GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast

208. What's On Your Mind- Is God Really Speaking? A Philosopher’s Search for Truth in Divine Revelation

• Jerry L. Martin, Scott Langdon

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Join this week’s What’s On Your Mind for a profound exploration of divine communication, revelation, and existence. Scott and Jerry share their reactions to the first exchange between philosophers Jerry L. Martin and Richard Oxenberg—the dialogue that inspired Two Philosophers Wrestle with God: A Dialogue, now available on Amazon.

It begins with an email from Richard, whose bold questions spark a thought-provoking discussion about how God communicates across cultures and individuals. Together, the philosophers confront a universal challenge: discerning divine truth from human interpretation. Through their dialectic, they unravel the complexities of revelation, the interaction between the divine and the human, and the enduring mystery of God’s voice in the world.

This episode isn’t just a conversation- it’s an invitation to think deeply, stay curious, and seek clarity in life’s most essential questions. It offers a rare chance to experience a genuine philosophical journey into God, belief, and existence.

Stay curious, ask life’s deepest questions, and seek clarity about how God’s voice is heard in the modern world. 

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Explore the dialogue that sparked it all: Two Philosophers Wrestle with God: A Dialogue. Get your copy on Amazon.

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Scott Langdon 00:17: This is 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. 

Scott Langdon 01:10: Welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I'm Scott Langdon and it's time once again for What's On Your Mind. This week, Jerry and I break down the very first email Dr. Richard Oxenberg ever sent to Jerry and the story behind it. If you are a regular listener to the program, Richard's name is probably quite familiar to you. His conversations with Jerry are featured as a series in this podcast, as well as in a new book Two Philosophers Wrestle with God: A Dialogue which you can find right now on Amazon.

Scott Langdon 01:42: I really got a lot out of revisiting this email with Jerry. Richard's questions are ones many of us have, and Jerry's answers are informed by his desire to be true to his encounter with God. I hope you enjoy the episode. Welcome back everyone to another edition of What's On Your Mind, and this is where Jerry and I go into the email bag and take some emails and we see what your story is, how God is working and how you're experiencing things. And often, well, almost always, these emails are in response to the book God: An Autobiography is Told to a Philosopher, which is what this podcast is based on, what we continue to talk about and look at, and, Jerry, this particular email is a special one that goes kind of way back.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 02:38: Yeah, this is. You know, I've done these dialogues with Richard Oxenberg, now published as Two Philosophers Wrestle with God, but this predates those dialogues. This is the first… I had run into him at a meeting. He'd given a fascinating talk at a conference on radical evil, but then I happened upon him as I was actually leaving to the airport and it turned out he had been reading God: An Autobiography online before it was actually published but excerpts were being printed and was full of questions, and so I invited and I didn't have time to really go into it much, but I said send me an email and he did, and so this really goes back to that early time and one of the first really substantive responses that the book drew.

Scott Langdon 03:31: It's an interesting thing to kind of go back to the beginning, if you will. You know, when I came onto this project, you and Richard had already done a series of dialogues which have become the book Two Philosophers Wrestle With God: A Dialogue, and in between you guys doing those talks and the book coming out in the podcast, we made them into dialogues, and so I've worked a lot with Richard's audio, what he's had to say and what you've had to say, and it's been such a pleasure and a privilege to be able to kind of sit and dissect and take in the dialogues between the two of you. And so when I was thinking about this particular episode and which email would be interesting to dive into and one that would also be also included in the theme of this sort of unit of episodes where God is talking about how God communicates. Episode 22, our Life Wisdom episode that we just had last week with Ajit Das, and the two of you talked about that episode which is called I Learned How God Communicates and I thought this email would be really terrific because Richard Oxenberg, in this first email that he sends you in response to the invitation that you gave him, says okay, you know, I want to ask you some questions, and here's my intention. And so I thought we would take this email and break it down a little bit. We'd stop and go and kind of talk about it, maybe a little bit different of a format than we've done sometimes before, where we read the whole thing and talk about it. But let's break it down a little bit, and I want to start with his introduction.

Scott Langdon 05:16: This is what Richard Oxenberg first writes to you. He says:

A Letter from Dr. Richard Oxenberg: Hi Jerry, First, let me thank you for the invitation, and the opportunity, to comment on your book and ask you what may seem some pointed questions. These questions are asked, not in a spirit of skepticism or from a desire to cast doubt, but from a sincere desire to understand the nature and meaning of your experiences. After all, I=if God is going to speak to a philosopher, it must be that God is not averse to some Socratic-like investigation!”

