God is not a person; God is a personification of reality. If we miss this we miss everything! Poseidon was not the god of the oceans, as if a supernatural entity separate from water was looking down from on high. Poseidon was the personification of the seas! Sol was not the god of the sun, as if there was a separation between the two, Sol was a sacred, proper name for our primary sustenance: that seemingly eternal, life-giving source of generous heat and light that we owe our very existence to. By saying "Sol" when we looked up, we experienced Him as a "Thou" to be related to. Today we have a different subjective experience of the same objective reality. We look up and say "the sun" and think of "it" in a depersonalized way, as a thing. As Joseph Campbell, Huston Smith, Paul Tillich, and other scholars of mythology and world religions remind us, we simply cannot understand religion if we don't understand the how the human mind instinctually relationalizes, or personifies, reality. Think of the movie "Castaway" with Tom Hanks. The personified soccer ball, Wilson, was the only thing that kept Hank's character sane (sort of).

Rudolf Bultmann, arguably the most influential theologian of the 20th century, wrote an important essay in 1931 titled, "The Crisis of Faith" In it, he moves discussion of God in a modern context beyond beliefs to universal experience. (I first learned of Bultmann's essay reading Gene Marshall's, A Primer on Radical Christianity, chapter 4: "What Reality in Human Experience Do We Point to With the Word ‘God'?", which I highly recommend.) Here is a brief summary of Bultmann's argument:

We are all concerned with what it takes to be safe and secure. We naturally and inevitably partake in activities designed to provide the essentials of living: food, water, warmth, enjoyment, and so forth. But just like the biblical story of the man who filled his barns with grain only to learn that he was going to die before he could use what he stored, we all experience unexpected misfortune. Plans go awry. Our efforts to be secure prove fruitless. The unexpected happens. Perhaps a spouse divorces us or we lose our job, a loved one dies, or our home is damaged by fire or flood. I experienced this myself last September when I was diagnosed with cancer and underwent treatment to shrink then remove a tumor attached to my spleen. I was quickly reminded of how insecure and fragile life is.

Being a frail, finite, mortal being dependent on other frail, finite, mortal beings and things means that I am always vulnerable to having my achievements and things that make me feel secure ripped away from me. If it were up to me, I'd be secure. My insecurity comes from something—some power, some force, some inescapable something—other than me. Whatever we may choose to call this reality, it's beyond belief or disbelief. It just is. We all know it through our experience. It is this inescapable reality that Bultmann calls "God".

Similarly, we all long for true and beautiful moments that we'd love to hang onto. We all know what it's like to wish for time to stand still, for the moment to stop, but of course this doesn't happen. If it were up to me it would, but I'm simply not able to stop time or make some temporal thing eternal. No matter how much I'd like the pleasure to continue, I can't even smell lilacs for more than 30 seconds and have my senses un-dulled. I can't make the clock stand still or a beautiful moment last. Time moves on. Whatever it is that controls the temporal and eternal is not me. Bultmann calls it "God".

Another example: because we are social animals almost all of us are driven by a desire for love and connection. If we cannot be forever secure and content, we can at least know true friendship and nourishing companionship. And of course, for most of us, most of the time, this is true. Many of us go long periods of our life rich in relationships. But as we all discover sooner or later, we must make our own big decisions. We must do our own living, and certainly must do our own dying. No matter how many friends and family we have, in a very important sense we are also alone. In the end, we are finally and unavoidably alone. As Bultmann says, "The power which drives us into that final solitude is what I am pointing to when I use the word ‘God'."

Similarly, we all know that our knowledge is limited. After years of learning skills and acquiring knowledge we often find ourselves back at the starting gate, a beginner once more. In the words of Gene Marshall,

The honest study of reality is somewhat like this story: I went on a long trip, and while I was gone my closest colleagues began doing entirely different things. When I came home they were using a new set of words. I did not know what they were talking about. They were doing new things that I did not know how to do. All my hard-won wisdoms of the past were irrelevant to what was now going on. Without consulting me, things change. Reality moves on ahead. I come off as someone who does not know what is going on anymore.

We also experience our limitations re our actions and accomplishments. Even the Egyptian pyramids will eventually wear away to nothing—rather quickly on a geological time scale! The power that sets a limit to knowing and doing is what Bultmann means by "God".

Bultmann's last example relates to our desire for self-mastery. Again, no matter how we conceive what it is that we want to do, or what we think we should do, our conscience ends up pronouncing us guilty of wasted time and lost opportunity, impure thoughts and mean actions. Whatever kind of excellence and success we aim for, we realize, if we are honest with ourselves, that we fall short.

