Is there a God?

God is the author both of the Bible and the book of Nature (and universe). As such, the Bible (as a story of our world) is a very small book compared to the book of Nature. Comparison is a problem in our thinking. We struggle to accept each thing for what it is, and see how each thing is part of every other thing. Comparing asks us to rank, to sacrifice one thing in favor of another, when all things have meaning and value, and all things are the same.

The knowledge of God is very far from the love of Him. - Pascal

The answer to the question also depends to some extent on semantics. This may seem like a ridiculous point, but in the same sense, the question itself is ridiculous. Isn't it obvious! I believe many of us implicitly know what we know. What we believe is a different story, and based to an alarming extent on the second and thirdhand hand-me down beliefs of others. Firsthand experience suffices.

Semantics is important in the sense that religion could only exist so long as there was a language to express is it. Think about it. And think about religion without writing, or words? Thus, any idea of religion living beyond the life of the language that expresses it is quite frankly fantasy. The period immediately after creation/evolution when man was stilllearning to talk, to write, to understand the world is no different to babes in a wood. We pretend that while we were babes, someone handed us a storybook and then took time out to teach us to read it, then to write and repeat it. Of course, nothing of the sort happened. We taught ourselves to read, invented stories - inspired by nature of course - and then wrote them down ourselves...saying that God had written then through us. It's much like the sportsman that wins a tennis match, or a soccer team that claims God was on their side: God did it, not me. It's true, but only from a certain point of view. Literally, we know whose muscles were at play, and that all skills and tactics had to be employed in order for God (or the player) to win. It's never a question of being essentially absent and God robotically pulling strings from up high. The clue is that 'God working in me' implies a particular level of consciousness, openness, to a higher order of function - even flow.

Now that we have gone beyond semantics, it's easier to see our impressive towers built to glorify our concept of God somewhat dimished.
Is there a God? Yes and no. God is in the sense that we equate all that exists with mystery and divinity. God is not in the sense that you and I are not God, and often function without holiness and often in spite of our knowledge of sense of the divine. God is all the bricks in the building that is God, but God is neither the brick nor the building. He is all, and both, and neither. God is our concept for all, a concept for the connections - seen and unseen, known and unknowable. In some ways this is a cop out - our easy answer for what is inexplicable. But God may well be behind some of those things we can't explain - not as trickster but as an intelligent, ultimately unknowable force.

We get into trouble when we confer our own personal edifices onto God - endowing God with a sex, a personality, an emotional spectrum. God somehow then confers on us the authority to judge, to condemn, to control. That can empower us and help us to understand him through ourselves, but it can also hinder us. To the extent that we can define God, we limit our own capacities for awe and grace and other things beyond what we can know... and also, we invite dissent, as our definitions begin to contradict one another.

What do you define as God? For me, and I consider myself loosely as an agnostic (this definition in itself has changed a few times). I place value in prayer (meditation), in communities formed through beliefs and churches. It is possible that these can serve to do a lot of good. God - I think - is something that words cannot describe (and we should not try to) ... God is the ether, the mystery, a higher consciousness, a higher state of Being. For me God is all that is, a super- connectedness (past, present, future - going eternally bigger and eternally smaller - here, there and in between, day, night, and twilight). God for me is not confined to just a person, just a religion - God is in all religions, and yet none.

God is personal if you want him to be, but my experience is a personal connection to something that is both personal and at turns impersonal - in the sense that seasons and weather, wind and air, can be pleasant or entirely unrelated to what we want or how we feel.

In the Story of God Professor Robert Winston espouses some incredible truths, the most important, in my opinion, is that we cannot (and must not) be certain of what we believe or think we believe. It is in our doubts that reality rests, and in our uncertainties that the flicker of truth begins to flare.

What is more evicence of this than those who moved away from conventional (sacred beliefs) to a closer, more intimate understanding of life, the universe and everything. I'm thinking of Galileo and Darwin. Would either of them have come up with their discoveries if they did not pursue truth beyond what they were taught/programmed to believe?

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo (The first person to reason that the earth was round, and the sun the centre of the Solar System despite what was commonly believed)

Finally I believe that God ought to do no more than bring us together. Our love and knowledge of God ought to be what binds is in the awe and majesty and magic that comes from living together - sophisticated, intelligent people in a vast complex system not made by us,and yet, while we live, we are co-creators, co-authors in the story of both life and what we decide will be the story of God.>