaps, not so patiently) \u201cthat is no definition of God at all in the traditional sense, and is simply the pronouncement already offered by Naturalists, who say that everything is God.\u201d
\nYet if Richard did say that, I would counter that what I am suggesting goes way beyond what most Naturalists believe. Again (and not to be minimized), I am suggesting that God is a process that produces consistent and predictable results.
\nHere again Dawkins might not like calling it \u201cGod,\u201d but might agree that indeed, such a nearly infallible process does exist. He might say that Life does the same thing. Quantum mechanics, to take one aspect of Life, offers results predictable to the breadth of a human hair across the span of the north American continent \u2013 a point he makes in his text.
\nYet I am also saying that God can be used to produce those results intentionally. God is therefore not only a Process, but a Mechanism. A Device with which to produce (or make manifest) physical realities and physical outcomes. A Tool with which to seemingly create out of thin air.
\nI am not sure that Dawkins would agree with that\u2026but I certainly would have loved to have heard his take on it, rather than over 400 pages debunking traditional, outdated, outmoded, and outdistanced concepts of Deity no longer embraced by those Cultural Creatives who, I suggest in my book Tomorrow’s God, are in fact creating a new God and a New Spirituality even as we speak.
\nSo Richard, if you are saying that Yesterday\u2019s God is a delusion, you are right. If you are saying that God in any form, known or unknown, taught or untaught, understood or not understood, does not exist, you are wrong. A rose by any other name\u2026
\nHumanity seems to me to be like children who have learned their addition and subtraction but have not yet discovered multiplication and long division \u2013 yet who loudly insist on declaring that addition and subtraction is all there is, and that there is nothing more to know on the subject of mathematics.
\nIn my conversations with God I was invited to consider the possibility that there is something we do not fully understand about God, the understanding of which would change everything.
\nIt was in my book What God Wants<\/em> that I wrote:
\n\u201cIf God is not the highest point in a pyramid that passes authority down the line, but is, rather, the power that exists in the whole line, and is, therefore, in a sense, the line itself, what does that do to the Top Down, Power Over structures upon which so much of human society is built?\u201d
\nThe answer, Richard, is the same answer that you gave: The God of Our Fathers simply does not exist. But the answer is not that some sort of God cannot exist: a God that we have only just begun to conceptualize, and surely do not fully understand.
\nI am telling you, kind professor, that this kind of God does exist. It exists as an impulse and a process and an experience within all of us. It exists as the process that is Life Itself, and there is no need to declare that God does not exist simply because we agree that God does not exist in anthropomorphic form.
\nAgain from What God Wants<\/em>:
\n\u201cIf the words \u2018God\u2019 and \u2018life\u2019 are interchangeable, the implications are\u2014if it\u2019s possible to imagine this\u2014more than enormous. They\u2019re staggering, earth shaking, paradigm-shattering. This is because everyone knows what is true about life. Everyone may not know what is true about God, but everyone knows what is true about life.
\n\u201cWhat is true about life is that nothing stands outside of life. Nothing exists without life, and life does not exist if nothing exists.
\n\u201cYou are the expression of life itself. So is everything around you. Even so-called inanimate objects are found, when examined under a microscope, to consist of particles constantly in motion. These particles and their movements are all part of life. Indeed, everything in the observable universe is life, in some form.
\n\u201cThe existence of life is confirmed by life itself. Life is self-referencing, self-confirming, self-sustaining, and self-evident. Life is the evidence of the existence of life.
\n\u201cNot only does everyone know these things, everyone agrees with these things. What makes what is being said here so dangerous is what happens when the word \u2018God\u2019 is inserted where the word \u2018life\u2019 appears. That produces this result:
\n\u201cNothing stands outside of God. Nothing exists without God, and God does not exist if nothing exists.
\n\u201cYou are the expression of God itself. So is everything around you. Even so-called inanimate objects are found, when examined under a microscope, to consist of particles constantly in motion. These particles and their movements are all part of God. Indeed, everything in the observable universe is God, in some form.
\n\u201cThe existence of God is confirmed by God itself. God is self-referencing, self-confirming, self-sustaining, and self-evident. God is the evidence of the existence of God.
\n\u201cDo you see the problem now? Those three paragraphs cause all the paragraphs in all the other books about God to fall apart. Everything crumbles. Not just a few of our beliefs about God, but the very basis upon which we have built so much of human society. It all comes tumbling down.
\n\u201cThe wonderful thing about this, the exciting thing, is that we get to recreate ourselves anew, and rebuild our human society\u2014and\u2026a huge part of that process is our renewed exploration of this whole idea of God\u2026\u201d
\nSadly, this is an exploration that brilliant Prof. Dawkins has not sufficiently undertaken. As I have earlier noted, he seems satisfied with having thoroughly disproven the existence of the Yesterday\u2019s God and speaks little or not at all of Tomorrow\u2019s God. What he does do, and magnificently, is call religion and religionists to task for their almost always life-sapping, life-negating, life-destroying views. His section on Absolutism is worth the price of the entire book. It could have come straight from the pages of What God Wants \u2013 and so, of course, I agree with Richard here completely (Neale said with a smile).
\nYet now the larger discussion must begin, Richard. I am not content to let things lie where you have left them. I offer this, once more from my own writing, as a beginning exchange:
\n\u201cIf in fact the words \u2018God\u2019 and \u2018life\u2019 are describing the same thing\u2026well, we have some major, major theological implications here.
\n\u201cDo we need more evidence of the existence of life than life itself? No. And what does life want? Nothing. Life simply is.
\n\u201cLife is an energy, a power, to be used. And it is being used, freely, by all. It has no expectations, no desires, no demands, no requirements, no need to be worshipped and no need to punish those who fail to worship it. Life is a singular and unemotional reality. Life is the creator, and it\u2019s that which has been created.
\n\u201cLife is the source of life, and it\u2019s That Which Has Been Sourced. Life produces life, and life informs life about life through the process of life itself.
\n\u201cLife is, in a few words, the Alpha and the Omega, the All in All. There is nothing that IS that It is not.
\n\u201cIf this is not the definition of God, then what is?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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