What is the relationship between God and nature?

::::::::

Originally posted:  http://bendench.blogspot.com/2009/05/on-nature.html

Before there was God, there was nature. After God died, nature remained.

All gods that have ever existed have been the attempts of human beings to anthropomorphize nature or the forces of nature in an attempt to deal with their world. The Abrahamic God behind the Universe is not fundamentally different from a god behind the sun, a god behind the storm, a god behind the sea, etc. In every instance it is human beings putting a human face on something which they do not understand. All gods are a metaphor for something which is more godly than any God: life itself. Remove life from God and what does God become? A shadow. A monster. Death personified. “The will to nothing pronounced holy!”

Before the rise of the city-state and industrialized society, before we turned away from the rest of nature and starting looking in, only to ourselves, we were more integrated with our environment—with the earth, with other species, with each other, with our bodies. Humanity felt connected with the rest of life. This was Eden.

The rise of agriculture and the city-state allowed for tremendous amounts of people to be supported by smaller and smaller amounts of land. We were surrounded not with other forms of life, but only with humanity and the products of humanity. Our gods became less “natural” and more “human” (Ares, Venus, Horus, Odin, etc, are all expressions of different aspects of human nature1)—and eventually less “human” and more “abstract.” Cut from nature, our gods became transcendent, and monolithic. We no longer felt the interconnection of life all around us. We had to look inside and imagine a point above it all—outside of the world of desperation we had created. God became “one” because divinity became too sterile to exist in abundance. We, looking in toward ourselves, decided that a “Great Human,” like ourselves, must have forged the world the way we forge machines. We did not grow out of nature—nature was built by us.

Nature became an enemy, a threat, an outside. Whereas once living in harmony and balance with other forms of life was our goal, now our goal became one of dominance, self over other. Other forms of life—even other human beings—became threats to be harnessed or destroyed. The rise of the Newtonian mechanistic worldview represented the dominance and instrumentality of the natural world—what was considered, essentially, to be God’s machine—by the human mind and rationality. The God that had detached itself from its base, which was nature, was not long for this world. Having already become one, and transcendent, it now became more abstract and distant. Thus was deism born. But even this was not for long, and this abstract God, less and less relevant, finally died, leaving atheism as the natural result of this process of transcendence. Science turned back to nature and the study of nature, not as God’s machine, but as a self-contained and closed system. But though God had died, the values that had given birth to God remained, and the world was now viewed not as a vibrant and vital organism, but as a more or less disenchanted mechanism—certainly no source for spiritual fulfillment. We came to look at nature as something stupid and empty. God, paradoxically, became the articulation for many of the essence of life, and so a world without God meant to them a world without hope—a conclusion they sought desperately to avoid through any means necessary.

But:

“Your spirituality is one of death” speak the shamans and other keepers of the old ways “for you can only have true spiritual connections with things that actually exist—not with any Great Human forger of the world, which is only a product of your imagination."2

In its broadest aspect, nature is reality—the world, the ground of being, the nature of existence, the objective, the absolute. And, in turn, life in its broadest sense is nature—not any particular living thing, but the underlying interconnectedness that makes possible every living thing.

Nature is everything that we mean by the divine. Nature is the "creator." Nature is the preserver. Nature is the destroyer and judge.3 And you, like everything else, are an incarnation of nature.

Nature is the measure of all things and the source of all values: true and false, good and evil. Nature is beyond good and evil. Nature contains all that is called good and all that is called evil. But nature, that is to say, life, is the basis of everything that we mean by good. Everything that we desire, everything that we value, everything that we esteem, is so as a result of our nature—and of the natural world and relationships that gave rise to our nature.

To be commanded nature must be obeyed. Every being, action, and experience is the perfect expression of those conditions that created it. You cannot help but worship nature—everything you do makes reference to it.

The God of Tillich or Spinoza, or the Brahman of the Yogis, already admits the point—that what we mean by God is nature. But why call it God at all? The term God carries with it the connotation of a person—but nature is not a person. Nature is everything, and because there is nothing that nature is not, nature has no outside with which to interact. Thus it has no personality, and thus it is not a person. Though thinking of it as a person can, in some ways, be a useful construction.

Nature can have no author or creator—for nature is reality, is everything that exists. Thus any “God” that existed would have to either be synonymous with nature or be an aspect of it—that which transcends reality by definition does not exist.