Scott Langdon: Straight away. I feel like here is someone who is coming to this and asking questions not trying to defend, but really trying to, as Stephen Covey would say, seek first to understand.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 06:03: Yes, yes, it's an exploration of what is going on here, and he's also a trained philosopher, so you know we're used to the Socratic method and we're going to employ it here. And this is how you come to understand things is by asking questions.

Scott Langdon 06:22: Yeah. So he goes on and he says this:

A Letter from Dr. Richard Oxenberg: So, what I would be particularly interested in exploring with you, if you would be open to it, is how best to interpret your own experience of being addressed verbally by God. Of course, it is an experience reminiscent of that of the Hebrew prophets, and, for that matter, of Mohammed. But is the voice that speaks to you the same as that which spoke to Abraham, to Moses, to the prophets, to Mohammed? Is it the same as the voice behind the Vedas (which, in Hindu tradition, as I’m sure you know, is called ‘sruti’–that which is “heard”)? If so how do we account for the wide variation in these revelatory experiences? The Vedas, after all, don’t seem very much like the Hebrew Bible–at least not on the surface. And there are elements in all these texts that seem to me questionable as divine communication.

Scott Langdon: So that's the first part, and I'd like to stop there and kind of look into that part first.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 07:28: Yeah, let me start with where I… these are very good questions he's asking and that we would all have. You know he's formulated them with precision we might all readily command, but it's the very questions any thoughtful person is going to have about this, right? So God is speaking to Jerry, that's so Jerry reports God is speaking to Jerry. And then he wants to know. And then in my response to him that's actually posted on the website, I first say I reframe his question. First, is the voice that speaks to me the same voice as that which spoke to Moses and other prophets, the Hindu Vedas and so forth, and I've not prayed about Islam because of the time frame I was given, but the others I can answer yes, there is one God. One divine reality with many aspects, who, by voice, inspiration and other means, has communicated with prophets, seers and ordinary folk across the world and across the centuries. And I add that divine reality because God is not always thought of as a person and God doesn't come to everybody in this vivid, personal way God comes to me. And so we talked about the Tao, for example, the way, or we've just gone through some of the Chinese sensibility with the I Ching, for example, and so God comes in many ways.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin  09:03: But I think there's a prior point here that's worth emphasizing. How is it we know about God at all? And you know we have these scriptures and people usually just kind of start there. Okay, there are religions and you can get a textbook on world religions and it will name them for you and it will tell you what their main texts are and you can go study those texts. But how does all of that come about? Is it just culturally produced texts, the way you know, we have legends of King Arthur and the knights and so on? You know, is it just like ancient legends that then get written up as scripture and people build religions around them? A cultural phenomenon? But the answer I give, based on my experience, is no.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 09:51: These come out of communications, and this is what God tells me in the course of God: An Autobiography, that these are communications from God or the divine reality in some form or other, not necessarily the voice like to me and say to the Hebrew prophets or Muhammad, but in some way or other. But it's from God, from the divine reality itself. And that's how some Chinese seer sitting there realizes truths about the Tao, the way and it's because of this communication. And that then raises the problem and I take his second point in that section that you read, Scott, to be how then do we account for the variations among the various revelations and questionable parts of them? And I give him really a two-part answer at that time. This is a very good question because you'd think if there's one God, one divine reality that's communicating with people around the globe and through the ages, it would always be the same, it would stay the same thing. I assumed that at the beginning, also imposed that question and God gave me a rather long answer. That's in one of our episodes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 11:17: But there are two parts that I pick out here that I focus on, two explanations. The first is that each communication is partly shaped by the divine input and partly by the human receiver and his or her culture. There's no way that a Chinese person in the first century AD is going to communicate, receive communications, interpret them, even hear them, as a 21st century American in American English. You know people have commented God seems to speak to me in rather conversational American English and that's true. That's how it comes to me. And God explained at one point that's how revelation works, that God uses the human instrument.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 12:11: And you know that's how a Martian would work, communicating with human beings, going to speak to the Chinese person in Chinese right. I mean that's how the divine relating to human beings uses human equipment, language, human concepts, human institutions, standards of piety and ritual, and norms and values and so forth. God makes use of those. So the communication is divine, but also using these human elements, and then the second side of it is that the divine reality is complex, and here's the way I put it to Richard: the divine reality is complex and has aspects that seem like opposites to us, both immanent and transcendent, both personal and transpersonal, both encountered as profoundly other than us and yet somehow found deep inside us. And that's why I'm always taught to hold over and think both/and, both/and, both/and.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 13:17: For a logic professor that's difficult, and in fact for human thinking it's difficult, because we normally clarify things by making distinctions. You know, is this animal, vegetable or mineral? You know, we put things into categories in that way and then it turns out some things don't fit the categories. That's always disturbing, and then what do we do with that and so forth? But the divine reality especially, we have to think of the divine reality in terms of roughly speaking metaphors drawn from worldly experience. But the divine reality is even farther from these conceptual nets than funny animals.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 14:00: I'm reading about some life form that's an organism, except at a certain temperature it becomes a crystal, so it's not even an organic entity anymore, and I don't quite understand. If it gets warmer it pops back into being an organism and doing normal life functions. Okay, those things are always puzzling for us. Well, the divine is even stranger than that little organism that becomes a crystal, and we have to just allow that. And of course, God: An Autobiography takes us through an exploration of those odd both/ands which exist in some form in more or less every tradition, kind of the puzzling aspects where you can't quite nail it down. But the divine reality is like that and the human spiritual potentialities are like that. They can reach farther than these little conceptual boxes.