All the aforementioned ways of experiencing human limitations are, of course, unavoidable. Life itself makes us finite. I am not making myself finite. Some mysterious "more than me" is making me finite. This mysterious power, this undeniable reality, says Bultmann, is what cultures throughout history have meant by the word, "God".

It is God who makes us finite, who makes a comedy of our care, who allows our longing to miscarry, who casts us into solitude, who sets a limit to our knowing and doing, who calls us to responsibility, and who fills us with guilt when we fall short. But it is also God who allows us to experience the gift of life, who drives us to care; who fills our hearts with love and trust and gratitude, who gives us knowledge and the strength to work, and who blesses us with the seemingly never-ending dance between self-interest and responsibility to others.

Now Bultmann has focused our attention: we see an enigmatic power operative in our everyday lives, giving us our life and all good gifts yet also limiting us in nearly every conceivable way, and finally taking our lives away. This is real life! This is reality as it really is, whether or not we like it. There can be no argument whether or not this reality exists. If you don't want to call it a power, call it a force, an up-against-ness, or simply the universe as it really is. As Bultmann points out in his essay, we are not talking about some metaphysical idea here. We are talking about an unavoidable actuality. Words may fail us, but we all know this reality intimately, personally.

Now that Bultmann has focused our attention on our common human experience, he asks,

"Why call this mysterious power ‘God'? Why give the enigma, the mystery that drives us this way and that and hedges us in, any other name but ‘the enigma', or ‘fate'? Or, if there must be a name, why not equally well ‘the devil'? Doesn't this power play a cruel game with us, destroying and annihilating? Is not unfulfillment the distinguishing mark of every life? Is not death and nothingness the end?"

These questions reveal that it matters how we name what is undeniable so, how we think about the inevitabilities of life, because our naming will influence how we will relate to our own finitude—indeed, to all aspects of our lives. If we call this enigmatic power or force, "the devil", we are thereby proclaiming reality to be fundamentally evil and untrustworthy. Such a stance toward life can only lead to despair. If reality is seen as evil, then we are estranged from reality. Yet because we are also inextricably bound to reality—we cannot escape it—we despair.

But despair is not the only option. Bultmann suggests that faith has nothing to do with beliefs; it's about trust. Trust that reality is okay just as it is. Reality is not too tough for me; I was made for reality! This trust gives meaning to our lives. For me to look into the awe-filling fullness of life and pronounce the name "God" means a commitment of my life to reality-based living. That's why I say, Reality is my God and living in right relationship with reality is my religion. Life as it really is, with all its warts and glory, this is the primary object of my trust, my loyalty, my love.

I foresee the concept of a "personal God" imaged as an unnatural being with the best and worst of human traits—now the hallmark of evangelical Christianity—being replaced by a reality-based view of God within a few generations. Despite how it appears in the Bible, ultimate Reality does not have the deranged personality and character flaws of a Bronze Age warlord. Indeed, evidence suggests that God has no character traits or personality at all, other than what we embody and/or project. God is a personification, not a person. This fundamental shift in the ‘root metaphor' of the Abrahamic traditions will, I predict, be seen historically as perhaps the greatest theological transformation in millennia. This shift, and what follows naturally from it, will also go a long way toward reconciling science and religion. It will do this not by accommodating science to religion, but by naturalizing, REALizing, religion. This shift leads to a serious upgrading of our map of reality. It opens the door to thinking about "God ways" and "God's guidance" via science rather than ancient texts. In the words of Frank Lloyd Wright, "I believe in God, only I spell it Nature."

Beyond theism, atheism, deism, pantheism, or even panentheism, this nested holarchical view, which celebrates evolutionary emergence and the fact Universe itself is creative, I refer to as "creatheism" in my book, Thank God for Evolution. However we may refer to it, I believe this evidence-based perspective can move us beyond old arguments and into a new world pregnant with fresh possibilities.

PLEASE DO READ: "What Reality in Human Experience Do We Point to with the Word, 'God'?", a pdf of a short essay by evolutionary theologian and bioregionalist, Gene Marshall. This chapter from one of Gene's books is foundational to an evolutionary understanding of the divine. (The pdf shows up sideways, so you'll need to open it with Adobe Reader and, under the "View" menu, rotate it clockwise. Otherwise you'll need to print it out. It's only 10 pages and well worth it!)