If the model of God developed in the previous chapter is correct—if our individual consciousness participates in a greater consciousness—then we should expect to see signs of this pattern around us. And we do. Cells combine to form bodies with capacities no single cell possesses. Creatures form ecosystems whose intricate life exceeds any individual organism. Human beings create families, communities, cultures and societies that remember, imagine and accomplish more than any one person could alone. Again and again, individual lives join together and something new emerges: a whole with qualities and possibilities of its own. One of the clearest and most fascinating examples can be found in the life of the honeybee.
A single bee knows very little of the hive. It leaves in search of nectar. It follows scent, colour and sunlight. It communicates what it has found through movement. It tends larvae, builds comb, guards the entrance or helps regulate the temperature of the colony. Each bee responds to the small part of the world immediately around it.
Yet together the bees create something remarkable.
The hive can select a new home, allocate labour, store food, regulate its internal conditions and respond to danger. No single bee possesses a plan of the whole. Even the queen does not govern the colony as a human monarch governs a nation. She plays an essential reproductive role, but she does not stand above the hive directing its activity.
The apparent intelligence of the hive is distributed throughout the colony. It arises through the countless interactions of its members. This does not necessarily mean that a hive is conscious in the way that a human being is conscious. Complexity, intelligence and consciousness are not identical. Nevertheless, the hive offers us an important image. It shows us how a living whole can possess capacities that are not located in any one of its individual parts.
The hive is not another bee. It is the larger life that comes into being between the bees, through the bees and within their relationships.
This may help us imagine our relationship with God.
We have often pictured God as the divine equivalent of a queen bee: a supreme individual who stands apart from creation, issuing instructions and controlling what happens within it. The universe is the kingdom; God is its ruler. Everything depends upon the will of the one at the top.
But what if God is less like the queen bee and more like the life of the hive?
What if divine consciousness arises in and through the evolving relationships of the universe? What if God is the greater awareness within which stars, cells, ecosystems, animals and human beings participate?
In this model, God is not one more being living somewhere beyond the universe. God is the conscious life of the Whole. The universe exists within God, and God is present within every part of the universe, just as the life of the hive is present within every bee while also exceeding the life of any individual bee.
The bee remains a bee. It does not disappear into the colony. It has its own body, its own activity and its own limited experience of the world. Yet it is also part of a larger living pattern that it could never create alone.
The same may be true of us.
We are distinct centres of experience. Each of us encounters the world from a particular place and through a particular body. Our joys and sorrows are genuinely our own. Yet our consciousness may also participate in something greater than itself. We may be individual expressions of a much larger field of awareness: the consciousness of God.
This is close to what Saint Paul imagined when he described a community as one body with many members. The eye remains an eye and the hand remains a hand, but neither possesses life in isolation. Each belongs within a greater living unity. “You are the body of Christ,” Paul wrote, “and individually members of it.”
Paul was speaking about the Christian community, but the image may reach further. Perhaps all life belongs within a sacred body. Perhaps every creature is both itself and a participant in the larger life of God.
God, then, would not observe the universe only from outside. God would experience it from within.
God would know the flight of a bird through the awareness of the bird. God would feel the warmth of the sun through the leaves that turn towards it. God would encounter human delight through our joy and human suffering through those who suffer. Every conscious being would contribute something to the experience of the Whole.
This does not reduce God to the sum of all existing things. A hive is not simply a pile of bees. Its larger life emerges from their relationships, their communication and their shared activity. In a similar way, God may be the unity created through the relationships of the cosmos while also being more than any collection of separate parts.
This gives prayer a different meaning. Prayer is no longer an isolated individual attempting to attract the attention of a distant supernatural being. It is the part consciously opening itself to the Whole. It is one centre of awareness becoming attentive to the greater consciousness in which it already participates.
We do not have to travel beyond the universe to find God. We do not even have to escape ourselves. We need to become more deeply aware of the life moving within us, between us and beyond us.
Like the bee, we are still ourselves. But we are also part of something greater. We are within it. And it is within us.
Which Picture Fits the World We Know?
A model of God cannot be tested in quite the same way as a scientific theory. God cannot be placed under a microscope or isolated in an experiment. Nevertheless, different models of God lead us to expect different kinds of worlds. We can therefore ask a reasonable question: which understanding of God most closely fits the world we actually experience?
Consider the familiar interventionist model. In this picture, God exists beyond the universe, possesses unlimited power and can act upon the world whenever God chooses. God is also believed to be perfectly loving and compassionate.
If this model were correct, what kind of world might we expect?
Surely we would expect a compassionate and all-powerful God to intervene more clearly in situations of terrible suffering. We might not expect every inconvenience to be removed, but we could reasonably expect protection from the most devastating forms of suffering: children dying from painful diseases, communities destroyed by natural disasters, or entire populations subjected to violence and starvation.
Yet this is not the world we experience. Sometimes suffering is overcome, but often it is not. Prayer may give people courage, comfort and a sense of companionship, but it does not reliably alter the physical course of events. Rain falls on the just and the unjust. Disease affects the faithful and the faithless alike. The processes of nature continue without any obvious divine suspension of their consequences.
