Is God outside the universe? Is God the same as the universe?

These days, God is imagined to exist in some other dimension - not bound to this universe. Or conversely, like Gaia, to be the earth, or the universe itself.

I can't imagine how we can know if God exists beyond our universe; we run into a descriptive wall when there is no natural world to think about. What category do we have for what would be "outside" the universe (if such a term means anything)? Revelation does not help us much, because the folks to whom it came had such a different cosmology from ours. Since God has to speak through and into a particular culture (ones lacking the language of physics and modern cosmology), these kind of distinctions don't even come up. It is not at all clear to me that the expansive language used to describe God's remoteness and otherness means non-material or non-local.

To say that God IS all the processes and systems of the universe would make God irrelevant, because to explain the natural world (as science is in process of doing) would also describe God and all her activities. To say that God chooses to act in exact synchronicity with natural law means that we can drop God from the equation. At this point, God becomes an idea, perhaps an inspiring thought - this concept fits few notions of God.

In a similar way, saying that God is supernatural would mean that God is unable to interact with the natural world at all, since so far, we have not detected any uncaused action. That is what supernatural would look like, right? Some physical process taking place with no cause acting on it, or through it - like a vase floating from point a to b though the air, with no possible explanation of how it is happening. So at the very least, God inhabits the universe, without simply being the universe. Inhabiting the universe gives the mechanism of action, and not simply being the universe gives the possibility that God is more than another way of saying natural processes.

What about the millions (billions?) of people who say that they have experienced God just that way? A direct-to-brain sense of God speaking to them (figurative or literal), an experience of comfort and assurance, miraculous coincidence, healings, interventions, appearances of angels at just the right time, just the right word from a friend or a stranger, knowledge of the private thoughts of another person, or predictions of future events that turn out just as described? The difficulty is that these experiences don't seem to stand up to scrutiny; that is, they don't seem to have a statistically significant impact on health, longevity, divorce rate, standard of living (if God blesses His own) and so on. Why do we experience significant spiritual events if they don't seem to impact the overall experience of life on earth? For example, Pat Robertson is a world-famous faith healer, yet he is seeking our Western medicine for his prostate cancer. Is it just me, or is this odd? Millions of people are praying for him, yet his disease is progressing in complete accord with statistical norms. Why this disconnect between what we believe, and what seems to be the case?

We don't perceive reality directly (one simple example: objects don't have color, right? Color is literally in the mind - a way we process the eye's reception of various wavelengths of light bouncing off an object - or so we explain it to ourselves). If I read the popular physics books correctly, all of time already exists, and for some reason we don't understand, we are forced to experience it one "slice" at a time, and only in one direction. There are other examples that suggest that we experience only a small subset of what there is, and that experience is heavily structured and mediated (and sometimes even manufactured) by our sensory and cognitive apparatus.

I am not trying to suggest some "gap" in our understanding is where God is. I am trying to suggest that we are heavily invested in our experience of the world, and even things we are confident about (a blue sky day, for example) represent a heavily coded representation of reality, and not reality itself. We pay attention to the things our brain generates based on data from our five senses because that is what we've got. In this sense, we are like the drunk looking for his keys under the streetlight "because the light is better." Our brain looks for patterns (and finds them). Our brain generates explanations for cognitive dissonance (and we believe them, even when they are patently false). We do better with an optimistic outlook, and our brain paints a rosy picture for us (many of us, some of the time).

I don't think that this means we do not know or experience reality (but we are working under some heavy disadvantages). Much of what we know (and we can easily sort truth from fiction here) is grounded in an actual physical system. That we experience those systems at a remove is a truism we skip for the sake of convenience. So to say that the sky is blue is a shorthand way of saying that receptors in our eyes have registered photons in the 475 nm range, and which our brains are mapping as the color blue (or near enough - if the exact process ends up being different, it won't impact this argument). That synesthesia - experiencing color as smell or taste is a clue that this binding is arbitrary (through hard-wired in the brain); but it does not mean that our description of the sky is any less real.

This is one of the reasons that science has been so successful. By challenging assumptions, insisting on data to support ab assertion, carefully running experiments and having others check the results, by having lots of smart people try to disprove an idea (as opposed to apologetics - having those same smart people rationalize why an idea is correct), we are moving in a more "truthlike" direction as regards our understanding of the natural world.

I know that I personally locate the experience of Spirit in my sense of flow, of synchronicity, of connectedness, of things coming together for a purpose. Perhaps I mean grace. I do not understand why so many people's lives appear to lack that grace. The truly wretched state of billions is the strongest argument against grace that I know - and yet, I still believe I experience it, and witness its effects in the world.