From Miceal website: http://www.hamburgeruniverse.com

If ants thought about God they would surely think of God as an ant - admittedly in a much grander form. And if elephants thought about God, surely they would think of God as some kind of super-pachyderm. While fully realizing this dynamic, human beings, for all our much vaunted intelligence, never seem to have quite got the point. We still persist in thinking of God as a person, purged of at least the more obvious vices andlimitations, but still fundamentally just a human being enlarged.

It's equally true that many of the more fanatical religious believers desperately want to hold on to that small kind of God as described in their scriptures. And they ferociously resist any attempt to change the picture. This religious ferocity against anyone perceived to be against your particular religious interpretation is something at which I have never ceased to wonder. It should be obvious that if God stands in need of such defense by us creatures, then "he" must not be all he is cracked up to be, and is in even a worse state than if "he" just needed worship. In short, behind these ferocious responses from the embattled variety of religious believer, probably lies not just a very weak and ill-informed theology, but ultimately a not so subtle form of atheism.

How is it that religions have never latched on to the wonders of the physical universe which are emerging through scientific research? Doing that might have given the religions not just a new lease of life, but might have directed them more realistically on to the path they claimed to have been following all along. We have seen many young people, in particular, who find God attractive but the religions that claim to be God's instruments irrelevant. This new generation has nothing very concrete against the religions; they just see them as irrelevant to modern life. Instead of religion they have identified something vaguely called "spirituality" to which they adhere.

But when are we also going to get past spirituality, which is still dealing with some vague version of an external divine force, and realize that reality does not consist of two broad categories, the physical, "natural" world, and the supernatural realms, but only of one continuous panorama whose more profound elements far surpass anything that could ever have been described under the old label of "supernatural?" Given the limits on our abilities to know, it should long ago have been obvious that, whatever God is, God is far more a verb than a noun. Furthermore, when are we going to realize that God as verb has none of the psychotic, neurotic and insecure qualities which the traditional human-style descriptions of God have for so long had at their core, and which are so passionately defended by equally neurotic and insecure followers?

Why it is that mainstream science is in many respects the world's greatest religion today, replete with its high priesthood, dogmas and excommunications? And why do we still insist that traditional style religion can be the only bedrock foundation for ethical behavior? If we really believed that, then we should still be stoning adulteresses. And if we no longer do that, then we should ask, was it religion that caused that change in practice to come about? Or did it come from elsewhere? And should we really fear that if the religious basis for ethics and morality won't stand up, that all is lost and we'll descend irretrievably into the barbarism of dog eat dog?
I don't think any of those worries are justified.

We have all heard of the "God Gene," and the "God Particle;" of "God and the New Physics," and "God in the Equation." And it appears the leading physicists have been quick to recognize how a touch of the divine, in their titles at least, can do wonders for sales. But fundamentally we still remain stuck in molds of interpretation that see everything through two completely different understandings of how the universe works.

After the movie What the Bleep Do We Know!? first appeared I was often asked if I believed that leading edge physics had replaced religion in the modern world. Bewildering assumptions about what is normal or natural is what has led us into this apparent impasse, with its apparently mutually exclusive categories of science and religion. This question can't be readily answered while we remain in that dichotomy. These are some of the issues I will explore in the forthcoming editions of the "Global Intelligencer." http://www.hamburgeruniverse.com

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