Nor can anything truly be created, in the strictest sense of coming from nothing. Either something exists in the potentiality of nature or it does not. If it is not possible for it to exist, then not even a God could make it exist. If it is possible for it to exist, then it already exists as a seed within the potentiality of nature awaiting its actualization—its summoning.

The goal of religion has always been to reorient the self-aware organism back to its interconnection with its environment. All organisms seek to integrate with their environment—without this tendency they would die. Within the confines of the city-state, without the experience of ecstatic union with the natural world, this desire often manifests itself as an unrequited love—an empty, unfulfilled longing.

And so, in order to become more full and joyous individuals, we must look back to the primordial, to nature, to the common reality that binds us all together with each other and with all living things.

To counter Heidegger, only the lack of a God can save us now.

But consider this: pantheism is not different from polytheism; it is not different from monotheism; it is not different from atheism. It includes each of these as components in a larger truth. The division falls down. Monotheism is true because nature is one—everything is interconnected and forms an interrelated whole. Polytheism is true because nature has many incarnations—many individual and distinct forces that operate within it. Atheism is true because nature is everything, and so it is also nothing—that is to say, it is not a thing, it is the ground of being, the set of all sets.

Tillich says this of theism in the traditional sense:

“[Theological theism] must be transcended because it is wrong. It is bad theology. This can be shown by a more penetrating analysis. The God of theological theism is a being beside others and as such a part of the whole of reality. He certainly is considered its most important part, but as a part and therefore as subjected to the structure of the whole. He is supposed to be beyond the ontological elements and categories which constitute reality. But every statement subjects him to them. He is seen as a self which has a world, as an ego which is related to a thou, as a cause which is separated from its effect, as having a definite space and an endless time. He is a being, not being-itself. As such he is bound to the subject-object structure of reality, he is an object for us as subjects. At the same time we are objects for him as a subject” (The Courage to Be, 184-185).

It is inappropriate to refer to God as “He,” because God is neither a man, nor a person. It is inappropriate to refer to God as “It,” because God is not a particular thing. In general, calling nature God at all is deceptive. God is not a man or a woman—except when God is a man or a woman. For example, you may be a man or a woman, and you are also God. Or God may be both, or God may be neither. God is not a thing—except when God is a thing. For example, the table I am writing this on is a thing, and it is also God.

All religions are like the spokes of a wheel. At the center is mysticism—direct spiritual encounters—and at the rim is fundamentalism—adherence to texts. The mystic traditions of every religion come together at the center of the wheel and radiate outwards as they separate into different fundamentalist sects. From the center of the wheel, we all agree: God is nature; we are God; there is only being. What you think of as God is everywhere present. More than that: it is everything. You, and everything else, are one with the essence of life—you are manifestations of this essence. Mystics experience this directly, but then traditions rise up around these experiences to preserve what is perceived as the link to the essence of life. But mysticism is not so much a matter of becoming one with the essence of life as becoming aware that this state is already, and always was, the case. It cannot be otherwise. From the rim of the wheel, one can see that one’s own spoke leads to the center, but looking at every other spoke one thinks that they divert from the center—that to travel to them is to travel away from the center. This is not to say that all religions describe reality with equal accuracy. They do not. Nor that religion, in the traditional sense, allows for the most accurate interpretation of reality. It does not.

To speak of God is pointless. People will create an endless variety of gods and an endless variety of interpretations of God. Whether or not there even is a God is a matter of contention. And all these arguments end in the only way theological arguments ever can—division and uneasy tolerance or an attempt at unity through violence and force. Why? Because what are you debating? Nothing for which anyone has any evidence. Our gods and Gods are all products of phantasy, not sensation, and so they are not bound by any principle through which they can be made to conform through reason alone. But when we speak of nature we have common ground. Everyone agrees that nature exists, and rival interpretations of nature admit of empirical confirmation, disproof, or adjustment. Problem solved.

Authors Website: http://bendench.blogspot.com/

Authors Bio:
Ben Dench graduated valedictorian of his class from The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey in the Spring Semester of 2007 with a B.A. in philosophy (his graduation speech, which received high praise, is available on YouTube). He is currently enrolled in the Pebble Hill School of Sacred Ministry, where he is studying to be an interfaith minister. His interests include all forms of experiential and technique oriented spirituality, especially shamanism and the out-of-body-experience; social justice, including environmentalism and building a sustainable global community; and the study of how to live effectively and maximize human potential.