The emergent ‘God’

I believe that ‘God’ is a completely natural phenomenon.

To some this will sound strange and heretical but it is the obvious conclusion of taking a panentheistic position. ‘God’ is one with the cosmos, with the natural world and universe; as such, how could God be anything other than natural? That is not to say that the world that we experience, which we see, taste, smell, hear and observe, is the only natural reality; I believe that there are many aspects to the natural universe which we have yet to experience or discover. Just as scientists are discovering that space may be multi-layered; so the time-space bubble that we inhabit may also be multi-layered. So, any surprise we may experience at the thought that God is a natural phenomenon may say more about how little our experience is of what is natural than it does about God him/her/itself.

Once we see God as a natural phenomenon new possibilities occur: the most exciting to me being that it implies that as the natural universe changes, develops and emerges; so God changes, develops and emerges. As consciousness develops; so God develops. As love expands; so God expands. I believe that when Jesus talked about the expansion of the Kingdom of Heaven, this is what he had in mind. God’s power resides in conscious minds which are focussed on love; when love increases, the Kingdom of Heaven expands.

In ‘The Prophet’ Kahil Gibran addresses the same issue, and sums it up much more clearly, when he writes: “When you love you should not say, ‘God is in my heart,’ but rather, ‘I am in the heart of God.’