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

215. What's On Our Mind: Exploring Life’s Purpose and Intimacy with God

• Jerry L. Martin, Scott Langdon

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In this thought-provoking episode, Jerry L. Martin and Scott Langdon explore profound spiritual and philosophical questions that strike at the heart of human existence. What is the purpose of life? How do we find meaning in our daily experiences? And what does it mean to truly fall in love with God?

Drawing on Jerry’s divine conversations detailed in God: An Autobiography, they discuss the concept of a non-teleological approach to life, where meaning lies in the "doing" rather than achieving an ultimate goal. Discover how God’s relationship with humanity evolves through cultures, from Ancient Israel to modern interpretations of love, harmony, and growth.

This episode examines profound topics, including divine encounters, God’s omnisubjectivity—engaging with all human stories—and the intimate nature of connecting with God in everyday life. It invites listeners to reflect on spiritual growth, the challenges of moral dilemmas, and the larger questions of existence.

Through thoughtful dialogue, the episode illuminates the universe as a great act of love and explores how God participates in and grows alongside creation.

Would you like to be featured on the show or have questions about spirituality or divine communication? Share your story or experience with God- we'd love to hear!

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The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

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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 01:18: Welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast, I’m your host Scott Langdon, and this week I join Jerry and we discuss What’s On Our Mind. When Jerry gets to the point in his journey with God where he asks, what's the point of it all?, God challenges Jerry's means/ends view of things by explaining the meaning of a song is not to get to the end, it's in the doing of it. What is the doing of a life, God asks, of a universe? Join Jerry and me for another episode of What's on Our Mind. We're so grateful you're here. I hope you enjoy the episode.

Scott Langdon 02:00: Welcome back everybody, to another edition of What's On Our Mind. I'm Scott Langdon here with Jerry Martin. What a fascinating group of episodes we have to talk about this week, Jerry.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 02:11: Well, I really think so, Scott, and I'm just delighted and eager to talk, particularly about episode 23, which I also then discussed with Richard Oxenberg. But I had my own thoughts and journey.