Scott Langdon 15:40: When you say the words came to me, like when God comes to people, and you know this is always a difficult thing for me to wrestle with but it automatically assumes that God was somewhere else and you're here, and that now God is here. So at one point you were without God. That's kind of the implication and I know it's more complicated than that- that it's the both/and that we've talked about. I'm curious about the duality of the communication, I think.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 16:29: I gather, Scott from our discussions that this always, in your growing up, religious context, early in life, this always seemed kind of threatening. That if you didn't just do the right thing, God was going to turn his back and disappear. And I understand that. But it's not at all part of my own religiosity. I experience God as other in the sense of the way I experience my wife as other. You know that she's someone I love, she loves me and so it's a relationship and I don't want to be her or have her be me, although there is, even in love between two persons, a kind of blending of two beings coming into one. But my sense, although we say God spoke to me and God wasn't speaking to me the moment before God spoke to me, God's omnipresent for me. The fact that God is intensely personal does not mean that God is ever really absent. You know, it's just God isn't talking to me all the time. And your idea of like a thought coming to you, well, you're probably thinking all the time, but a particular thought comes to you. Or sometimes you're not thinking, you're doing something else, you're working out and not processing any thoughts, but a thought comes to you and it is both, and here's the both/and. And I think you have a sense of this, Scott, you have against a background different from mine, but we both have that sense of both/and here that God is both differential, in the sense that sometimes God is telling us something. You get prompts from the divine, from what seemed like the divine you could just say from conscience, or is the sense that, oh, this is something I need to do, it's calling to me with my name on it, so that doesn't happen continuously and all the time. So there's that distinctiveness. And yet there is some other way. And even the traditions with a great distance, who speak of God as totally other, like Karl Barth, the great Protestant theologian, he also thinks God is in your heart. It's not that God is distant, God's distinct from the world in that kind of theology, completely distinct from the world, in fact. That's important to a guy like Karl Barth and a lot of Christian thinking, religious thinking. But that doesn't mean God is ever absent and doesn't mean God is actually far off the way the Martians are before they land. They're simply far off. But God is never far off and that's part of the puzzle, that's part of the both/and and the different religions, part of what I walked through in God: An Autobiography is God has me read the ancient scriptures of the different traditions.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 19:47: We come to the Chinese. The Chinese, for example, we've been talking about I Ching, and the Chinese had a sense of harmony. That's a fundamental concept in their cosmology. The cosmos is a cosmic harmony and in their sociology, you might say their social ethics is an ethics of harmony, of everyone being in the right place and in the right roles and behaving properly to one another. In terms of those, that's a principle of harmony. And the Chinese just had that. And as God kind of gives the account, well, God realizes- I am kind of cosmic harmony. You know that's right, it's the way this often happens to us as we discover a feature of ourselves in situations that draw out that feature. Oh, I do have this talent, or it may be a weakness, we discover, but whatever it is, we discover facets of ourselves in situations. Well, God is doing that in this very intense interaction with human beings.

