A God We Can Believe In
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At home on a bookshelf we have a massive folio-style slipcover book titled Cabinet of Natural Curiosities by Albertus Seba, a pharmacist in eighteenth-century Amsterdam. In 1731, after decades of collecting strange and exotic plants, snakes, frogs, crocodiles, shellfish, corals, insects and butterflies, as well as a few fantastic beasts, such as a hydra and a dragon, Seba published an illustrated catalog of these curiosities. It’s an amazing display of biodiversity—enough to make anyone curious about why things change and how the same species can vary so much from one specimen to another.
Darwin’s theory of evolution, published more than a century later, enabled us to connect the dots. Sometimes biological change happens slowly and incrementally; at other times, change comes swiftly, especially when the pressure is great. In recent years, we have learned that a similar “evolve or perish” principle applies to the economic world we inhabit.
These parallels led me to wonder what a cabinet of spiritual curiosities might contain. How does religion respond to the pressure to evolve? Most religions have developed slowly over centuries and changed incrementally over generations. The question today is whether religion can evolve more rapidly, like a finch or an economy.
History suggests the answer is no. It took five hundred years for the church to forgive Nicholas Copernicus for looking into the night sky and reporting what he saw: that the sun, not the Earth, lies at the center of our solar system. Copernicus died of natural causes before the theological backlash against his discovery gained lethal momentum. Two of Copernicus’ scientific contemporaries, Giordano Bruno and Galileo, weren’t so fortunate. They agreed with Copernicus that the Earth—and therefore humanity—wasn’t at the center of God’s creation. Bruno even dared to suggest that space is boundless and the universe might be home to many solar systems; he was burned at the stake. Galileo was tortured, forced to recant his endorsement of the Copernican discovery, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
In more recent centuries, scientists have come to another conclusion of similar theological magnitude: in our universe, the laws of nature apply everywhere and always. In 1905 Einstein articulated the theory of relativity, which applies to large-scale interactions among and within galaxies. Over the following few decades a group of scientists (including Einstein) developed quantum mechanics, a branch of physics that describes physical interactions at the atomic and subatomic levels.
It’s too soon to tell whether superstring theory will fully reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics, but one thing is clear: in our universe, the fundamental laws of nature have existed from the very beginning. they apply everywhere, and they do not change.
What does this discovery mean for religion today? The religions of the West—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, along with their various permutations—are based on the belief that God exists above and beyond the realm of nature. In a word, they believe that God is supernatural—able to command and control the forces of nature at will, in order to carry out the divine plan for creation. God can stop the sun, impregnate a virgin, inhabit a human body, walk on water.
As we’ve peered into the inner workings of the universe, however, we’ve come to the inescapable conclusion that our universe isn’t set up this way. The laws of nature are not subject to change without notice. The view of God as supernatural, like the view of the universe as Earth-centered, must be left behind. Religion needs to evolve, and the pressure is mounting rapidly.
Some people today, including many leading scientists, argue that religion doesn’t need to evolve because it has become extinct. If God isn’t supernatural, they insist, then the experience of God and the role of religion are obsolete. This is sloppy logic. Following a similar line of reasoning, Bruno and Galileo would have declared that if the Earth is not the center of the universe, then the universe doesn’t exist. We certainly need to rearrange the theological constellations, but this doesn’t mean the sky is empty. Our challenge is to integrate what we have learned about God into what we know about religion.
If God isn’t supernatural, then religion in fact becomes more important, not less. With a supernatural God, who makes all the rules and hands them down to humanity, religion is merely obedience in fancy clothes. If God is not supernatural, then religion has a serious role to play. Religion is the process of taking everything we know about the universe into account and creating a life of meaning and purpose within it. In order to play this new role, religion must adapt, and the experience of God must adapt as well.
For my part, I believe that God exists like beauty exists, but not like a person or an apple exists. An apple is a physical object you can pick off a tree, cut into slices, bake in a pie and serve warm with vanilla ice cream. God, in contrast, is like beauty. Beauty itself never appears to us, but we find the description necessary to account for our delight in the symmetry and form of certain objects and experiences: sunsets, symphonies, and sculptures by Degas. Like beauty, God becomes manifest through other forms as a quality of our experience.
In my way of thinking, God is necessary to explain two kinds of experience. One has to do with the past. When we think of the most enduring elements of existence, we usually think of physical things: rocks, mountains, and so on. On the other hand, we usually think of the elements that make up the realm of meaning—thoughts, feelings, and emotions—as fleeting and ephemeral. Over time, however, the opposite turns out to be true. The atoms that make up a given body or object eventually disband themselves and go on to constitute something else entirely. Even so, the experiences made possible by those atoms remain. The question is where experiences go when their physical substrate no longer exists.
We have a word for the totality of the physical world; the word is universe. We also need a word for the unification of all the experiences in the universe—that word is God. The renowned 20th century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead calls this the consequent nature of God, suggesting that God is, in part, the consequence of, and thus constituted by, all experiences whatsoever. This experience of God accounts for our sense that experiences matter. They don’t matter just to us; they matter, period. Even though no one may remember them or even know about them in the first place, experiences don’t vanish into thin air.
