"The meaning of the world is not a teleology, though that is not a bad concept."
Welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. A dramatic adaptation and continuing discussion of the book God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin.
He was a lifelong agnostic, but one day he had an occasion to pray. To his vast surprise, God answered- in words. Being a philosopher, he had a lot of questions, and God had a lot to tell him.
Read God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher.
Would You Like To Share Your Experience With God? We Want To Hear About Your Spiritual Journey!
Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube |
"The meaning of the world is not a teleology, though that is not a bad concept."
Welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. A dramatic adaptation and continuing discussion of the book God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin.
He was a lifelong agnostic, but one day he had an occasion to pray. To his vast surprise, God answered- in words. Being a philosopher, he had a lot of questions, and God had a lot to tell him.
Read God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher.
Would You Like To Share Your Experience With God? We Want To Hear About Your Spiritual Journey!
Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube |
Season Two - Episode Twenty Three
GOD: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY - THE PODCAST
JLM - Narrator (Jerry L. Martin) - voiced by Scott Langdon
Jerry - Jerry Martin - voiced by Scott Langdon
GOD - The Voice of God - voiced by Jerry L. Martin, who heard the voice
EPISODE 23
(Music)
JLM
What is the point of it all? My intellectual curiosity was being satisfied, as God was answering questions about the Creation and how He has related to various cultures. For a philosopher, that goes a long way. But I had a deeper yearning that was profoundly unsatisfied. What, I wanted to know, is the point? Is there a point? Or does God preside over a world that lacks discernible meaning?
JERRY
Lord, what is the meaning or purpose of life--and of the world?
GOD
The meaning of the universe is not exactly a teleology, though this is not a bad concept. In other words, it is not a beginning-to-an-ending narrative of progress, with a single, simple outcome, such as reuniting with God. The meaning that encompasses (the entire story) is a total holistic meaning: they (various moments) are all bearers of this total meaning simultaneously and, in a sense, all the time. Think of the meaning of a body of work, such as Beethoven's symphonies. Their meaning does not depend on the Ninth being better than the First.
JERRY
Lord, I can understand a story-like meaning that goes from lower to higher, or worse to better. And I can understand a rather formal meaning in a single work, its patterns and structures and the like. But, frankly, I don't see that the collected symphonies have any overall meaning. What do You mean by meaning?
GOD
I can see this will take some time. You will come up with an analogy that works for you if you keep searching. You surely understand that a single symphony has a meaning--it certainly has a meaningful structure and sequence--yet "the purpose of a song is not to get to the end." The purpose is in the doing of it. Ask yourself, what is the doing of a life? (Of) a universe?
JERRY
Much of it is a struggle to achieve certain ideals--achieving justice, right versus wrong, and so forth.
GOD
Exactly, but that is not all. There is insight, understanding, beauty, love itself.
JERRY
Well, I meant ideals in a broader sense than just ethical values.
GOD
That is right.
JERRY
So we are supposed to achieve those things worth achieving?
GOD
It is for God to achieve them as well, for God to grow and develop.
JERRY
And purpose does not require a sequential, progressive pattern with a climactic ending?
GOD
That is correct. Beginning and end are much closer (to each other) than you imagine.
JERRY
Then You are working with individuals, both for their own growth and for the social and cosmic order?
GOD
Yes, though that does not sound as intimate as it is. One lover doesn't say of the other, "I am trying to call her into being, and trying to create a harmonious, well-ordered household." That is immensely too sterile. You are living in and through one another, enjoying each other's growth, feeling the pain of each other's heartbreak, and trying to create a life together that has value and reflects a range of values. But you falsify all that if you make it too means-ends, too instrumental in conception. It starts from an intimate core, just you and her and making a life together.
Why shouldn't the universe be like that? Why shouldn't that be the whole story of creation? You do not say about the love, oh, it's meaningless because it lacks a larger purpose. If you say that, it's not love. The universe is one great act of love. That is what it means to "call into being." The cosmic order reflects and promotes that. Analogously, the social order.
JERRY
So I should conceive of telling Your story as telling a love story, not so much the external drama of it (boy meets girl) as the intimate life of it.