Scott Langdon 20:57: Moving on to the second part of the email, I wanted to break it up into these sort of two parts because I wanted to hear Richard's questions and then hear how you addressed them and to talk about them a little bit more, to elaborate some. And then the second part, though I wanted to offer his hypothesis. So he asks you know, how do we account for a wide variation in these revelatory experiences? And so he goes on to say this:

A Letter From Dr. Richard Oxenberg 21:28: Here is one hypothesis I would suggest to you: I myself have never been verbally addressed by God. My inner thought occurs in words for the most part, but I have never supposed these words to be anything but my own. And yet, at times, I have had moments of what seem to me ‘inspiration,’ in which I will suddenly see or understand something at a meta-verbal level. Then I will struggle to find the words with which to express it. Could it be that the translation of meta-verbal inspiration into words, which occurs for me at a conscious level, is happening for you at an unconscious level, so that your first awareness of it is of the words themselves? Might this, indeed, help to explain the experiences of other prophets as well? If so, then this might allow us to account for the variability we find in these revelatory accounts. Perhaps your translation of inspiration into words is colored by your particular personality, prior understandings, proclivities, etc., such that what you finally ‘hear’ is not God per se, but God as mediated by, and perhaps even modified by, Jerry Martin (and, of course, we might say something of the same for other prophets who have reported such experiences). This would not invalidate your experience, but it would relativize, finitize, and particularize it to some degree. And it would allow for the possibility that what you hear and report is not a perfect reflection of the divine. So there is my first question for you, Jerry. And, again, I ask it, not from a spirit of skepticism, but from a desire to make sense of all this. I look forward to your reply. Thanks so much! Richard.

Scott Langdon 23:15: So again, the spirit of inquiry and understanding comes not only out in his questions, but then also a possible hypothesis, a possible another way of seeing this. And I think that your answer to this hypothesis in this question is important because of how God explains to you what His communication is about to you. He says here is why I am, here's what I want you to specifically do. So, I think this answer is important.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 23:55: Yeah, yeah, I've answered part of this already, because even in this question Richard is assuming if God is speaking to Jerry, then it should be that God is telling Jerry the same thing as what God told the Buddha or the ancient Hindus or etc. etc. But we've explored that assumption and it's not a valid assumption and God explains why and shows the alternative reality of God expressing different sides of divine self to different people, in part because of the very factors that Richard is mentioning now, the factors, they're in a different situation, they have different language, they have concepts, they have, you might say, biases, preferences. Some things make sense to them and other things don't, and that varies from one culture to another. What one takes to make sense, you know, and so I don't think the Hebrew prophets or Muhammad talk much about harmony, for example, in the way the Chinese find so very natural as a pinnacle value, a value at the top of the heap of values, is harmony and it makes sense of all the other values, for that certain Chinese way of thinking that they find so natural, and yet it's very different from the other ways of thinking and God is making use of that. So that's a crucial thing to accept that God has many aspects and is making use of all of these cultural and linguistic differences to express those aspects and to use those aspects to relate to human beings. To relate to human beings through those aspects that this or that culture will find available to them. God has to make God's self available to people, right, and I always say…

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 26:04: However, anybody wants to interpret this in terms of you know what he's trying to think of the divine mechanisms, I always say I do not have any idea what the physics of the divine voice are, just don't know. I have a theory about that. I don't feel I need a theory about that. If some people need a theory and come up with it and maybe Richard has done that, that's fine with me. The crucial thing, not to get lost in that expedition to explain, is that there's still the crucial component is God, is the divine reality communicating, and you can have whatever theory of that communication you want and you can acknowledge the mix of cultural factors, personal factors, biases, whatever you want to throw into that total account. I mean, religions and human experience are extremely complex after all, there are many aspects and factors. That's all fine, but a crucial factor is the divine reality communicating, and not just communicating but, you might say, living your life with you, that kind of cohabitation, co-partnering that the divine engages in in these multiple ways with different cultures, through different religions, with different people.

Scott Langdon 27:33: The question for me becomes how do you know that you're being communicated to from God and not your own ego, right? So I guess it's not so much the idea that God would be communicating that I have a problem with. We've been doing this for four and a half years and if I didn't believe that God communicated with you, we wouldn't be doing it.

Scott Langdon 27:55: So if people ask me something like you know, do you think it's true what happened to Jerry? I said yes, because it happened to Jerry. Just like I'm telling you I went to Wawa this morning and got a Snickers bar and ate it.. You didn't see me do that, but I told you that and you believe that that happened because that was my experience. So, in that way I don't have any trouble and I don't really have trouble anymore it's in terms of that God communicates.

Scott Langdon 28:27: I used to, I, you know, because I didn't think that this personal God existed the way I understood that to be. But what I do wonder about now is the discernment, and we talk a lot about that. You know we have to discern, but it seems like right now, especially in America, and the election has just happened, and one side really feels like God's will is being done and the other side feels like God's will is not being done. And so we say, well, because of these communications, I feel like God is saying this and the other side, the complete opposite side, it seems. It seems like it's complete opposite goes no, God is telling me to do this.

