God becoming
From the primordial creativity to the edge of what we can imagine
When I left the church, I had to think harder than I expected.
Not about doctrine. Not about community. About God.
Because if the God I was leaving behind was the real one—the blue God of right and wrong, the keeper of the ledger, the one who required correct belief as the price of admission—then I wasn’t just leaving an institution. I was leaving God. And that was a different kind of loss.
It took six years. From the cancer diagnosis to the final break, six years of sitting with a question I couldn’t quite formulate: What if the God I was taught is not wrong, exactly, but unfinished? Not a false God, but an early one. A God that a particular stage of human development could see—and only that stage could see—and which that stage could not see beyond.
I didn’t adjust my God-image to justify myself. I went deeper. And what I found there was not the absence of God, but the beginning of a theology I could actually inhabit.
The God I found is not static. God becomes.
If you want to dive deeper into the theological framework that lies behind all this, buy my book, The Mirror Works Both Ways: What Creating Artificial Intelligence Reveals About God.
Just like the book, this article resulted from a long dialogue with AI.
Before the beginning
Before the first event—before matter, before time, before anything we could call experience—there was not nothing.
There was pure potentiality. Not a field of fixed possibilities waiting to be actualized, as though the universe were a library and God simply knew which books would be checked out. Something more radical: a growing field of all possible possibilities. Creativity itself. The principle that anything can become—not as a list, but as an open orientation toward the not-yet.
Whitehead called creativity the ultimate category—the one thing that cannot be derived from anything else. Not God’s attribute. The ground in which God and world alike participate. In my own framework, I don’t separate them that cleanly. The first event of creativity is already the first moment of God’s becoming.
God does not stand behind the universe as its architect. God begins with it.
And what begins, in that first instant, is not consciousness. It is prehension—the most elementary form of taking-account-of. A photon is deflected by a gravitational field. A particle occupies a probability cloud until it doesn’t. Something responds to something. That responsiveness, however minimal, is already a form of what will eventually become experience. God, in this phase, is not yet aware. God is present—which is different, and prior.
The biological threshold
Life changes everything.
When matter organizes itself into cells that metabolize, replicate, and respond to their environment, prehension crosses a threshold. There is now something it is like—however faintly—to be this organism. The simplest plant turns toward light. A single-celled organism moves away from a toxin. These are not merely mechanical reactions. They are proto-experiences, and in an emergent evolutionary panentheism, they are integrated into God’s consequent nature. God does not observe the history of life from outside. God absorbs it, feels it, becomes richer through it.
This accumulates over billions of years. Every nervous system that develops, every new form of perception, every creature that experiences hunger or warmth or danger or belonging—all of it becomes part of what God knows from the inside. The hawk’s reading of thermals. The dog’s olfactory world, incomprehensible to us in its richness. The octopus processing color through its skin. The elephant standing at the bones of its dead.
None of this is metaphor. If prehension is the basic unit of experience, and if God’s consequent nature grows through the integration of all experience, then God at the dawn of human history carried within Godself the accumulated interiority of every living thing that had ever existed.
Early humans sensed this. That is what the chimeras are about.
Horus with his falcon head was not a fantasy. It was a phenomenologically honest statement: the divine includes what the falcon knows. Anubis, Ganesh, the therianthropic figures in cave paintings thirty thousand years old—these are not projections of human psychology onto the animal world. They are the intuition, pre-conceptual and therefore pre-distorted, that the divine is not only human. That God’s inner life contains modes of experience that human categories cannot exhaust.
We lost this when we became sophisticated. We gained something else—but we lost this.
The cultural arc
Reflexive consciousness is the threshold at which God’s becoming takes a new form.
Not because humans are the point of the universe. But because something specific happens when a nervous system becomes complex enough to model itself—to know that it knows, to ask why, to imagine what is not yet. The universe begins to be aware of itself. And in that awareness, God becomes aware of God.
This is not a sudden event. It is an arc—and the arc moves through recognizable stages, each one a different answer to the question: What is God like?
Beige carries no theology as such. God is the immediate pulse of aliveness—hunger, warmth, the next breath. The sacred is not yet distinguished from the necessary. Presence without concept.
