Evolving God

I was originally supposed to be in dialogue with Tim Miller of Our Evolving God, but he had to take care of a loved one and so missed this year’s Theology Beer Camp in Kansas City. He prepared some remarks that were read by a friend just prior to when this recording starts. In short, he proposed that God learned to love through encountering creaturely suffering. This goes beyond saying God acquires new knowledge. The proposal is that God’s compassion and moral character themselves develop.

Here’s a transcript of my remarks, slightly edited for readability:

I come at the relationship between God and evolution from a somewhat different direction than Tim Miller does, and perhaps from a different direction than many people at this gathering. I wasn’t raised within and convinced of the truth of Christianity as a young person and then confronted with evolution, wondering how to reconcile the two. I was far more interested in science and learning about nature. My encounter with Christ came later.

My mother is Christian, more or less evangelical, though of a unique variety, and my father is Jewish. My mom never forced Christianity on me. But growing up, relating to her and asking questions, I was never quite satisfied with what I considered her dogmatic and fearful views. She is a very loving person, yet there were certain people and political persuasions about which she could suddenly become hateful. I struggled to make sense of that.

When I was eleven or twelve, I started getting really interested in science. I was picking up books by Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins and reading about Darwin, evolutionary biology, and all the ways the living world is not intelligently designed. Nature, I came to understand, was red in tooth and claw, full of tremendous suffering and extinction. As for the human social world, 9/11 happened while I was just beginning high school. I came of age in a world at war. If there is supposed to be this all-powerful loving God, what was hell going on here on earth? By my early teens, I had become a pretty brach and annoying, know-it-all atheist.

At seventeen or eighteen, I began reading more psychology and encountered Carl Jung. I read Answer to Job without fully understanding it, but I knew there was something important there. Jung presents a vision of God evolving: an unconscious Yahweh, jealous and angry, allows Job to be tortured, only to encounter in Job a morality exceeding his own. In Jung’s telling, Yahweh is confronted with the realization that his creatures have become more moral than he is. God must become human to catch up with Job. Incarnation becomes necessary for God’s own moral development. I found that very interesting.

Then, when I was nineteen, I had an experience of Christ that changed me. I don’t know that I would call myself Christian now. I have never quite found a church in which I feel comfortable. But I have a relationship with this being whom I know to be real, and that relationship drives how I live.

This morning, for example, I really wanted to talk to the Westboro Baptist protesters.

I could feel how much they were suffering. To be convinced of eternal damnation…it makes me want to cry. I wanted to understand them, to give them someone to talk to, though perhaps they wouldn’t have been interested.

Whatever drives that desire in me does not feel like my ordinary psychology. At the surface, I feel plenty of anger toward them. Their hateful behavior makes me furious. But there is another part of me that wants to meet the suffering underlying their behavior, to show them some compassion. That is not me, that is the Christ in me.

So I find myself in this situation: I know Christ is real and that God is love, and I also have all this knowledge of science and the universe. I take physics and biology seriously, but I have questions about what we allow them to tell us. Unlike Tim, I don’t simply begin by accepting the laws of physics as the ultimate framework within which everything else must be explained. Those laws are abstractions. All of physical science is derived from experience. There is always a human being reading the dial, interpreting the mathematics.

Why should a mechanistic picture of the universe be more real than our relationships, our meaning-making, our narratives? Science itself presupposes that the universe is intelligible. That is not something it can first prove scientifically. Why and how can the human mind understand the universe in the first place?

I don’t allow the abstractions produced by physics and biology to outweigh my own sense of what is real as a human being, or what I value. Love is the most real thing in the universe, as far as I can tell.

I look carefully at what physics and biology tell us, but I try to understand their findings within a more capacious cosmological context than materialism usually allows. I have had teachers who helped me do this, including Brian Swimme, the cosmologist who tells the universe story. Brian worked with Thomas Berry, a Passionist priest who called himself a “geologian” because he recognized nature as the primary revelation. Berry urged Christians to put the Bible on the shelf for a generation and study the book of nature. That, he said, is God’s primary revelation.

Looking through these thinkers at the history of the universe, I see what Brian likes to point out: we live in a universe where a cloud of hydrogen became giraffes and roses and Beethoven. What does that tell us about a cloud of hydrogen? Can it really be just a bunch of particles banging into one another? What draws those atoms together to form stars?

We have to use our imagination here. Tim expressed reservations about panexperientialism, but I cannot make sense of the universe without a panexperiential view: there is something it is like to be hydrogen.