Scott Langdon 02:28: Yeah, I had my own thoughts and journey about this episode too. It was really one where, when we were making the audio adaptation and we got to this point, it really flowed naturally with my experience of the God book and the God book journey that I was on. So when we got to episode 23, I was starting to feel like this is all cool, what's the point of it all? And that happens to be just kind of where you get to in this journey. You've done all the reading, you've done the conversations with God, you've done all the, and it's just well why. What's the point of it all? So a really fascinating episode, ripe with a lot of interesting insights and implications for our lives.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 03:10: Yeah, I think of it as a big questions episode, because I'm praying about this and that. Often it's, you know, texts that I've been guided to in this or that religion and we've been praying intensely about those particulars, or I've got some question on my mind: ego, love, suffering, evil, whatever. And then every once in a while, you know, I'm preoccupied with each of those particular topics and every once in a while it's this oh, I've been swimming under water across the Atlantic and I want to come up. Hey, where am I? You know, what is the story? What is the big thing? I'm kind of lost in the particulars. And here I wanted to know, I asked God, what is the point of it all? Is there just this, that and the other thing? And I'm right, my intellectual curiosity would be satisfied because God was answering all these questions I kept asking, but I had a deeper yearning that was profoundly unsatisfied, and that was the yearning to know what's the point of it all? Because is there a point, I ask, or is it a world with no discernible meaning? To me, you know, a meaning is to have a point, for there to be a point.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 04:29: And God then challenges that notion of meaning. You know, meaning is not… He says I've got to give up the story-like meaning, I've got to give up the means-ends comparison. We're doing this in order to have that outcome kind of thinking, and then I think about patterns and structures as a kind of meaning. You know that works of art might have those patterns. But then God reminds me, this is God to Jerry.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 04:58: The purpose of a song is not to get to the end. The purpose, God says, is in the doing of it. Ask yourself, what is the doing of a life, of a universe? Well, I say, much of it is to achieve certain ideals. You know values, you know you try to achieve things that are worth achieving, something like that. And well, yes, God says, but there's also things like that aren't the struggle to achieve an outcome, things like insight, understanding this is God's list, beauty, love itself. And there's those things that, without necessarily moving from beginning to a kind of culminating point, and so I try to restate it in a more general way well, it's for growth, or something like that, our individual growth, person, social growth, cosmic growth. And God says yes, though that does not sound as intimate as it is, God goes on.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 06:15: “One lover doesn't say of the other. I'm 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, trying to create a life together that has a value and reflects a range of values. But you falsify all of 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.” Well, okay, I understand that, certainly in personal terms, but I wonder how could you talk about the whole cosmic story that way? But God goes on to say 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.” And so that I thought was a very fascinating set of comments and a correction that I have to be corrected. A lot of these things where I have a wrong conception, like I can think either/or, and God keeps saying no, think both/and you know that's my training as a logic professor, and here it's just one sense of human life often is you're working hard to achieve something, to have an outcome, and most of the daily things we do seem to be to earn a living, to stay healthy and so forth and to take care of the people we care about, and do work such that we can take pride in it, that we're satisfied by what we've done. So we have all those means-ends, relationships in life. But there are some things that aren't means-ends and the contemplative values that God mentioned earlier, like just understanding, beauty, those are not you're trying to huff and puff and achieve something, you're just taking something in. Insight is on that list of God. Aha, okay, before I didn't understand something, now it becomes clear to me. Aha, well, that's a great value. So not everything is in this means/end structure and story-like structure where often you feel the outcome in a well-constructed play, usually there's a kind of climactic moment at the end where something is achieved, often insight or character transformation. The character realizes something not realized before or may realize that the life project being pursued came to no good, you know, was upended, and ah well, that's an insight too, when you think, oh, this didn't work, my particular way of going about life, and so, okay, that's an insight. But here it's intimate. And yet that intimate thing from the inside is what the universe is about, and of course that's puzzling, and later on there's more in the episode that may help clarify that. But what struck you about that, Scott?

Scott Langdon 10:06: Struck me really deeply in this episode and in this conversation that you have with God is the doing of it part. You know He asks what is the doing of a life? When you ask Him, Lord, what's the meaning and the purpose of this life, what's the meaning of being in this world, God comes right back to you with the meaning is not a teleology. He says to you this isn't a bad concept, but it's not a beginning to end narrative with a single simple outcome, such as reuniting with God. And that struck me because that seemed to be the basis of the theology I grew up with, which is you know you're born, you go out, you go through life, you get to an age of say, 13 or so, or age of accountability, they call it and you kind of make your decision if you're going to follow and in my case it was you know follow Jesus or not. And then you kind of go through life and you get to the end of it and you get to the gates of heaven and St Peter has a book and are you in the Book of Life or are you not? And if you're in, you're in. If you're not, maybe purgatory. If you're Catholic, maybe straight to hell if you're not. I mean, it was very kind of clear cut, very teleological. Very much about this reuniting with God in the end. Jesus in the Christina faith comes on to the scene as the savior, as the on ewho you would otherwise be away from God had it not been for Jesus dying and taking care of all that, like any sine you could do, its all wiped had it not been for Jesus dying and taking care of all of that, like any sin you could do, it's wiped away now. And that was very singular.

