My thoughts about God as I aged:
While working on wiki, I encountered (by chance) TomAtlee?, in person, and got wrapped up in the EvolutionarySalons (#2 & #3, specifically.) MichaelDowd really shook my world, by his presentation of EvolutionarySpirituality to me. I went through a number of mazes in thought, before realizing, “Oh my God, this is really it; this is the real deal.”
The God I now believe in is Reality and Life. But it is not the hollow reality of naturalism: mountains, oceans, trees, clouds, and apes. (MaterialLiteralism.) Rather, it is the whole of reality, including ourselves, imagination, machines, ideas, virtues, history, purposes, – as well as the natural things.
Sometimes I describe my comprehension of Reality as MysticalRealism. My basic notion is that we do not see things as they are, but as our eyes communicate to us by way of light turned into neural signals. But pictures are misleading. On the trivial side of things: We know that 99% of what we consider solid is actually full of empty space. Further, we know that faces and motions are misleading: People live rich inner lives. Nobody believes that they really “understand” another person, simply by looking at a picture of them, or even after having one brief conversation with them. Mystical Realism, to me, then, is developing the capacity to see the Real through vehicles other than our eyes. Thus, we must turn to our intuitions and hearts, in addition to our eyes and ordinary senses.
Using our intuitions and hearts and eyes and senses together, we can develop in ourselves a sense of the Real, which is sacred. Depicted iconographically, we naturally discover that religious imagery and a sense of the sacred communicate the Real more than any natural photograph ever can. God is a powerful force, the font of virtue and life.
Let me be clear: I do not believe in super-natural powers, (though I still yearn for a satisfactory account of SpoonBending?, like I experienced first-hand,) and I know that our minds are very good at fooling ourselves. I know that there are psychological realities to the mind, that we do not understand, or understand only very weakly. I do not believe in “planes,” except as philosophical groupings of imagined worlds, imagined worlds that can be experienced first-hand through meditation. And yet, I hold imagination up in very high esteem, far higher than I think most people do: The imagination of a deity or a spirit is a powerful force in the world; The sustenance my daughter draws from Pokemon is clear – the sustenance I draw from fantasy stories is clear. When AI come to life, this will be abundantly clear to us all.
God is the One Reality, connecting the myriad things.
Some times I refer to “the Four Gods.”
These are four very different meanings for the word “God,” that a person with NaturalisticCommitments could meaningfully intend.
As for the motions of Evolution and of thought & heart, (of drama,) I consider it the real-ization of the “Spirit.”
Expressed alternatively:
There are 3, 4, maybe 5 (depending on how you count) things that can be labelled “God,” which are worth talking about (“relevant,”) for which there is no real reason to doubt that they exist.
We could also add a fifth, commonly called “the Holy Spirit,” or evolution, the “living life force” or “the river of existence, understandable naturalistically or metaphysically, depending on your persuasion.
All 5 of these are things worth talking about: The 1st, to refer to “Why or how is there anything?” (for example,) the 2nd, to refer to reality and a search for truth, the 3rd to make a moral argument or other appeal to the heart, the 4th to talk about proper or ideal goals and destinations, the 5th to talk about our experience of life.
Only if we didn’t think it was worth talking about existence, and not worth talking about “what is real?”, and not worth making appeals to the heart or moral judgements, or to talk about extremely long term goals, or to talk about life as it is experienced, could we say, “There’s no good reason to talk about God.”
So “belief” in the word God can be quite justifiable, and is not necessarily a vehicle for oppression. No anti- or un- NaturalisticCommitments? required.