If seeing God as a supernatural being causes so many problems (see my previous post The Problem with God), then how else can we view God?

I have come to understand God, not as a transcendent Zeus-like figure, but instead as the infinite creative source of existence.  By “creative source” here, I do not mean to say that I think of God as creating existence by waving a magic wand from afar, but rather that all of existence – matter, energy, the physical laws which govern the universe, and even us – comes out of God. I do not see this “coming from” God as happening at one particular time in history, whether this was 6000 years ago according to Genesis or 14 billion years ago according to the Big Bang theory, but it happens continually. I do not see God as a separate being with intelligence itself, but rather God is the center of being within me, and everything around me. God did not form my distant ancestors out of clay as mythological tales might suggest if taken literally, but rather God is what gives me life and gives existence its very structure. This power is infinite and indescribable because it lies behind all that is. God is not to be found “out there” but deep within my existence.

This conception of God is what twentieth-century Christian theologian Paul Tillich called “the ground of being.” Studying Tillich at Oxford (his theology was the subject of my Masters thesis) strongly influenced my conception of God.  However, reading Tillich was not like discovering something new but was akin to learning a truth that I had always known before, yet was unable to express. Tillich was influenced by centuries of theologians and philosophers before him who thought of God in similar existential terms: Friedrich Schelling (b. 1775) considered God as “the Power of Being”; Georg Hegel (b.1770 ) referred to God simply as “Being”;  Meister Eckhart (b. 1260) “being itself”; Francis of Assisi (b. 1182) “the ground of all reality”; and Plotinus (b. 205), drawing on Plato, described God as “the One” – the source out of which all being emanates, including the human soul. This understanding of God is rooted not in Creationism or Intelligent Design or a desire for a father figure, but rather comes from this simple question posed first by Parminedes (b. 510 BCE) : why is there existence in the first place, instead of nothing?

How do you even conceive of such a God that is not an exalted deity?  In a future post, I will examine how we can rethink our symbols of God, if we are to understand God in this very different way. Here, I will leave you with one example: this metaphor for God as the source of being does not come from a Christian theologian or a philosopher, but from Zen Monk Thich Nhat Hanh who imagined the relationship between God and man as that between the ocean and the wave.

The ocean is the “ground” of the wave in the static sense that the water of the ocean makes up the essence of the wave and in the dynamic sense that the power of the ocean creates the individual existence of the wave. The wave has its own individuality, but its lifespan is relatively short. However, the finite wave, which lives in existence, is comprised of the eternal ground of the ocean. The wave emanates from the infinite ocean, it returns to the ocean, and it is connected to all other waves because they share the ocean as their ground.

To me, this understanding of God can not only work within the confines of modern science, but it also provides a powerful direction for how we experience God. What I may have lost from the “comfort” of believing in a supernatural father figure who may or may not intervene on my behalf, I have more than made up with the realization that a God that is the ground of my being can be touched and experienced (though never fully understood or seen) at a much more intimate level, because God is the spark of light within me. This view of God also leads to a more embracing view of morality because I share this power of being with each of my fellow humans in true brother and sister-hood, and I share it with the natural world as well.