Scott Langdon 12:04: And I just felt like what that led to for me was I didn't sign up for this game. Nobody told me the rules. I didn't agree to them. This doesn't seem fair. I'm just kind of chucked down here and expected to figure out this path, this teleological way, and if I don't, I'm doomed. I just, I'm not interested. It just got to... It got to that and I think that in a way, led to the full surrender. Finally was I'm just not interested in, I can't make that happen. That can't be right, is it? And this feeling inside was this deeper thing that God talks to you about. No, it's not a bad concept to walk on a path and move forward, but it's about the… It seemed like God is going not a long way, but a longer way to say it's about the present moment, the doing of it. What are you doing in the moment? It seems a way of talking about it in that way.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 13:06: Yeah, you think about so many of our activities. You're a musician as well as an actor and many other things. But why do you make music? Well, it's certainly not to get to the end of that piece of music, as God reminds me about a song. But it's also not, I mean it can be, to earn money, you know, hit record or this audience will pay me, but it's not necessarily that. That's not basically why people make music. They make music for the purpose of making music. You know, it's a valuable activity in and of itself. Making music, singing, dancing, we don't do these things for some further purpose. But then the doing of a life you know, that's kind of a big question the doing of a life, the doing of a universe. Well, it's also about love. And love is as God is explaining here: if you think love is instrumental for some purpose, then it's not love, that's not the nature of love. And if you think, oh, love requires some further meaning, it's insufficient, well that's not love either. Love doesn't require that answer. And I've often thought people who believe life is meaningless. There are people who say life is meaningless, life is absurd. I thought they're not in love. There's nobody they love. If you love somebody, then that makes no sense to say this is meaningless. It's full of meaning but it's not a means and meaning, and God keeps trying to correct me on that.

Scott Langdon 15:15: When you ask God, you say didn't the people of Israel experience You as acting in history, fighting battles for them and the like? And God comes right back in and He says do not get carried away with that aspect. The chief thing was the divine encounter. They encountered Me as a self.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 15:34: You're talking about ancient Israel.
Scott Langdon 15:36: I'm talking about ancient Israel, there, a little bit later on in this episode, God's talking to you about coming in contact with different peoples. The reason that I bring this up is that, whether it's a group of people so ancient Israel, for example in this example that God gives, or the personal, there is this divine encounter that God is always wanting to point out and point up, and that divine encounter is this love that you're talking about. So, if you think about, in doing work, let's say, if you're doing work that you love, we talk about it like that. I'm doing work that I love and it doesn't even seem like work, or the time goes by so quickly and I didn't realize it because I loved my work. That is a divine encounter. When you think of Abigail, or I think of Sarah, and Sarah and I have a conversation, and there's the wanting to do something, not just for me to get a good feeling, but to know that if I do this thing, it will make Sarah's life a little easier, it will help her in some way, and so I do it because I know that she will get something positive out of it. Now, does that also enhance me? Yes, that divine encounter.

Scott Langdon 17:10: What is the divine encounter? It's love. It seems to be the very thing. Why can't the universe be like that, is what God says, why can't it be like this great, great, big act of love? So everything, if you can look around and see everything, even the trials, the things, people coming at me, if I can look at that and go, what's going on here that this could be a divine encounter in some way. It's tricky, it's delicate, but I'm looking for the divine encounter.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 17:44: Yeah, and the divine encounter... I think you're quite right, Scott. It's not just in the wonderful moments, though that's easiest to understand, just those wow moments. You know, just the beautiful sunset. Or you see the Grand Canyon if you've ever been there it just takes your breath away. So there are those wow moments of romantic love and of family gatherings. Some people, if they were fortunate, had that around Christmas, with their family coming together.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 18:14: Well, those are wonderful moments where it's easy to understand how God is a—there's a divine element in all of that. God is present to all of that. But God is also with the drunk who has his head in the gutter you know, dead drunk. God is there with him. And with the mugger who just mugged him because he was easy market as a guy staggering along the sidewalk and the mugger just grabbed his wallet and ran down the street. God is on all of these and that's harder to figure out because God is in, on our side, but God is not absent from the guy running away with the drunk's wallet. You know, God is also there. And it's hard to explicate that because that doesn't mean that's okay or ideal.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 19:09: At one point I have this objection where God is talking along these lines and I said well, that sounds as if Lady Macbeth is just okay and God says, no, it's as if you're not listening to Me. Evil is wrong and has to be fought in the world. You've got to put a stop. If someone's trying to break into your house, you've got to stop them, you know, and it may require force. Okay, that's part of life too. But the drama of life that includes these ups and downs and elements of struggle and contending wills, even, God is part of that drama, and that is the drama of God's life as well, that God is in these struggles and God can understand better than we can the evil of the evildoer. God can, you might say, fully relate to that as well.

