The God That Could Be Real

The fact is "in the beginning" is no more precise than "once upon a time". Nancy Ellen Abrams

Over the last number of years I have become more and more firmly convinced that our concept of God is a human construct. It is the result of people over the ages from many different culture’s trying to explain their spiritual experiences with only the words and understanding that were currently at their disposal to help them.

The last few months I have found myself deleting unread most of the computer mailings that come from progressive Christianity sites as being uninteresting or not speaking to me. They no longer talk about my concept of God. Instead they talk about a concept that while it was once more less mine, is no longer. I realize that this is a sign of change. Not change within the blogs which I am sure are still sending out the same type of material but rather of a change within myself.

I can no longer read articles that talk about God as a being, that see this way or that way as being ‘right’, that condemn others for how they see God. This is the religion of our past. The religion that condemned Newton for saying that the earth revolved around the sun, not vice-versa. Our knowledge has increased exponentially about the universe and how it works.

I read 'The God That Could Be Real' by Nancy Abrams a couple of years ago. And it refuses to leave my head. In the introduction she says ‘The question “Does God exist?” is a hopeless distraction that will never lead anywhere positive…If I wanted to find a God that is real, I had to start from what’s real, what actually exists…The question that matters is this: Could anything actually exist in the universe, as science understands it, that is worthy of being called God?’

Desmond Tutu comments in his introduction to this book that far too often God is a “God of the gaps’ - where we fill our lack of knowledge with the belief that there must be a God. That when our understanding of the universe only extended to the stars in the heavens, God lived just beyond them As our knowledge of the universe has expanded, God has moved farther and farther out in space and time. ‘God,’ he says, ‘must be more than a placeholder for what we do not yet know.’

What Abrams has done in this book is to attempt to tell who her God is using the framework of science as we know it today. She is doing what people have done for millenniums, using the knowledge and the language of her time, of our time, to answer the age-old question, “Is there a God?’

“If we look for God in what is real, the argument about God’s existence is over, and we begin to discover its true nature and relationship to us.” ~Nance Ellen Abrams

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