Scott Langdon 29:15: And it seems like throughout history and a lot of folks blame religion on this, I'm thinking you don’t blame religion, you blame it's what people have done, but have carried the one side with God's banner and the other side with God's banner and we've had war over: God says this. So what is it that God is ultimately communicating? Is it the way of love? Because, again, some people say, well, this is love and other people say that's not love. So I mean, how do we determine that it is God communicating?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 29:57: Well, I would tend to step away from the political example, because people are so emotionally invested in one answer or the other that it's very hard to have the kind of careful analysis of the kind that Richard Oxenberg brings to the dialogue with me. We're not arguing about our politics. People are unusually committed to their political views, maybe even more these days than to any religious view. But just a step back a little. When the voice first occurred to me, God spoke to me. The voice was undeniable, it was real. It was as real as anything could be.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 30:44: However, I'm a philosopher and I knew the fact that something comes to me as vibrantly real doesn't automatically make it real. You can be mistaken about anything. I believe there's no category of certainty in the realm of knowledge. I mean epistemologists. Some believe there is certain categories of certainty. I don't accept that. I think we're fallible. Wall-to-wall, end-to-end about everything, but that doesn't mean we don't know anything. It's just hard to know which parts of what we believe are knowledge and which aren't.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 31:21: And so I called a philosopher friend who teaches at a religious college and thought ah, I bet he can be helpful and said is there any literature on how do you tell If you think God's telling you something? You think something is a divine message, it can be prompting, just like conscience or something. And well, you know, people don't ponder that much about conscience. But the same problem actually arrives there how do you know that what's prompting your conscience is really valid? All these things are subject to further questioning. And he said oh, that's the problem of spiritual discernment. I didn't even have the concept because all this religion stuff was new to me. It turned out there's a vast literature on spiritual discernment and another way of treating the question in Eastern traditions. This is the crucial epistemological question, not just for religions and worldviews as a whole, but for daily life.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 32:25: If I think this is something I'm called to do, how do I know that that urge is right? There are many ways you can be wrong. It can be just a little ego thing. I want to be the person to the rescue whoop-a-dee-doo, you know, make myself a kind of little hero. So you have to look at those and this deserves, of course, a longer discussion than we have right now.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 32:49: But the crucial question always if you want to accept that God can prompt you in some way may or may not be a voice, but God can prompt you in some way, put a task in front of you or a feeling at the pit of your stomach or, you know, can come many ways. How do you know that that's God and not one of these many other things that can push and pull the human animal, you know? But that's the crucial question. It's almost like the crucial question of life is how do you tell a crap from clay you know that's what they used to say- how do you tell real coin from counterfeit? There's a lot of counterfeit in life, a lot of counterfeit. Counterfeit is often attractive. Its attractiveness is not a sufficient criterion. You need some means other than that, and I end up just to put a tag on it for this discussion. Maybe we can revisit it sometime in the book that I'm just bringing out.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 34:10: Radically Personal, I call it the clarified soul, and I think a lot of traditions have some version of that.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 34:21: You need to get all the other detritus out of your way so that you can discern with clarity and not in a cloudy way, clouded by your own ego, fears, hopes, desires, greed, lust. You know, whoever you know, whatever it might be, these cross currents of feeling, even daily distractions oh I've got to get to the bank before it closes can get in the way of: Shouldn't I stop to help this person? No, I'm trying to get to the bank before it closes, but maybe I should stop and help this person, even if it means I don't get to the bank today. So you know, you have to get these other distractions. It's often just a matter of, like, clearing the scene. Get these other distractions out of your soul, as it were, out of your inner pits, and look at it with an open heart and mind and without distraction.

Scott Langdon 35:19: Well, we want to thank Richard Oxenberg for this email. We're going way deep into the email bag for this one, but it started a lot of really great things. The discussion that has gone all the way to Two Philosophers Wrestle with God: A Dialogue, the new book that's out now you can look on Amazon and grab that and this is a wonderful discussion. Jerry, I really appreciate it.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 35:43: Thank you.

Scott Langdon 36:01: Thank you for listening to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. Subscribe for free today wherever you listen to your podcasts and hear a new episode every week. You can hear the complete dramatic adaptation of God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin by beginning with episode one of our podcast and listening through its conclusion with Episode 44. You can read the original true story in the book from which this podcast is adapted, God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher, available now at amazon.com, and always at godanautobiography.com. Pick up your own copy today. If you have any questions about this or any other episode, please email us at questions@godanautobiography.com, and experience the world from God's perspective as it was told to a philosopher. This is Scott Langdon. I'll see you next time.