God Revised: How Religion Must Evolve in a Scientific Age

by Galen Guengerich

Over the past few decades, the ever-expanding scientific knowledge of the universe and the human condition, combined with the evolution from religion-based to personal morality, has led to a mass crisis of faith. Leaders of most Protestant and Catholic religious traditions, which include nearly 80 percent of Americans, have watched their memberships stagnate or dwindle. Over the years, philosophers and scientists have argued that science has in fact "killed" God, and that if we believe the facts science has presented, we must also accept that God is fiction. Others, holding fast to their long-standing doctrines, attempt to justify their beliefs by using God to explain gaps in scientific knowledge. Having left an upbringing in a family of Mennonite preachers to discover his own experience of God, Galen Guengerich understands the modern American struggle to combine modern world views with outdated religious dogma. Drawing upon his own experiences, he proposes that just as humanity has had to evolve its conception of the universe to coincide with new scientific discoveries, we are long overdue in evolving our concept of God. Gone are the days of the magical, supernatural deity in the sky who visits wrath upon those who have not followed his word. Especially in a scientific age, we need an experience of a God we can believe in—an experience that grounds our morality, unites us in community, and engages us with a world that still holds more mystery than answers.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Spirituality, Religion

240 pages, Hardcover

First published May 28, 2013

About the author

Galen Guengerich is Senior Minister of All Souls Unitarian Church, an historic congregation located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. He is the tenth person to hold this position in the congregation’s 193-year history. His last name is pronounced GING (rhymes with “sing”) -rich.

He was educated at Franklin and Marshall College (BA, 1982), Princeton Theological Seminary (MDiv, 1985) and the University of Chicago (PhD, 2004). His doctoral dissertation is titled Comprehensive Commitments and the Public World: Tillich, Rawls and Whitehead on the Nature of Justice.

He is author of the forthcoming book God Revised: How Religion Must Evolve in a Scientific Age (Palgrave Macmillan, May 2013) and writes a regular column on “The Search for Meaning” for psychologytoday.com.

His sermon at All Souls on Sept. 16, 2001—the Sunday after 9/11—was selected for inclusion in Representative American Speeches 2001-2002. Titled “The Shaking of the Foundations,” the sermon appears along with speeches by Governor George Pataki, President George Bush and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani as one of seven “Responses to September 11th.”

He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He serves on the Board of Directors of Interfaith Alliance, the national non-partisan advocacy voice for faith and freedom; he served as chair of the Interfaith Alliance board from 2008-2012.In the past, Rev. Guengerich has served as Visiting Scholar at Union Theological Seminary in New York City; and on the boards of Dads and Daughters, the national advocacy nonprofit for fathers and daughters; the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, a human rights organization; and the New York City Audubon Society.

He lives in Manhattan with his wife, Holly G. Atkinson, MD; his daughter Zoë is a student at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Reviews

[Darin Stewart · Rating 4 out of 5]

God Revised is an excellent introduction to a humanist approach to faith and religion. Guengerich articulates two fundamental ideas that form the core of the book. The first defines God as "a connection with all that is present, all that is past and all that is possible." To traditional theists this will seem completely nonsensical. However, for those that cannot come to accept a supernatural, anthropomorphic deity and yet feel a deep sense of spirituality, this will make perfect sense and provide a context for thinking and communicating about the divine. The second central idea is in regards to an "ethic of gratitude" as the moral foundation of life. Together, these two principles form the underpinnings of a simple yet rich theology.

The subtitle of the book is slightly misleading. This is not primarily a book about reconciling religion and science. It is more about how to find spirituality in a scientific age and how to live as a person of faith without believing what is contrary to evidence and reason. At times Guengerich is a bit too pleased with his own erudition, but this is tempered with frequent self-deprecation, personal experiences and pop-culture references.

I highly recommend this book for the "nones", the "spiritual but not religious." It makes a compelling argument that religion and the communities it facilitates have value and that value is of a sort that is difficult to find or create elsewhere. I also recommend this book to those people of faith who experience the cognitive dissonance that often comes with religious observance in the context of day to day life and experience. It is possible to keep a foot in both worlds and live with both spiritual and intellectual integrity, but only if we are willing to question and revise our notions of God.

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quotable:
I discovered that freedom from one way of life leads to a welter of choices about possible alternative ways of life.

It’s certainly possible to believe that Jesus was the offspring of Mary and the Holy Ghost and yet to choose to have an MRI to identify the cause of your lower back pain. The spiritual splitting between magic and science goes on all the time. But it requires trying to inhabit two incompatible universes at once. For my part, I don’t believe this spiritual schizophrenia is necessary. There’s a better way to be religious, and this book is my attempt to describe that better way.

The reason religion is necessary isn’t so we can find salvation for the next life, but rather so we can find meaning and purpose in this one.