Scott Langdon 20:26: One of the other things I found really fascinating and I wanted to get your insight on this and what you thought about it, because it's a line that goes by pretty quickly from God. It's at the beginning of the episode where you ask God, straight away what is the meaning of it all, and in fact you say to Him, Lord, what is the meaning or purpose of life and of the world? And God goes in to give an explanation. The meaning of the universe is not exactly a teleology. He goes on to give an example, Beethoven symphonies.

Scott Langdon 21:02: Right that, think of the meaning of a body of work such as these nine symphonies of Beethoven. The meaning does not depend on the ninth being better than the first. And you come back and you say, Lord, I can understand a story like meaning that goes from lower to higher or worse to better, a story like meaning. But I don't understand the idea of what you mean by Beethoven's works having a meaning. What do You mean by meaning?

Scott Langdon 21:27: And God says I can see this is going to take some time. And here's the thing He says that's really interesting to me. God says you will come up with an analogy that works for you if you keep searching. And then He goes on, you surely understand a single symphony and He talks about it a little bit more, but that sentence: you will come up with an analogy that works for you if you keep searching. He doesn't say to you you'll come up with the right answer at some point. If your heart is right and you keep studying, if you pray every day and you wonder what would Jesus do, the right answer will come to you. Instead, He says you'll come up with an analogy that works for you, basically giving you permission to deal in story, to deal in the way we seem to be most fundamentally dealing with the world in reality, which is trying to make meaning and understanding of it. How did that strike you?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 22:22: Even the most fundamental things we're talking about, they aren't all esoteric that we've been talking about. They're not occult, certainly, and yet how do you understand life? How do you understand suffering? How do you understand the ways in which life is? Sort of like a story. That's an analogy that works well for certain purposes and context, but it doesn't quite cover everything and it leaves out things God names and you have to look for which ones you connect with, and that's one of the points of my forthcoming book, be out within the month.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 23:04: Radically Personal, that your journey with God is intensely personal in ways that are suggested here in this episode 23. God is saying look, love isn't just some big schmear, or the purpose of the point of it all isn't some big schmear. You've got to get more intimate. Imagine two lovers. Well, that's, of course, itself an analogy, but it's an analogy that suggests how you come to understand somebody and you try to understand them, you might say, from the inside out, which is part of what God is trying to get us to do in God: An Autobiography, to understand what it's like to be God. When He first tells me that, I thought I didn't think there was anything that's what it's like to be God. You know God is just serene, eternal and changing and so forth, sitting there in His glorious perfection. But that's not the story. And if you say that, then you're not going to understand what it's like to be God, the intimate life of God. And if you do that, to say the woman you fall in love with and just put her on a pedestal, and treat her as a goddess and not as an actual woman with her own intimate life, then you're not relating to her really. You're relating to your own image of her.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 24:28: A lot of religion has that problem. Some of the things you've talked about, Scott, seem to be people start worshiping their own beliefs and their own symbols and images instead of worshiping God. You know they're more wedded. In fact, you know it's one of the things in Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor you probably remember it better than I do, Scott that the Grand Inquisitor shows how Jesus encounters the Grand Inquisitor and the Grand Inquisitor starts to explain. You know you've got it all wrong. You know you shut up. I can have you locked up in 15 minutes, you know, for heresy of some kind. Well, if that's the enforcer of some official set of doctrines, images and so forth.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 25:16: Well, what's the story of God: An Autobiography, a lot of which is recounted here? Moses, how Moses, in effect, took a step beyond the polytheism of the Egyptians. And then, well, the Chinese are doing something different. It leaves out the personal God, so that's a limitation, but it's got in all these elements. And God says everybody leaves something out. Okay, well, you don't get it all. That's not the aim.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 25:46: God came to each culture. He says, with what that culture was prepared to hear and understand and to act on. God is using the resources. The Chinese and their whole culture have a great sense of harmony in their cosmology, in their art, in their pottery, anything you want to name. It's about harmony.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 26:12: At that point God realizes ah, I have that aspect to Myself because the Chinese are picking up on it, and that's how it is in our personal relations. You know, you meet a good woman. She's going to see things in you you don't see yourself. She's going to see the strong points and the weak points and will probably know you better than you know yourself. But you'll learn from that, right, you'll learn from that and you'll grow from that, and that itself is an interaction of love. And that's the kind of interaction we're having with God as we go along is that living together through the long course of history and in the total human story, through the many cultures, we and God have quite a complicated, you might say, narrative together.