GOD
Exactly. That is what Maritain meant when he talked about getting to know the mind of God.
JLM
Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain wrote, in A Preface to Metaphysics, that ontological knowledge "seeks to discover . . . the secrets of Being, . . . of love, of purely spiritual realities . . . above all, of God's interior life."
GOD
It is just as how you want to get inside the mind and heart of someone you love. You want to understand them from the inside out, you might say. I want you to understand Me from the inside out and, in those terms, how I have related to Abraham, Buddha, and others.
Don't worry whether Noah or Abraham is historical, or (about) historical controversies over Moses, Zoroaster, and others. Assume that the spiritual texts and historical records give you a good glimpse of what they were like and what they were up to and what they thought and said. In some cases, like Noah, it will not matter if there was exactly a Noah--he certainly represents a kind of man of an early time that I related to in an intimate way. Just take it on its own terms. If something is so wildly unhistorical that it actually contradicts My experience with mankind, I will tell you.
Abraham is a perfectly good place to start.
The most important part of the entire Old Testament is the Abraham story.
JERRY
What should I understand about Abraham?
GOD
He is, as I told you earlier, the first man who truly heard My voice--and recognized it as My voice. Although I appear in many ways, an important part of My nature is that I am One. I am a Person, and I am One. Polytheism is all good and well, but it utterly fails to grasp that fact, and as a result, it not only has an inadequate (partial) picture of the whole but it cannot be a sufficient guide to life or basis for interacting with Me.
As you can see, none of the other modes of revelation achieves that. The Eastern (the Chinese) relates to Me through an aestheticized nature, fine but incomplete. It is in error insofar as it takes the natural order to be fixed, impersonal, eternal, unchanging, regular, law-like. But I am a Person, willful, interested, engaged, unpredictable--I surprise even Myself--and that is essential not only to My story--you might just think, "Well, God isn't all He's cracked up to be"--but to the true nature of the Cosmos, the total reality.
In spite of its apparent polytheism, Egyptian religion is an important step toward monotheism, because it has a sense that God is personal and that the various gods are manifestations of a single God--not fully articulated except in the odd case of Akhenaten, but quite presupposed. The Egyptian God is, however, inadequate for guiding action.
And hence the importance of the contrast between Israel and Egypt, and the story or experience of Moses.
JERRY
Didn't the people of Israel experience You as acting in history, fighting battles for them, and the like?
GOD
Do not get carried away with that aspect. The chief thing was the divine encounter. They encountered Me as a self. I revealed Myself and I gave them a law.
JERRY
And monotheism?
GOD
I also revealed Myself as One God who demanded allegiance.
JLM
Scholars say that, in the earliest textual stratum, the God of Israel does not dispute the validity of the gods worshipped by other peoples.
JERRY
Lord, at the beginning, it seems, You were understood as just one god among many.
GOD
But always (as one) who demanded absolute obedience. The rest (the monotheism) flows from that.
JERRY
Why was revealing Yourself as a Person important, Lord?
GOD
First, because I am, among other things, a Person.
Second, it was the first step to personal guidance--once interiorized (as) a God personal to each individual, loving and guiding, not just in the abstract but a partner in each individual's life.
JERRY
Was Abraham a real historical person, Lord? Was Moses?
GOD
I know those are important questions in one way, but for our purposes, now at least, they are not. The stories reveal a truth. In the case of Moses, they reveal the truth of the inadequacy of the Egyptian revelation. Read these texts again and you will see Moses responding to the fully personal, fully One God, and seeing the inadequacy of the Egyptian lack of full articulation and realization of this. Confronted with the One God, their gods become false. The same is true of polytheism. Their gods are real--they are real manifestations of Me--but they are not final, not adequate.
JERRY
Well, is the idea of the One God final or adequate?
GOD
That is not the question for now, but you know the answer: of course it is not complete, and in that sense, a fuller, more adequate conception is needed. But for that, one has to relax some of the logical constraints that make it difficult to accept that God can be both One and many, a Person and much more than a person, immanent in nature and yet not reducible to nature.
JLM
I wanted to put God in a conceptual box. He wouldn't let me do it.