Well, I would preface this with two things:
First of all, what I designate as "God" is an object to which I attribute various experiences I've had in my life, from mystical experiences of transcendence to seemingly implausible synchronicities to a general sense of being guided and experiencing purpose in my journey through life (and that I also read into the broader movement of history). I feel it's important to preface with this because I also like to speculate about the metaphysical nature of this thing I call "God," and that while my metaphysical framework has shifted over the years, the experiences to which that framework refers are still there and still valid.
Second, I would like to say that definitions are imperfect, even for everyday objects, let alone for matters of ultimate concern. As Wittgenstein pointed out in his Philosophical Investigations, the meaning a word is often found not in a set of necessary-and-sufficient conditions that we normally associate with a definition, but rather by a "family resemblance" in the ways the word is used. One of the traditional attributes ascribed to God is "transcendence," and if there's one thing the divine surely transcends, it is surely our attempts to nail it down to a concise definition. This is the motivation behind apophatic or "negative" theology, which seeks to understand God only in terms of what he is NOT. However, I think there is also a place for cataphatic or "positive" theology, for we can at least draw analogies for what God is like, even if they don't fully capture what God is. With that said, here's my current thinking on the subject:
The Gospel of John famously begins: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was God." The "Word" in this English translation is "Logos" in the original Greek. This is a very significant word with a long history in Greek philosophy going back as far as Heraclitus. It is where we get the word "logic," but it has a greater significance than that. See, for the Greeks, logic was not just some skill of the human mind, but rather something out in the world that was imperfectly grasped by our mind. It embodies Plato's categories of the Good, Beautiful, and the True. The Logos was thus a kind of order to the cosmos, similar to the Egyptian idea of Ma'at or the Chinese concept of the Tao. This isn't a static order, but a dynamic and creative one. It embodies a creative principle by which novelty emerges from habit, and new possibilities emerge. The Logos is the outer expression of God as revealed in creation. For Christians, this culminates in the "Word made Flesh" in the person of Jesus Christ.
Yet this Logos still seems a bit impersonal, even if it is finally expressed in a person. What does it mean to have a "personal God," as the Abrahamic traditions lay claim to? It would have to be a God who is not only an abstract principle, but who is responsive to us. One we can relate to as "thou" and not merely as "it." For this to happen, this cosmic principle would also have to have experience. How is this possible? Here, I think we need a metaphysics not only about God, but about ourselves, as well all created beings. We need a theory of consciousness.
And so forgive me if I take a detour here from God to the soul. I promise there is a point to all this. It is common to assume that consciousness is produced by the brain. There is no agreement among neuroscientists as to how this is accomplished, but it remains the default assumption. This problem is known if philosophy of mind as the "hard problem" of consciousness: how conscious experience emerges from unconscious matter. Descartes thought that mind and matter were two entirely distinct substances that somehow interact with one another, and this conception of mind tends to be the prevailing view among those who claim to believe in the "soul." Modern materialism laughs at the idea of soul, but struggles to come up with a neurological explanation for the hard problem. However, there is a more ancient alternative that has has recently become more popular. It is known as "panpsychism," which says that consciousness is somehow fundamental, existing at differing levels of complexity at all levels of organization, from quarks to atoms to molecules all the way up to us. This idea has recently been developed by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, who proposed that consciousness can be identified as integrated information. That is, an entity is conscious to the degree that it integrates disparate pieces of information into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. For example, while a digital camera may take in lots of information, if you take away half the pixels in the picture, you get half the picture, whereas if you cover up one of our eyes, we still get a whole picture. Each eye receives a whole picture that is integrated together in the brain. Tononi describes how everything, even the smallest quark, integrates information to some degree, and therefore has some sort of inner experience, no matter how primitive. This idea has recently been taken up by Christoph Koch, a protege of Francis Crick, who spent years searching for the "neural correlates of consciousness," and found that it must be understood in terms that transcend neuroscience.
So where does God fit in here? Well, if this Logos connects all that exists, then it would form the most comprehensive network in existence and integrate it into the most conscious thing in the universe. It would be essentially the consciousness of the universe itself (or multiverse, if such a thing exists). The sum of all our individual experiences would be integrated into this larger experience. By tapping into this larger consciousness, we experience what in Christianity is known as the Holy Spirit.
Yet this still does not give us a God who is responsive in the way that a personal God would be. For that, we need not only consciousness, but memory. Like consciousness, it is often assumed that memory is stored in the brain. We do know a thing or two about the formation and retrieval of memories, but what happens in between - the storage of memory - remains a mystery. There doesn't seem to be a "memory center" in the brain. Rather, when we retrieve a memory, the same neurons that fired during the original experience are activated again, as if to reconstruct the experience. But reconstruction implies an original from which to reconstruct, so we are left begging the question. The popular theory of memory "engrams" - neural imprints that store memories - takes us into an infinite regress, because if we are trying to recall a memory, then we would have to remember what memory to recall, and remember the memory of that memory, etc. This becomes very messy for a brain to do. In his book Matter and Memory, Henri Bergson offered a different view: rather than being stored as material traces in the brain, memories are part of an objectively existing past. We experience the present as a set of open possibilities to act upon. We experience the past as a set of closed possibilities we can no longer change, but which can influence our choices in the present. The difference between the two is one of causal openness versus causal closure. The past, in a sense, is still very much present, albeit without the ability to act upon it so as to change it. So we perceive the past in much the same way that we perceive the present.
So, if we return to this idea of a universal consciousness, our individual experiences of pain and pleasure, hopes and dreams, etc., are all integrated into this universal consciousness, which feels these experiences with us, and responds to them. It is in this way that the Logos takes on a dynamic quality, both affecting all created beings and also being affected by them. God then offers possibilities in response to the needs of those beings, and the beings choose among those possibilities. God, then, is not the exception to this metaphysical system, but the supreme exemplification of it.
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