God has been invoked as a business ally for a long time, even before John D. Rockefeller, Jr., a devout Baptist, declared that his wealth came from God. The deity has served as a pious cover for shady practices and unethical behavior. He (or she) has also bolstered peoples' strength and courage, their ability to cope with failure and setbacks, and other crises on the path to success. To say that faith is an important quality in religious believers isn't surprising.

But having a divine ally seems very inconsistent, to put it mildly. In the recent economic downturn, when businesses and home owners were severely stressed, I doubt that the difference between those who survived and those who didn't was devotion to God. Believing in a personal God who cares for you is one thing; activating God to help you make the right choices in life is another. For a being defined as omnipotent and omniscient, God has proved to be remarkably passive and unreliable in the practical affairs of life.

Let me set aside arguments from devout believers who will protest that I am mistaken, that they relate to God and are guided by him in everything they do. I fully realize that some people feel this way, and there are corporate cultures where everyone is expected to conform to a given religious attitude. But there are countless more people who find the gap between God and their own lives very real, and disturbing. Given a choice between taking care of themselves or relying on divine help, they would immediately choose the former.

I've recently written a new book, The Future of God , which addresses one question at length: How do you turn a passive, unreliable God into an active, consistent god? The thickets of theology block any new answer, because behind the word God lurks centuries of contradictory beliefs, dogmas, and creeds. I don't pick and choose between them. My argument, in a nutshell, is as follows:

1. If God is real, he can only be known through experience. Hope and faith fall short of experience.
2. Any experience of God must take place in the mind, and mental events require processing in the brain.
3. The brain gives us access to higher consciousness by adapting to experiences of higher consciousness.
4. If you go inward through meditation, you reach the level of consciousness where new possibilities arise.
5. Among these new possibilities are increased creativity, strength, meaning, and intelligence.
6. The inner and outer world are connected. As your consciousness deepens, your outer life will benefit.
7. At the very deepest level of our awareness is the source of creation, from which all possibilities emerge. Finding the source is the same as contacting God.

This train of thought unites the world's wisdom traditions, which hold that God, however you define him, is within us. There is no need to adopt prayer, faith, or religious obedience as completely necessary. It's not even necessary to posit a personal God. The entire process is one of expanding your awareness so that your personal reality shifts. If along the way you find that you value faith, worship, prayer, and a specific religion, that's also part of your personal reality--none of these things are excluded. But they aren't universal, either.

God's help becomes practical, a tangible aspect of daily existence, when you activate the hidden potential in your own consciousness. If you feel skeptical about this assertion, I invite you to read the entire argument laid out in the book. My motivation wasn't to bolster religion but to show that God has a future if we stop circling back to the same old discussions and disagreements. The road to a renewed God starts by discarding assumptions and beliefs that have rendered God passive and inert. Once activated, God 2.0 holds infinite promise for improving human existence.