Scott Langdon 27:05: When God says the beginning and the end are much closer than you imagine. That's also really interesting to me, because what He's saying is for God to grow and develop and purpose does not require a sequential, progressive pattern with a climactic ending. God says that's correct, beginning and end are much closer than you imagine. So it seems like in the doing of it and in fact God kind of talks about it this way like it's for God to grow as well, not just individuals and cultures, but for God to grow. So in the doing of a thing like you just mentioned, God says oh yeah, I have this aspect of Myself and God discovers that through the doing of it.

Scott Langdon 27:58: I've talked about this a little bit before that, like last year, I was playing Lord Leonard Aster in Peter and the Starcatcher and there was this great scene with him and his daughter and Scott the actor learned scott's self by performing this character. I checked in on myself and my relationship with my own children because I was in the personhood of the manifestation, if you will, of Lord Leonard Aster in this world. And I just got some insight into that, into my children and my relationship with them, but I also got an insight, it seemed like God was giving me an insight into what it's like to be God. In a sense, He was saying that's how it is for Me, sort of. When you have a struggle or you come up with an epiphany and you go aha, I'm also going aha, because in a sense, I am you. That's fascinating to me. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 29:00: Yeah, that sounds exactly right, Scott. God says you know what is My story, this is later in the book, what is My story? Well, My story is all of your stories that God is living through: Scott's story, Jerry's story and the story of Abigail and the next-door neighbor and down the street. God is living through each of these stories and I hadn't thought of that kind of insight, but it's a good one.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 29:32: There's a very interesting book by someone I write about in my forthcoming book. I always have trouble remembering her name. The book is called Omnisubjectivity. It was the Aquinas Lectures at Marquette University, omni-subjectivity. And she's a Catholic, a very good philosopher. (Linda Zagzebski) I wish her name might come to me or maybe I can give it to you after the program and you can work it in somewhere. We can put it in the notes. But anyway, it starts from this.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 30:08: She starts with a Christian, with the Christian assumption God knows everything. Omniscience, ah well, does God know what it's like to have a toothache? It seems puzzling because you've got this eternal and changing, perfect God. How on earth could God know what it's like to have a toothache? He could know it the way a doctor might know it. You know they always tell you beforehand this will pinch or whatever, before a shot. Okay, but he's not feeling that pinch. He knows it because he's also been pinched. But God hasn't been pinched except insofar as Jerry, at the dentist, has had a toothache and been shot into that gum and ouch experience. And so the argument, she's a straight-line Catholic as far as I could tell, except she's willing to think boldly on her own as an extremely capable philosopher. That look, and she calls it an additional divine attribute, one of the attributes of God has to be engaging in your and my subjectivities, not being out there, and of course the non-dualists are not going to have a problem with that. But in this more complex version that is reflected in God: An Autobiography, God is both outside and inside, is both different from us and the same from us, and that violates my either-or kind of mentality, but if you work you can kind of start understanding that a bit. God is inside us enough to know what it's like to have a toothache or a heartbreak or to face old age as I'm doing at this point. God knows what it's like because God is also intimately engaged in Scott's life and Jerry's life and the next life over.

Scott Langdon 32:35: 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.