I want to know the truth: what’s logically true and what’s true to life. My guess is that most people want the same… The harmony between our minds and the world gets disrupted when we are asked to believe things that our reason and sense experience tell us can’t be true… We need to ask whether religious belief operates under a different set of rules than our beliefs about other things.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t believe in God or that the Bible isn’t an important work of wisdom literature. I’m simply saying that God isn’t supernatural and that the Bible is not the ultimate authority on every subject with which it deals. The claim that the Bible is the authoritative revelation of the one true God has no logical foundation.

Beauty depends on well-ordered physical relationships, goodness derives from well-ordered ethical relationships, and happiness derives from well-ordered emotional relationships – none of which are possible if life is senseless and meaningless.

Everyone is who they are by virtue of their relationships to everyone and everything else.

Religion is about transformation – about making good on our desire to become better people and make our world a better place.

The religions of the West developed as they did for reasons that made sense at the time, but their time has passed. Our understanding of how we know and of what there is must evolve, and our understanding of God must evolve as well.

I agree with the atheists that God is not supernatural, yet I agree with the advocates of traditional religion that belief in God is necessary.

Hildegard of Bingen… "I am the fiery life of divine substance, I blaze above the beauty of the fields, I shine in the waters, I burn in the sun, moon, and stars. And I awaken all to life with every wind of the air, as with invisible life that sustains everything…. Thus I am concealed in things as fiery energy. They are ablaze through me, like the breath that ceaselessly enlivens the human being, or like the wind-tossed flame in a fire. All these things live in their essence, and there is no death in them, for I am life. I also am rationality, who holds the breath of the resonant word by which the whole of creation was created; and I have breathed life into everything, so that nothing by its nature may be mortal, for I am life."

God is the experience of being connected to all that is – all that is present, as well as all that is past and all that is possible.

Rather than trying to describe the physical world and explain its workings, as scientists do, theologians try to interpret human experience and account for its meaning.

We need some way to acknowledge the enduring presence of all that is past. Our experience demands a resting place – a refuge – for all that is past.

When I say “I believe in God,” I’m saying that I believe in an experience that intimately and extensively connects me to all that is – all that is present, as well as all that is past, and all that is possible. As the safeguard of all that is past, God provides a refuge – no matter how dire my present circumstances, As the source of all that is possible, God provides hope – no matter how bleak my prospects.
For most people who say they don’t believe in God, however, the experience of God as immanent witness to our past experiences and transcendent source of our future possibilities isn’t the problem. Their problem is the idea that God is a personal being or, to put the issue more precisely, a conscience being. This is the parking-spot-by-the-mall-door problem. Is Gad by virtue of being independent of time and history, able willy-nilly to step in and change things – move the Hummer to parking lot C?

The experience of the God we can believe in can at times be frightening because of our sense of responsibility. But the experience can be boundless as well because of our sense of possibility. To be sure, God cannot be placed under a microscope or subjected to double-blind studies. Nor will God ensure that good things always happen to good people.
But I believe the experience of God is both philosophically necessary and theologically sound. It enables us to interpret our experience and account for its meaning. Faith in God is faith that our experiences, however difficult or sublime, have genuine and abiding significance. It is also faith that the tale of the future has not yet been told – that a night of distress may yet turn into a morning of light.

If you trace my atoms all the way back in time and my relationships all the way out in space, you will eventually account for everything in the universe. If you look ahead into my future, you’ll encounter all the possibilities that could conceivably arise from the circumstances of my present.

Men fear being smothered by a relationship or humiliated by rejection or defeat while women fear isolation – that in being set apart by success, they will be left alone.

Instead of bowing to religious dogmatism and scientific orthodoxy, the pragmatists championed open-mindedness and tolerance. They evaluated ideas and values not by assessing who originated them and when, but by their usefulness – their ability to promote happiness, solve problems, and get things done.

The point of religion is not simply to affirm that something is true. It is to make yourself a better person and your world a better place.

At its best faith is a commitment to live with the belief that life is a wondrous mystery, that love is divine, that we are responsible for the well-being of those around us. Faith is a commitment to live fervently and devoutly, with eyes wide open and mind fully engaged, but also with heart open to mystery and soul attuned to the transcendent.

Alain de Botton… is not intent on mocking religions like many of his fellow agnostics and atheists. Instead, Botton advises pillaging from religion. They’ve packed with good ideas on how to live our lives and arrange our societies. Religion can teach us how to build a sense of community, make our relationships last, get more out of art, and overcome feelings of envy and inadequacy.

For an enlightened religious community, the challenge is to find a middle distance between an individual quests for freedom that leaves us each isolated and an authoritarian insistence on certainty that leaves us all in bondage. We need a way of being religious that sets is free and makes us whole. I believe that the hallmark of this way of being religious is the discipline of gratitude.

From the movie Shall we dance… The reason we marry is that “we need a witness to our lives. There’s a billion people on the planet… I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you’re promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things… all of it, all the time, every day. You’re saying ‘Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness.’”

It’s worth remembering that the word “religion” does not mean liberating or setting free, but rather binding together. Religion unites the purpose of our lives as human beings with the purpose that animates the universe. Religion unites the spirit of humanity with the energy that keeps the stars shining, the planets spinning, and the flowers blooming in springtime. Gratitude is the appropriate response to our experience of being part of, yet utterly dependent upon, the people around us and the universe that sustains us.