Armchair philosophers debate whether a tree falling in the woods makes a sound if no one hears it. This question raises a deeply religious issue. What happens to experiences no one knows about or remembers? Who hears the lonely cry of an anguished soul in the night’s darkest hour? Who suffers with a young boy abused by his father? Who bears witness to the travesty of an infant girl abandoned by her parents on a hillside to die? What if no one knows? What if no one cares?
The experience of God accounts for our sense that, just as atoms are never lost in physical reactions, so no human experience—however sad or tragic—is ever suffered alone or eternally forgotten. As Whitehead puts it, everything that happens in the universe—“its sufferings, its sorrows, its triumphs, its immediacies of joy”—is woven into the harmony of a completed whole. God is the name we give to our sense of a presence that bears witness to everything that happens in life. In Whitehead’s words, God is “the binding element in the universe.” Without the experience of God, our experiences have no refuge.
The experience of God also accounts for our sense that the future is possible. At any given moment, the future can unfold in a number of possible ways. These possibilities must come from somewhere. Admittedly, you can’t put possibilities under a microscope. But they have to come from somewhere. Simply put, God is the experience that accounts for our sense that the future is possible at all. Whitehead calls this God’s primordial nature, which points to God’s role as the beginning of the future.
When the ancient Greeks pondered the future, they often spoke of fate, which they understood as the tendency of the future to move toward a particular goal, like the tendency of a plant to grow toward the sun. The plant can be turned away, of course, but it will always grow back toward the light. In a similar way, the experience of God accounts for our sense that the future can unfold in a purposive and meaningful way, even though it sometimes doesn’t. God is the transcendent source of possibility.
Where do consciousness and choice enter the divine picture? They enter through us—through our consciousness and our choices. The only way God plays an active role in history is through us. William Blake was on the right track when he wrote, “Every one, of every clime, that prays in deep distress, prays to the human form divine.” For his part, Blake thought the human form divine described only Jesus. My view is that you and I are also human forms of the divine.
To say that we are the presence of God in this world is not a metaphor. We are the face of God in this world, and God’s voice and hands. God changes outcomes in this world only as we change them. God is not an independent agent, in other words. God is dependent on us. The active agency of the divine life emerges through our choices and actions.
This understanding of God is hard to accept—but not because it requires us to believe something miraculous about God. Rather, it requires us to believe something astounding about ourselves: that we are the divine in human form. Only we can provide refuge in light of what’s past and offer optimism in light of what’s possible. If we respond faithfully to this opportunity, the God of history and possibility—the God we can believe in—will be not a curiosity, but a source of comfort and hope.
Rev. Dr. Guengerich’s book God Revised: How Religion Must Evolve in a Scientific Age will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in May.
City. He was educated at Franklin and Marshall College (BA, 1982), Princeton Theological Seminary (MDiv, 1985) and the University of Chicago (PhD, 2004).
His doctoral dissertation is titled Comprehensive Commitments and the Public World: Tillich, Rawls and Whitehead on the Nature of Justice.
He is author of God Revised: How Religion Must Evolve in a Scientific Age (Palgrave Macmillan) and writes a column on “The Search for Meaning” for psychologytoday.com. He also writes for Huffington Post and has been published in numerous other online and print publications.
His sermon at All Souls on Sept. 16, 2001—the Sunday after 9/11—was selected for inclusion in Representative American Speeches 2001-2002. Titled “The Shaking of the Foundations,” the sermon appears along with speeches by Governor George Pataki, President George Bush and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani as one of seven “Responses to September 11th.”
He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, where he focuses on how traditional religious beliefs and practices, both in the US and abroad, usually reinforce patriarchy to the detriment of women and democracy. In April, 2013, he visited Afghanistan with a delegation of Council members and fellows, meeting with top military, diplomatic, and civilian leaders in Kabul, as well as in Kandahar and Helmand Provinces. In February, 2013 and March, 2014, he spoke in Belfast, Northern Ireland, visits hosted by Christopher Hudson, MBE, who helped negotiate the Good Friday Agreement.In January 2012, he was part of a 15-member delegation of senior clergy from New York City to visit Israel and the West Bank, the first such delegation to meet with a broad spectrum of religious and political leaders, including Shimon Peres, then President of Israel, and Salem Fayyad, then Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority.
He serves on the Board of Directors of Interfaith Alliance, the national non-partisan voice that champions and protects our nation’s religious pluralism; he served as chair of the Interfaith Alliance board from 2008-2012. He is a Lecturer in Preaching at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where he has also served as Visiting Scholar. Also in the past, he served on the boards of Dads and Daughters, the national advocacy nonprofit for fathers and daughters; the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, a human rights organization; and the New York City Audubon Society.
He lives in Manhattan with his wife, Holly G. Atkinson, MD, who is Director of the Human Rights Program at Mount Sinai School of Medicine; his daughter Zoë is a physics student at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
- The Cadence of Courage - March 1, 2015
- A God We Can Believe In - February 1, 2013
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