Off and on for 20 years I’ve thought carefully about how my relationship with God has changed. I’ve been acutely aware that his survival is at stake (for “His” you can substitute “Her” or “Its”, since an all-powerful, all-knowing, ever-present deity doesn’t have gender). I don’t approach the future by asking whether God exists, with believers declaring their faith on one hand and non-believers expressing their doubts on the other.

If an either/or debate could be settled once and for all, it would have been clinched long ago. Nor can we say that our relationship with God has evolved, because the same stuckness exists today as it did two centuries ago, despite the full flowering of the scientific age. Let’s concede that we live in a world dominated by science and materialism. The future of God depends on how you, as an individual, relate to that fact. Whether the faithful like it or not, no account of God will move forward if it contradicts scientific facts. On the other hand, millions of people are willing to abandon time-honoured religious beliefs in the face of materialism.
What we need are expanded facts. And these can only come from a space of inner reflection that takes advantage of facts and experience. For God to be an experience, a person has to look inside, which means that consciousness is involved. If science can tell us more about the human mind, we will discover — so is my fervent hope — that the source of the universe is the same as our source. At the cutting edge of physics there are thinkers who are willing to consider the notion that the cosmos is actually a conscious entity. If that is so, then the Creator of the universe would be here with us now, an invisible presence that imbues everything with the gifts that come with consciousness: creativity, intelligence, self-awareness, love and truth.
For God to transform into this new creator, seekers must evolve beyond the simplistic concept of “the man upstairs”. A close reading of the world’s scriptures, from the East and West, reveals that God was never seen as a human being sitting above the clouds. Beyond a personal God lies a very abstract notion (accepted in the Vedas, Buddhism and the Old Testament) of a creative intelligence that is everywhere at all times. In this guise, God cannot be localised. His home isn’t the sky but closer to the pre-created state envisioned by quantum physics.
Time and space had to come from somewhere. You cannot ask, “What came before time?” since that is self-contradictory, like asking “What’s north of the North Pole?” There must be a pre-created state that is timeless. For modern physics, the best candidate is a void that contains the potential for everything that emerged with the Big Bang. This void isn’t just nothing. In quantum reality, things can exist as pure potential before they manifest as visible things. Is God the same as pure potential?
Some scientists, without going that far, are willing to place some things in the pre-created universe. One is information. The same way that matter and energy cannot be destroyed, it appears that the cosmos remembers its basic rules for combining matter and energy. As it evolves from atoms to molecules to DNA and the human brain, information keeps building upon itself in a way that is undeniably creative.
A second thing that many scientists place in the pre-created state is mathematics. The famed Theory of Everything that is the holy grail of modern physics is entirely mathematical. But if the universe must operate according to mathematical principles, then we can’t throw out what maths is. Maths isn’t just numbers. It is also harmony, symmetry, order and rational relationships. If those things are also part of the pre-created state, we have a very strong hint that what came before the Big Bang was a mind.
Indeed, Einstein, who was not a conventional religious believer, often said that he was delving into the mind of God. A vedic rishi would have said the same thing. The great difference is that the rishis were Einsteins of consciousness. They transcended the thinking mind in order to find the source of all things in a silent, eternal, unchanging domain. Science finds it hard, if not impossible, to equate what it does with the inner exploration of saints, sages and seers. Ultimately, the proof is in the pudding. Each person must take the same inner journey that delivered truth to the Buddha or Vashistha.
You and I are used to trusting science more than we trust inner voyagers. Objectivity has won out over subjectivity. The reasons seem valid enough. Objective science has led to every convenience of modern life, and in sweeping away old superstitions, science has given us solid facts and verifiable experiments. A nuclear physicist can’t excuse his faulty results by saying that he was in a bad mood. Yet there is a fatal flaw with objectivity — it doesn’t exist. To be truly objective, you must stand outside the thing you are observing, like a boy pressing his nose against the bakery shop window.
No one can stand outside the universe. We are enmeshed in it. Science rejects the deep, rich experience of the inner world and, thus, falsifies it. You can’t turn love into data, or compassion or God. With a brain scan you can extract data about the areas of the brain that light up when a person is in love, feeling compassionate, or experiencing God. But that data isn’t the experience itself. Science could probably measure the molecular activity of a transistor as Mozart plays on the radio, but that isn’t remotely the same as understanding music.
Spirituality is about understanding. To reach God, you must be clear on this point. Imagine that a car has run off the road into a ditch. Bystanders rush to the scene of the accident, and the dazed driver is asked, “How did this happen?” There is more than one way to answer. He can say that the wheels turned into the ditch when the steering wheel suddenly turned — that’s the mechanical answer. He can say that his muscles pulled the steering wheel — that’s the physiological answer. He can say that he was drunk and lost control — that’s the personal answer. If we ask which answer leads to an actual understanding of the accident, the personal answer is a genuine starting point. Afterwards we can delve into a deeper understanding, which would involve how people face life psychologically, why they need a crutch like alcohol, and what genuine happiness means.
Inner exploration is the only means of gaining the kind of understanding that reveals God. We haven’t evolved in our relationship to God; we have only thrown out the old religious terminology, which is for the good. My position is that advanced science has actually given us new ways to defend, not God as a patriarch seated on his throne, but God as a field of intelligence that gives rise to the cosmos, life, evolution, and all the human mind. The vedic seers were right to declare that reality is based in consciousness, but it isn’t a personal consciousness. Sat Chit Ananda is impersonal, and the seeker who journeys to the find the source of his own consciousness will discover that the same source gave rise to the material universe. A meeting between science and spirituality is possible — the notion of a conscious universe is attracting more and more attention among physicists — but it depends on human evolution. As we look deeper into our own awareness, we will encounter the field of infinite awareness and intelligence that is God.

Deepak Chopra is a well-known public speaker, author and writer on Ayurveda, spirituality and mind-body medicine