18+ General Discussion Forum

Juneau,

Since you put this on the book thread, I will answer you with books. In "The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God." which I quoted several postings above, Carl Sagan points out that in order to have an intelligent discussion about God, you have to define what you mean by it. That's just what you do when you define God as a common thread of consciousness that binds existence together. That's a good start.

Yet, I disagree with your premise that our tiny brains shouldn't be able to figure out the mysteries of the universe without divine help. Our laws of physics have been deduced largely from observable information and mathematics: two things our tiny brains seem to handle quite well.

Yet you might be on the same track as Rabbi Michael Lerner in Jewish Renewal when he says something to the effect that God is a force that permeates the whole universe and is the quality of the universe that allows for healing and transcendence. He says "We are to God as a cell in our liver is to our conscious mind." (Like your grain of sand analogy.) "We can think of God as the mind of the universe, including every part of the universe within it and yet not reducible to any part."

I'm not sure that I agree with Lerner's concept, but it is one of the few descriptions of God that I can even suspend my disbelief about and imagine could be true.

Marcia

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