What is gravity? Go back billions of years, when there are only clouds of hydrogen. Something is pulling them together into relationship. Physics calls it gravity and gives us mathematics that allow us to predict its effects. But what is gravity, in itself? Nobody really knows. What if it is an unconscious love?

Imagine that love drawing the hydrogen atoms together. They don’t know where they are going. As the intimacy of their relationships grow more intense, they ignite into a star. They didn’t see that coming. But love is creative. It gets us into all sorts of unexpected trouble.

I appreciate Tim’s thought experiment, but I approach this differently. I don’t begin by imagining God deliberating before the creation of the universe, working out how to do things and devising an especially clever set of physical laws. Thinking with Whitehead, I imagine God beginning unconsciously, as a yearning for relationship. That yearning brings forth a vision of what is possible, a vision of infinite beauty. Everything that follows responds to this originating desire, carrying it forward and making it a little more conscious, though the adventure comes with risk.

Whitehead calls it Eros, the Greek word for desire. Where is this desire going? Hydrogen didn’t know it would become stars. Stars didn’t know they would explode and produce the heavier elements—carbon, phosphorus, and so on—that make life possible on rocky and watery planets. When the first cell emerged, it didn’t know it would become us. Yet through this whole process, the universe is gradually waking up to the divine desire for more intimate relationship.

God begins unconscious and, through the evolutionary creativity that gives rise to creatures like us, becomes more deeply conscious. God’s consciousness, in a sense, depends on our waking up to the love that inspired the whole of creation.

There is no God outside creation who is going to come in and save us. But there is a savior: the Christ in us. With Teilhard de Chardin, I understand Christ as the evolutionary energy drawing us into deeper and deeper relationship.

Sometimes labels help. I don’t think of myself as a theist, if that means God exists outside the world, could have created any universe, and simply decided to create this one. Why this flawed universe? Why so much suffering, if its creator is perfect, omnipotent, and omniscient?

Nor am I a pantheist, as if God and nature are simply two names for the same thing. There is not enough relationship there for me. I need a polarity.

Panentheism comes closer: God is in the world, and the world is in God. Creation is God making room within God’s own self for there to be a cosmos. But even that does not quite express what I mean.

I coined the term pangentheism—gen as in genesis—to name a vision in which God and the world are continually co-creating one another. God needs us to help bring creation to fruition and to bring God’s own consciousness into full flowering.

This is a participatory vision. What we imagine God to be, and most importantly what we do and how we act, changes the divine nature. We participate in bringing forth a divine life that is more good, more true, more beautiful. Or else, if we are selfish, if we lie, we make the world uglier, and we participate in the diminishment of God.

This does not mean human beings make God up. There was love at the beginning, allowing this evolutionary adventure to unfold and creatures like us to emerge. God is not merely an idea we have invented. We are made, in a sense, by a primordial cosmogenetic love. But to carry that love forward is now also our responsibility. We have to continue the creative effort because we are not separate from the love that brought us into being.

That is what I mean by pangentheism.

Dialogue with the Audience

Audience: Nikos Kazantzakis says in his Spiritual Exercises, “God will not save us. We will save God.” That seems like a concise way of expressing some of what you are saying.

Matt: I love that. Beautiful.

Audience: If our ideas of God, and the ways we behave in relation to those ideas, contribute to what God becomes, what happens when so many believers behave destructively? Could the concept of God itself be polarizing?

Matt: There is a lot at stake here. Alan Watts raises the problem of monarchy and democracy in our images of heaven. What is heaven’s political structure? Traditionally, it is a monarchy: God is king, and we are the subjects.

The modern world, we hope, is moving toward democracy, though that is still very much in process. Sometimes the people vote for the demagogue anyway. Perhaps it is not a simple either-or.

There is real risk in an evolving creation. If we participate in the evolution of the divine nature, then we have important work of persuasion to do. We need to help people (including ourselves, if we are tempted!) move away from the authoritarian image of God as dictator toward a more relational, open, and loving image.

We are members of the body of God, and even of the soul of God. Our actions and intentions shape how God will become. Pangentheism is not necessarily a comforting vision. It may be true that most religious believers are pulling the God-World relation in a destructive direction. Nothing in what I am saying provides a guarantee that everything will work out in the end. I have no such assurance to offer. It is an adventure in that sense. We don’t know how it will turn out.

Audience: But adventure is somebody else having a bad time.

Matt: Yes.

