These so-called “free-thinkers” (a term dreamed up by atheists to describe themselves) have such tightly defined parameters of what's real that nothing challenging their preconceptions can get through no matter how many times and in how many ways something is said. Case in point: Using the term “God” in this forum is equivalent to invoking a magical being in the sky. Without question some theists do just that and anti-theists tend to look no further. That more mature conceptions of God can be reasonable, coherent and consistent with modern scientific conceptions is of Reality eludes them. I can't do anything about that.
Long before I heard of Hegel or knew anything of his philosophy, there was a sense that “nothing gives me greater comfort than knowing God's presence in my life is my life.” Hegel's God (a recording of an interview with Robert Wallace) is about Hegel's philosophical mysticism, a philosophy that gives me understanding of God where before there was only the unformed sense.
In his blog, Wallace writes:
Aside from the usual snide remarks from the anti-theist crowd, any comments?For me, mysticism is the doctrine that God and I, and you and I, are all, in an important way, One. Philosophical mysticism is the kind of mysticism that emphasizes the role of thinking, in this Oneness. We’re One through our deepest and most serious kind of thinking. Or through love, which is inseparable from that kind of thinking. So in response to the common assumption that “mysticism” is vague and irrational, philosophical mysticism aims to show how, if we take seriously the thinking and loving that we do every day, they point beyond the usual assumption that God and I, and you and I, are ultimately separate and distinct.
Involving thought and love in this way, my mysticism is obviously a matter not just of “theory” but of experience. For me, it’s an immensely fulfilling experience which I had barely dreamt of, before it came to me. For my first four or five decades, I inhabited what looks (in retrospect) like a spiritual waste land. In The God of Love, Science, and Inner Freedom I’ve described some of the experience—of pain, despair, love, and thought—that brought me from that waste land to my current frequent experiences of ecstasy. “Philosophy” should surely come out of, and enrich, a person’s experience. In recent years, mine certainly has.
How can God and I be One? We can be One if my effort to be myself, is God. Such a God isn’t identical with my physical body or my habitual fears, desires and ideas. God may involve that body and those fears and so forth, but God is called “God” because he/she/it goes beyond (“transcends”) them. So when I say that this God is me, I’m not saying that God is physically present in me or that God has the failings that I have. God goes beyond all of that. But a God who transcends those parts of me can nevertheless be present in me as my capacity for inner freedom, or self-determination: for being, or trying to be, something that goes beyond my physical and habitual aspects. In this way there can be, as the Quakers say, “that of God in everyone,” without this God’s being identical to anything merely physical or externally determined.
