God is not supernatural.
Human PERCEPTION is SUB-natural.
God is what is - the true reality of nature itself.
“But God exists beyond the laws of nature!”
The known laws of nature, yes.
When I think of God as ‘what is” (which, for me, makes every ‘Good News’ claim about God suddenly make sense), then God IS the laws of nature. Which is precisely what makes God seem mysterious and other-worldly: because we do not have a perfect understanding of the laws of nature. The known laws of nature are incomplete, as any scientist will tell you.
“God,” then, is not some heavenly man DETACHED from what is, but what REALLY is, in REALITY, the actual reality that we do not fully grasp.
God, by this definition, is not mystical or ethereal or other-worldly but concretely real. It’s our thinking that is mystical, ethereal and other-worldly. We create stories of “worlds,” of “pasts” and “futures” and “me’s” and “you’s” (and “Gods!”) that aren’t really there and then we credit some invisible ghost-like man for doing it all.
“Have faith!” they say. But finding faith is not about having your head in the clouds and ignoring reality, it’s getting your head OUT of the clouds and getting REAL in the strictest sense of the word.
The search for God is about questioning what I really know, who I really am, and where the real border is between me and anything else in the universe.
Wherever I get a glimpse of the true answers to these questions, I find God, and when I do, faith is automatic. The truth becomes undeniable. That’s faith. Not blindly believing what someone tells you you should - which is just lying to yourself. It’s impossible to believe what you don’t believe. There is no God that wants you to believe what you don’t believe, no God that wants anything that isn’t.
But don’t believe me. Question your thoughts and find out for yourself. They call it “praying.”
If God is what is truly real, then Prayer is a process of seeking to understand what is truly real (and what is not). Anything I do in a wholehearted, open-minded search for the truth is prayer.
Understood this way, there is no problem between God and Science. Understood this way, scientists are some of the most prayerful people on the planet. They are getting closer to God every day, though they may not call it “God” - and who cares what name is used? Any name will do.
If I want to know God, I can work like a scientist to discover the Truth. All I have to do is get real about what I truly know, what I truly am and open myself to seeing clues into the true nature of reality, the REAL reality beyond my story.
“Sure,” you may say. “But what’s the harm in just calling our limited understanding ‘Nature,’ and calling God ‘more than that’ or ‘supernatural.’”
Well, there’s no harm in it. But it does appear to cause some unnecessary confusion. It seems to separate me from the peaceful, whole and totally safe existence I’m being guided to notice through a relationship with God. I’m liable to suffer unnecessarily from the idea of a ghostlike, supernatural guy for whom I must deny or transcend the “natural” in order to have that relationship. It seems to put up barriers I don’t need.
It’s true that to see God, I’ll need to transcend how I habitually see the world, but I’m not denying REALITY when I do that, I’m giving up my ILLUSIONS. I’m committing to fully living in the world AS IT IS.
Since it is quite obviously true that my understanding and experience of the universe is severely limited, it seems silly to me to claim my limited understanding as “natural” and refer to God as something other-than-natural. It just seems more accurate - and more helpful in overcoming my own suffering - to notice that my human experience falls FAR SHORT of what is, and that what I’m really seeking in a search for God is the true nature of reality itself, that “the true nature of reality itself” is all I mean when I say “God.”
Looking at it this way, a search for God stops requiring otherworldly saintliness or sanctimony and just becomes a reasonable search for the Truth (and through it, the Way, and the Life), something we all want and are already searching for.
What do I have to lose in a search for a God that is perfectly natural - aside from my own false notions about What Is?