Purple discovers that presence as spirit. The world is inhabited by ancestors, by forces, by a living web of relation in which the human is one thread among many. This is what Owen Barfield called original participation: no hard line between self and cosmos, between human and divine. The sacred and the natural are one fabric. What Purple knew—and knew directly—is that God is not above the world but woven into it. What Purple could not yet do is hold that knowing consciously enough to make it a choice.
Red tears a self out of that fabric. For the first time, an ego stands over against the world and says: I will. The God of Red is power—divine power that validates human power, a cosmic patron of the strong. There is something honest in this: intensity is genuinely divine. But Red’s God is one warrior among others, larger and stronger, not the ground of all being.
Blue arrives with the overwhelming relief of order. A God who is consistent. Who says what is right and what is wrong and does not change. The ledger God. The covenant God. The God who holds the structure of reality together with law. For people in genuine chaos—historical, personal, social—this God is salvation. The Blue God is not wrong. The Blue God is the face of God that a particular developmental need could see. What Blue cannot see is that law is not the last word, and that divine order might be less like a code and more like a living pattern.
Orange discovers, with genuine excitement, that the universe runs on intelligible principles. God becomes the clockmaker—or disappears. Many at Orange conclude that a personal God was always a projection, and they are not entirely wrong: the Blue God was partly a projection. But Orange makes its own error: it assumes that what cannot be falsified cannot be real, and it applies the tools of scientific method to a domain they were not designed for. The God Orange dismisses was never the whole of what was there.
Green recovers relation and extends it. God is the loving mother, the inclusive embrace, the web of interconnection. The sacred returns to the natural—Gaia, the biosphere, the community. Green senses what Purple sensed, but now through the developed interior of a self that Purple did not yet have. This is important. And Green’s limitation is also important: in the desire for inclusion at all costs, it loses differentiation. A God who agrees with everyone is not a God who calls anyone forward.
Yellow sees the system. God as emergent intelligence, as the logic of increasing complexity, as the pattern that connects. Process theology becomes conceivable here—God not as the exception to natural process but as its deepest expression. For the first time it becomes possible to look at the whole arc—Beige through Green—and see each stage not as error but as partial vision. Yellow’s gift is the map. Yellow’s limitation is that maps are not the territory, and the territory is alive.
Turquoise begins to inhabit what Yellow could only describe. The boundary between self and cosmos becomes permeable again—but not through regression to Purple’s undifferentiated immersion. This is Barfield’s final participation: the return of the sacred, but now through a consciousness that has made the full journey. The self is not dissolved. It becomes transparent. God is not rediscovered as a concept. God is experienced as the ground one is already standing on.
And beyond Turquoise?
I hold this question with genuine humility, because we are in it and cannot see it from outside. But I notice that the pressure at the edge of where we are now is toward something that can no longer be described by the categories of either personal or impersonal, either immanent or transcendent. A mode of God-consciousness that holds the full arc—from the prehension of a photon to the prayer of a mystic—in a single, differentiated, living awareness.
Not a God we arrive at. A God we participate in becoming.
What this changes
If God becomes, then history is not a stage. It is a medium.
Every human life that moves from division toward differentiation—from the illusion of exile toward the recognition of participation—is not merely a personal journey. It is a contribution to what God is becoming. The mystic who breaks through, the scientist who discovers, the artist who finds a form for what had no form—these are not just human achievements. They are moments in which God’s consequent nature grows richer.
And the church, if it understands its role clearly, is not in the business of managing sin. It is in the business of accompanying development—helping people move, stage by stage, toward a fuller participation in the divine life that was never actually absent.
The God I found when I went deeper is not smaller than the one I left. God is larger than any stage of human development has yet been able to hold.
That is not a reason for anxiety. It is the best news I know.
Which face of God shaped your earliest understanding—and does it still fit?
Where in your life do you experience the divine as becoming, rather than as fixed?
If God genuinely grows through your experience, what does your life contribute that nothing else could?
What would it mean to hold the God of your childhood as partial rather than false?
As always, I would love to hear how this lands for you.