Audience: Could the authoritarian hierarchy be a human imposition, rather than something we find in the life of Christ? And might the collective behavior you describe be groupthink? Perhaps God is not changing at all. Perhaps we are waking up to a fuller understanding of God. Isaiah reminds us, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not my ways.” Could God be looking on and saying that some of us are finally beginning to get it?

Matt: Perhaps we are saying something similar. The love out of which all things originate does not change. The good news is that the impulse to love is far more deeply rooted in the evolutionary process than the groupthink we are talking about.

There is suffering all along the edges of this process. Love is creative and, as Whitehead would say, a little oblivious as to morals. It does not necessarily know where it is going. We jump into love; we fall in love. We don’t have the future planned out in advance. But that love runs far deeper than our groupthink.

Look at the example of Jesus. We don’t have a great victory in which he rolls into Jerusalem, vanquishes the Romans, and establishes peace and happiness. He gets nailed to the cross. Yes, there is the resurrection. But only a few witness it. What we encounter here is a form of love that, in Whitehead’s account, operates quietly, slowly, in the background.

Yet this may prove to be the most powerful force in the universe. Those of us who have a relationship with Christ already have some sense of that. Has any one person changed the world more than that raggedy carpenter they nailed to a tree? And it could be that the influence of Jesus Christ is only beginning.

Audience: But as someone with a background in history, I sometimes worry that we presume more perfect knowledge than we have. Take slavery. We might say, “God used to like slavery, and then God decided he didn’t.” But perhaps God never liked slavery. The first inklings of divine love reached people who already lived in a slavekeeping society, and that love was filtered through their context. Is God evolving, or are people gradually getting smarter? I might be convinced of the first proposition; I earnestly pray that the second is true. Perhaps God is simply saying, “Welcome aboard. Took you long enough.”

Matt: And yet even people who agree that slavery is immoral and contrary to God’s desire can still relate to God as a slave to a master.

Audience: Some do. Eventually you can find somebody who believes anything.

Audience: Is God’s consciousness, then, at the same level as ours?

Matt: What is our level of consciousness? When I first wake up in the morning, I am drowsy and not yet thinking clearly. Sometimes I have peak experiences in which I look back over my whole life and feel crystal clear about where I am. At other times, I am just daydreaming on the highway.

When we have an overwhelmingly beautiful, sublime, unitive experience, perhaps we come a little closer to what divine consciousness is like. Jesus, as a human being, broke through—perhaps more than anyone—to that most intense form of divine consciousness. That shows us something of what is possible for any of us. But we are not always there. I am not simply equating God’s consciousness with our everyday state of mind while we are eating lunch.

Audience: This makes me think of the Quaker idea that there is something of God in each of us, alongside the other aspects of ourselves.

Matt: I love that.

Audience: I see an evolution of God throughout scripture. If God is always evolving and expanding, perhaps that opportunity, that grace, is also afforded to me as someone created in God’s image and likeness. How does this relate to the idea that we are the hands and feet of God, or of Jesus, in the world?

Matt: Until the incarnation, God didn’t have hands or feet or eyes. So yes, we are the hands of God in the world.

I also love what you said about the Bible. At the very least, it tells the story of an evolving relationship between humanity and God. Jung, Teilhard, and Whithead go further in saying that God evolves. But I hope we can agree that the relationship presented in the biblical narrative changes.

What is God outside that relationship? We might say that God exists independently of it, but what do we know of that independent existence? How is it relevant to us? We can speak of an evolving God at least in terms of the changing relationship between humanity and the divine.

Audience: Is there such a thing as an unconscious follower?

Matt: Conscious and unconscious are not simply two positions on a light switch.

Audience: When people see the beauty of creation and say, “That is God,” I want to say that it is also an invitation, a sign. A sign calls for action, for a response. Perhaps people can respond generously to Christ without being fully conscious of doing so.

Audience: What do you make of Jesus’ prayer, “You loved me before the foundation of the world”?

Matt: I don’t understand God. I have many thoughts about these questions, but there is a great deal of mystery. I take scripture seriously because it bears the wisdom of humanity, particularly of people who have had deep experiences of this cosmic love, this originating love that is the source of the universe’s order. I wrestle with it.

I don’t always know how to square every passage of scripture with my view. But I return to Thomas Berry’s insistence that the primary revelation is the book of nature. My concern is to bring scripture and the history of religion into relationship with the most comprehensive vision of the universe I can achieve: scientifically informed and philosophically enriched. That does not mean accepting whatever any scientist happens to tell me. It means doing my best to understand this universe, and then squaring scripture with that understanding, rather than the reverse.