I have experienced God. Once, as a child lying in bed I had an intense sensation that Jesus was standing by my bed, just being present. Once, as an adult, at a particularly desolate time I asked myself desperately “Surely, there is more to reality than this?”, and a great wave of joyful certainty washed over me: yes there is. Once I had an immediate and positive, unambiguous and frightening answer to a very specific prayer. Proof enough to believe in God? Most of the time.
As a practicing Christian (at least, one who tries to walk the walk) I have been in a family of faith and a committed member of some church all my adult life. The finest people I have known have all been fine because of their faith--Saints all. To worship, minister, commune, celebrate, and take communion with such Christians—or even the beginners--is as vital to me as air.
And yet. I cannot seem to be able to leave off asking myself: What if it’s all a delusion? And when when this question pops up, it is like walking up to the edge of a vast, dark abyss, and stumbling on the edge, terrified, terrified of meaninglessness. Because if there is no God, no Good, if it’s all just physics then I am no more than a complex maggot.
But surely, no self-respecting
human being—any human with a conscience—will accept this. Although science
seems to say (and certainly there are scientists who say) that we are just an accident
of nature, a smart animal with a deluded sense of grandeur, most people, I think,
regardless of religious conviction believe we are subject to a higher moral sense:
a sense of good and evil and subject to moral principles which can contradict and
even overrule our Darwinian instincts for self-preservation. A soldier throws himself
on a grenade and saves his comrades at the cost of his own life. A priest at a death camp takes the place of a
younger person condemned to death. In ordinary existence, isn’t every generous
gift that is given sacrificially a challenge, a denial, of selfish competition?
For Christians, of course, the iconic sacrifice is Jesus crucifixion, an
atonement for all human sin. Saint Paul
says Jesus’ sacrifice appears foolish to non-believers, but don’t most people,
even non-christians, recognize the nobility of Jesus act, the self-denial of it,
even if they do not believe in the necessity of it?
The reason most humans recoil from
the brink of the abyss of meaninglessness is, we cannot live without meaning.
We want our existence, our lives, to count for something. I believe this almost universal desire is the best evidence we will ever
have for the existence of God. This is what Christians call the Holy
Spirit, and surely there are similar terms for this inspiration we have in all the great religions.
So, I
begin by affirming a belief in God: something besides physics and chemistry
that is part of reality. My definition may be not too different from that of
Paul Tillich: God as the “ground of our being” that--spirit, perhaps?--which is
responsible for our conscience, our empathy. Is this God an independent person beyond ourselves, a distinct and
separate holiness, or perhaps “just” some sort of universal spirit common to
humans? I’m not sure how important this question is! For me the important thing
is the existence of something that is
supernatural, something that is the source of love, beauty, kindness,
generosity, something that defies hate and and selfishness.
I am
well aware that science, that powerful activity that is at the heart of
modernity, makes the working assumption that all the gifts I assign to this
supernatural thing are in fact illusions, that the Darwinian struggle and the survival
value of cooperation explains all our pretensions of higher emotions and of
conscience. But the key point here is
that is a working definition that is
forced upon science by its methodological limitations! Scientists define their work as the exploration of natural law, by observation and
measurement and the construction of predictions, coupled with a working philosophical
assumption that that is all there is. This assumption does not say there is no
God, only that the supernatural is simply off limits because it is outside natural
law. Of course many scientists—and indeed
many modern men and women—go beyond this working
assumption to say that the assumption is really
all there is! This is as much a faith statement as any
religious creed, with no more, and no less, justification.
On the
other hand, religions say a great deal more than this about who God is! In the next chapter
I want to explore the theology of the dominant religions.
