Who is God?
Part 4: God as a powerful force, but not necessarily a person
However, it is not the only conclusion to draw. And this takes us back to the start of our thinking when we considered that many people have developed a very different conception of who God is. I think there are still two broad channels to go down. Some people have a view of God that, in my view, is not really a view of a personal God – though they may disagree, and the other route is to continue to believe in a personal God – but in very different form. I expect that there are multiple combinations of ideas, with the two routes over-lapping to greater or lesser degree, and perhaps becoming indistinguishable.
Hence, many believers understand God as a presence. They detect in the workings of their hearts and minds an experience of a presence. This is often understood as an experience of the transcendent, or the infinite and eternal, or of perfection. So, rather than experienced as a presence, you might simply call it an emotion or a feeling. Interestingly, (as a contact with the God who is simply “out there” ready to be found) this presence or feeling is simply there to be found. It just exists in the natural world – or, at least, it exists in the capabilities of the human mind, and I am calling that part of the natural world. Some people might want to claim that it is somehow “artificial” because it is a human construct, but I don’t think that argument holds, especially when we consider how universal and ubiquitous this experience is in human cultures – it appears to just be part of who we are as humans.
A very popular modern idea, linked to this, is the idea of God as “the ground of our being”. This is a very profound, multi-faceted idea, ( it could be compatible with God as a person, as some sort of spiritual force, or as “something else” that’s difficult to put into words) but I think, very briefly, it understands God as the something that enables existence to happen, and which imparts into existence qualities of goodness and love etc which it is possible for human beings to “tune into”. People with this view of God can live lives of profound faith, believing in the qualities of God, and trying to live them out in their own lives, and, in fact continuing to talk about God (for God must be talked about somehow) in ways that accord completely with traditional conceptions of God, while never being able to conceive of God with any precision, for God is simply an intangible sense that there is “something” behind, or within, or upholding existence, and our lives within it, and this something is good.
It’s tempting to think that if we push this approach too far, we simply end up with God as an ideal – he is a set of principles and values which anyone could hold, and which a number of secular philosophies of life have emulated through the ages. I think the view of God as ground of our being or as some sort of “sense of the divine” is saying more than this, but we can see that it could quite easily morph into this, in which case, there is certainly great scope for, and need for, the creation of a “secular religion” which becomes a philosophy of life for humanity to embrace, which would take up all the good ideals of religion without ever fully leaving a secular mindset.
Spiritual Devotion 