Thinking Bigger about God (but with Humility)

​Thinking Bigger about God (but with Humility)
 
A basic assumption of the evolutionary model of religion posits that as humanity evolves, consciousness evolves; as consciousness evolves, our perception or sense of Spirit evolves; and as human awareness of Spirit evolves, religion, or the specific expressions of our understanding of Spirit, also evolves.
 
The evolution of religion necessarily takes many forms, including spiritual practices, ritual and worship, ethical guidelines, new sacred texts, new models of religious authority, etc. But these and many other evolving aspects of religion are all rooted in the starting point of how we understand or perceive the nature of the Ultimate Reality upon which everything else is based, or in simple terms, how we conceive of Spirit.
 
Many suggest that, at the beginning of the 21st century, we have reached a point where, for a growing segment of humanity, the traditional understanding of Spirit, or “God,” is no longer adequate or credible. While our general knowledge of the Universe has expanded over the course of the past 3000 years in such a way that we now recognize that we exist in a Cosmos that is unimaginably more vast than that which was conceived by our ancestors, as a culture we have tended to cling to a sense of God that has not changed significantly over the past three millennia. Addressing that issue calls for setting aside the concept of a “small” God and thinking bigger about the nature of Spirit, in such a way that religion and spirituality can again become credible to 21st century humans who are fully informed by a scientific, historical, and critical sensibility.
 
We necessarily use aspects of our experience of the sensory world to construct our understanding of the transcendent realm: the language derived from our empirical experiences is all that we have to use, and to the extent that we have a direct sense of Spirit, it’s indescribable, leading us to resort to that everyday experience for language to describe that which transcends everydayness.
 
But our everyday experience has evolved over the centuries, and yet we hang on to God-language from an earlier time. So what  do we need to change?
 
Setting Aside the Small Concept God
 
To suggest that we need to modify the traditional understanding of Spirit is not to suggest that past ways of understanding Ultimacy were “wrong,” nor is it meant to imply that contemporary humanity has achieved some sort of final enlightened understanding of the Sacred. Rather, we are merely operating according to the fairly obvious fact that any human attempt to perceive, understand, and describe Spirit is necessarily the product of the epistemologically-limited capacities of humans in a given cultural time and place. The indigenous sense of Spirit as something found in nature, or the Abrahamic notion of the one personal God, are not wrong per se, but rather limited to their particular cultural circumstances. Those circumstances have changed for much of humanity, and hence our concept of Spirit should be revised accordingly, along the lines of the “transcend and include” model of Ken Wilber, which retains previous perceptions of Spirit but expands them according to our current mode of consciousness.
 
In what sense, then, does the traditional notion of God that has been dominant for at least the past 2000 years need to be modified?

    1. A less anthropomorphic concept of Spirit
Certainly the emergence of the theistic concept of Spirit as a God who has personal qualities similar to those of humans makes sense as an effort to recognize that certain qualities found only in the human species (moral goodness, justice, love, freedom) should be attributed to an Ultimate Being. Trying to make sense of Spirit by projecting qualities and characteristics of “worldly” phenomena is both understandable and inevitable.
But the theistic God as found in the Abrahamic religions and elsewhere is one which also includes many unappealing, and even revolting, human qualities. Jealousy, capriciousness, vengefulness, partiality, anger, and other human flaws are common characteristics of God as found in the Abrahamic texts, and it is time to simply acknowledge and reject such characterizations (rather than ignoring, rationalizing, or dancing around them, as often is done by theistic believers and theologians). Many contemporary humans recognize that such characteristics are flaws, and hence we should stop accepting them as qualities of what is supposed to be a perfect being.

    2. A less parochial concept of Spirit
Given that we now possess the ability to have a global, trans-cultural view of the world, it no longer makes sense to conceive of Spirit as the God of one specific group of people, one culture, one historical time period, or one geographic area of the planet. One could even argue that conceiving of Spirit in terms of one species on one planet is an absurdly restrictive way of thinking about a transcendent Being who is unlimited by space and time.
 
Eliminating such parochial elements of our notion of Spirit would also mean setting aside the attribution of limiting socio-political labels such as King and Lord, and biological labels such as Father and similar gendered references. We now have a fuller sense of Spirit as so much more than all of that.