The traditional model also creates questions about revelation. If God can speak directly and unmistakably to humanity, why does special revelation appear to be concentrated in the distant past? Why should the most important truths about God depend upon ancient events, texts and experiences that must now be interpreted across enormous historical and cultural distances?
If God spoke decisively through prophets and apostles, why would that direct revelation largely cease? A God who wishes to be known and who can communicate without limitation might be expected to continue revealing divine truth clearly in every culture and generation.
Traditional theology has developed many responses to these questions. It speaks of human freedom, the regularity of natural law, the spiritual value of struggle and the hidden purposes of God. Some of these responses contain genuine wisdom. Yet the fundamental tension remains. The world does not look much like one continually managed by an all-powerful external being who can intervene at will.
Now consider the model we have been developing.
In a panpsychist and panentheistic understanding, God is not a separate consciousness controlling the universe from outside. God is the greater consciousness present within and emerging through the relationships of the whole. Every centre of experience participates in that greater life, while the divine consciousness gathers those experiences into a unity that exceeds any one of them.
What kind of world would this model lead us to expect?
We would expect awareness of God to grow as consciousness itself becomes more complex. In a universe containing only simple forms of experience, knowledge of God would also be simple and undeveloped. As life evolves nervous systems, memory, imagination, language and self-awareness, the universe becomes increasingly capable of recognising the sacred depth within it.
Revelation would therefore not be confined to messages delivered from outside the world. It would arise within the developing consciousness of the world. Human beings would gradually become capable of recognising dimensions of divine reality that earlier generations could not yet perceive or express.
This growth would not necessarily proceed smoothly. Evolution seldom moves in a straight line. Long periods of gradual development can be punctuated by moments when many separate elements suddenly form a new pattern. Psychology calls this a Gestalt: a moment when what appeared to be disconnected pieces are seen as a meaningful whole.
Religious history contains such moments. New insights gather around particular people whose lives reorganise the spiritual possibilities of their cultures. Older traditions are not simply discarded, but seen in a new way.
Jesus can be understood as one of the most profound of these Gestalt moments in humanity’s growing awareness of God. In him, inherited ideas about law, holiness, power and belonging were gathered into a new vision centred upon compassion, forgiveness and love. God was encountered not chiefly in domination but in healing, inclusion, shared meals and the restoration of those pushed aside.
This does not reduce Jesus to merely an insightful teacher. He can be understood as an intense expression of the divine consciousness becoming visible within human consciousness. In Jesus, humanity recognised something that had always been present within the depths of reality but had not previously been brought together with the same clarity and power.
There have been other steps since then. Our moral awareness has continued to grow. We have slowly come to recognise the dignity of people once enslaved, colonised, excluded or regarded as inferior. Our circle of compassion has widened, although unevenly and with much resistance. Revelation continues wherever consciousness becomes more capable of perceiving the value and experience of another.
Divine intervention would also look different in this model. God would not normally act by interrupting the processes of nature from outside. God would act from within them, gradually increasing the capacity of creation to respond to suffering.
Life evolved immune systems and the ability to repair damaged tissue. Animals developed instincts of nurture and protection. Human beings developed empathy, cooperation and moral responsibility. From these emerged healers, carers, hospitals, medicine, psychology, social work and the many professions devoted to relieving suffering and restoring life.
These developments did not arrive fully formed. They grew through long processes of experiment, failure, discovery and cultural learning. The healing work of God entered the world through the expanding capacities of living beings.
This does not mean that every evolutionary or cultural development is divine. Evolution produces cruelty as well as cooperation, and human cultures can deepen suffering as readily as relieve it. Consciousness makes compassion possible, but it also creates new possibilities for exploitation and violence. Discernment remains necessary.
Nevertheless, across the long history of life, we can see a growing capacity to become aware of suffering and to respond to it. God’s healing presence becomes effective as creatures become capable of embodying it. Divine action grows within the world as the world develops the consciousness, knowledge and cooperation through which healing can occur.
This is much closer to the world we actually inhabit.
We do not live in a world where suffering is regularly removed by supernatural intervention. We live in a world where the capacity to recognise and relieve suffering has gradually evolved. We do not live in a world where revelation remains fixed in the past. We live in a world where understanding grows, occasionally taking great leaps through people such as Jesus, while continuing to unfold through new knowledge and moral awareness.
None of this proves that the panpsychist model is true. But it does mean that the model fits the character of our world more closely than the traditional interventionist picture. It does not require us to explain why an all-powerful and compassionate God repeatedly chooses not to act. Instead, it invites us to recognise how God has been acting all along: from within the evolving consciousness of creation.
God’s intervention is gradual because it occurs through evolution. God’s revelation continues because consciousness continues to grow. God’s healing enters history through creatures who become capable of recognising suffering and responding with compassion.
The world is not waiting for God to arrive from somewhere else.
The world is slowly becoming able to express the God who is already within it.