The point of disciplines of religion: they help us remember who we are and remind us of the commitments we have made.

The root of wisdom is nothing more or nothing less than the ability to keep our wits about us. It’s the ability to think clearly in difficult situations – to pay attention to what matters and ignore what doesn’t.

How far do our obligations as human beings extend? Our obligations certainly extend beyond those we consider our fellow citizens, but how much further?

Religion includes good art and great architecture and stirring music and instructive stories and comforting rituals and prophetic challenges. But until thy all fit together in a way that unites spiritual need and moral imagination, they don’t add up to transformed lives and a changed world.

Discovering where you belong is the first step to being set free.

[Dana · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author of this book, a Unitarian Universalist pastor who had been raised Mennonite, believes that we have outgrown the concept of a supernatural God, so we no longer need one, yet we still need religion to give us a sense of common community and ethics and morality.
He advocates religion without God. He posits that since religion has always explained the unexplainable, and we now have science to do that for us, the concept of a supernatural God, one who is inconceivably born of a virgin and who is omnipresent and omniscient, is an unnecessary and outmoded one. In his view, we are brought together by rituals and we need those rituals to give us a sense of community, gratitude and ethics, and we can do that without a supernatural God.
I disagree. I would rather have God without religion than religion without God.

[William Crosby]

[Iowa mention]

[Bob H · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is not for those who believe the Bible is the literal, inerrant word of God; the book's marketers say this is aimed at people seeking a God that does not deny their rationality. As the author himself says, belief can follow understanding, not the other way round. It's a compelling premise for those trying to figure out what mainline religion needs to do, facing dwindling interest and membership -- in no small part because they might not be able to explain a newly-seen, rational God to their audiences. While not a Unitarian-Universalist like the author, I come to this as a member of the United Church of Christ and might appreciate his insights.

The title is something of a misnomer. By a "scientific age" he seems to mean a rational one, in which he only mentions Darwin or Newton to illustrate the conflict between traditional belief and modern knowledge, modern phenomena that contradict it: "faith in the realm of the absurd," he calls it. It's not a revision of God, unlike the title, but a re-vising of belief that reconciles faith and reason -- God revisited, maybe, or God: Rebooted. It's definitely not God-is-dead; he doesn't have much use for the atheism of Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. He does draw on his own experiences with his childhood Mennonite faith and subsequent evolution into Unitarianism. He builds on it with observations from Kant, Emerson, Wittgenstein, a large number of other philosophers and others. It builds to what perhaps should have been his peroration: an ethic of gratitude, of community.

The downside is that, as the book proceeds, it begins a repetitive pattern. Premise; an outside reading ("So-and-so, in his book ABCD, says this, while Whoosit in DEFG says this also); a conclusion and a segue to next point -- a pattern I'm familiar with from innumerable church sermons. I would have liked more of his own original insights. And, his final chapter seems to be why Unitarian Universalism is the solution. It's not helpful either as an explanation why his church, All Souls in New York, is successful, nor is it helpful to other mainline progressive religions as a guide to a re-energized faith for modern audiences.

It's still an intelligent read, in places, but it does tend to diffuse after a while. But, "if the trumpet sounds an uncertain note, who shall heed the call to battle?" (I Cor. 14:8).

[Farfoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will start with, if you have seen or heard Rev. Guengerich you know what to expect. He has turned his two day lecture / sermon series into a cohesive book. I am pretty much a groupie and I wasn't disappointed.

While you consider God, interdependence and gratitude, you'll get your full dose of Bonhoeffer, Tillich and Whitehead with a little Green Day thrown in. Don't be put off by the physics terms -- he just uses them to make his point and keeps it simple.

This book won't convince any fundamentalists (of any stripe) convert, but then, I don't think it is meant to. It is meant to explore how liberal religionists can adapt for modern times and how we can have a modern concept of god, faith and justice.

[Brandon · Rating 2 out of 5]

In my opinion, the title seemed to be misleading when I finished the book. It is more a story of how Guengerich left his religion from birth to becoming a universalist. I was expecting evidence of how teachings in the main three religions are wrong according to science and how we can take this new found knowledge and apply it to our lives. There were very few quotations from the bible and most were from random atheists without much substance.

[Joan Porte · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting tale of his move from being born a Menonnite to becoming a Unitarian minister - with good questions about how we fashion the concept of God. He lost me a bit at the end - but over all a "good read."

[Samuel Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mostly trivial. Not terrible, just trivial. I read about 40 pages, 20 at the beginning and 20 passim. Didn't find anything terribly insightful or creative religiously or scientifically.

[Sx3 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finally finished this book.

My secular self really enjoyed it but that said, I would have liked more Scripture included.

I'm surprised that I feel that way too.

[Kam · Rating 5 out of 5]

VERY provocative.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating discussion about the potential of religious community in the 21st century.

[Δx Δp ≥ ½ ħ · Rating 3 out of 5]

People need to understand the difference between religion and a personal relationship with God.