    3. A concept of Spirit that is compatible with a modern Cosmology
Conceiving of Spirit in terms of a God of one culture, one species, or even one planet is equivalent to reducing Spirit to a limited demi-urge. We now have an understanding of the physical Universe as something whose existence as a temporal and spatial entity is so vast as to be inconceivable to the human mind. As such, we should not be retreating to limited human notions of space and time in how we think about God:  if Spirit is an entity which is both immanent in every particle of the Universe while at the same time paradoxically transcending the entirety of spatiotemporal reality, our representations of Spirit should not fall back on the notion of a smaller God who rules over one planet in a one-galaxy Universe. Our awareness of a vast Cosmos should be accompanied by a sense of Spirit which is even more vast.

    4. A concept of Spirit that recognizes the role of evolution
If we live in an ever-changing, evolving Cosmos rather than a static completed Cosmos, our sense of the Sacred should be liberated to embrace this sense of constant movement. This entails accepting the notion of a God which is manifesting itself in the Cosmos in ever-fuller expressions, rather than a static deity whose essential nature should be restricted to how it appeared to humanity 2500 years ago.
No recent figures have expressed this notion of an ever-expanding sense of the Divine with the confidence and clarity as the French paleontologist/priest Teilhard de Chardin and the Hindu philosopher Aurobindo Ghose (see earlier blog posts from March and April 2024). Both Teilhard and Aurobindo present an evolutionary spirituality which recognizes the presence of a paradoxical deity which, while already existent in its pure form, is also progressively manifesting itself in the process of cosmic evolution, producing the opportunity for an increasingly fuller, expansive, and more complete perception of itself by humans whose consciousness is developing expanded capacity for perceiving the Sacred.
 
In one sense, the small, limited concept of God/Spirit that still dominates human religious awareness can be seen as the product of epistemological parochialism, or the assumption that the nature of reality must correspond to the epistemological capacities of a single (rather young) species on a single (tiny) planet. Of course, this is an untenable position. We should always retain a deep sense of epistemological humility, rooted in recognition of the absurdity of the notion that the Ultimate Nature of all reality could be adequately understood and articulated by a relatively new species using a gooey three pound organ, or brain. Ants can’t do algebra, and similarly, it’s not likely that humans, while blessed with an intuitive capacity to sense that there is a Something More or Spiritual quality to reality, can comprehensively perceive, understand, and describe that which is infinitely beyond the limited capacity of human perception and knowledge.
 
But if we set aside the anthropomorphic, parochial, and outdated characterizations of Spirit, what does that leave us? How will humans conceive of the “God/Spirit” of the future?
 
In a spirit of humility as referenced above, we are reluctant to speculate on this issue, other than to assert that the “God-concept” of the future will be one which reflects the four criteria described above. To attempt anything beyond that would be ill-advised and irresponsible, and for two reasons:

    1. A period of transition  
We clearly are in the early stages of a transition period from one mode of spirituality to something new, and the way in which Spirit will be conceived in that new spirituality has not yet coalesced into anything even remotely specific. Certainly, this post-traditional concept of Spirit will be less anthropomorphic, parochial, and static, and more full, expansive, and evolving, but what it is beyond that will have to wait for the coming years, decades, and perhaps centuries.

    2. Spiritual Minimalism
We have reached a stage in our understanding of the Cosmos, humanity and its place within the Cosmos, and a sense (admittedly vague) of Spirit which is likely to preclude the future development of the kinds of detailed theological and philosophical propositions about the nature of God that have been characteristic of thinking about Spirit in the 2500 years since the beginning of such speculation in the Axial Age. An honest account of our awareness of the nature of Spirit is more likely to be characterized by a sense of Spiritual Minimalism (which, of course, has been found for centuries in mystical and apophatic traditions in both Eastern and Western thought). The reality of Spirit will be affirmed without the addition of speculative and often divisive detailed affirmations about that Spirit. We are less likely than our predecessors to pretend to be ants doing algebra.
 
 And then we wait…..

 So perhaps we need to be content, for now, with just taking the first step of confidently and clearly recognizing that certain aspects of the traditional understanding of Spirit/God can be set aside. The understanding of God that evolved prior to the emergence of modern consciousness and the contemporary epistemological sensibility which incorporates scientific, historical, and cross-cultural awareness, will hopefully be gradually modified and replaced (in the “transcend but include” mode which we described above) by a concept of Spirit that is credible to a contemporary consciousness, leading to what J.L. Schellenberg has referred to as a badly needed “religion appropriate to our time.” 
Some might be dissatisfied with the absence of a clear account of such a  “new God-concept” which is likely to develop, but for now, just recognizing that we can set aside traditional ways of thinking about Spirit can be an incredibly liberating experience, one that breaks the spiritual tethers to the past and opens the door to new ways of experiencing, understanding, and, eventually, making sense of Spirit in a way that is credible and meaningful to 21st consciousness.