PLGRM

You were gracious the last time we talked about this, and I appreciate it. I may have called you a fool, but didn’t fully tell you why. Thanks for your patience. 🙂

I am intrigued by our human intuition – the internal sense – that there is “something more” than what we can see and perceive. Part of what I want to make a case for is this intuition is vital. I’m not alone in saying this, but it does stand at odds with how humans have come to know things over the last few centuries.

Part of why someone says they “don’t believe in God” is because they are using the particular set of criteria established by modernism.

Hang with me here.

Once Descartes uttered the maxim “I think, therefore I am” and the human race entered modernity, we began to discount any form of knowing that wasn’t deemed “objective.”

Philosopher Ken Wilber points out that we started privileging the rational over and above everything else and developed a pathological tendency to only value those things we can externally measure and test in a laboratory. Subjectivity, individual experience, and feelings are fine things to have, but they have no meaning as data. “It’s fine that your ‘gut’ is telling you something might happen, but statistics say otherwise. Don’t talk to me about feelings of ‘love.’ You’re only experiencing a chemical reaction in your brain.” While we have certainly moderated this point of view in the 400 years since Descartes, our modern (particularly) Western society still basically operates from a posture of: if we can’t see it, it’s not real.

For spiritual and religious people, this stands at odds with everything we have experienced.

Indeed, our faith often begins by having an experience we can’t explain – “things happen” that defy scientific or objective reasoning – and we’re then driven by the need to find words to describe what happened. Even as far back as the 4th Century, this dynamic was well known. So much so that St. Augustine established it as the basis for doing theology. He called it “faith seeking understanding.” In the 11th Century, St. Anselm took the idea a step further:

“I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but rather, I believe in order that I may understand.”

But who is this “I” that is seeking to understand? When you think of “you,” are you able to pinpoint the location of your being? Are you your body? You have muscles and tendons and skin, but when you think of “yourself” can you be defined by the sum of your body parts? How about that “gut” we alluded to earlier? You have feelings, but are you your feelings? If not, how about that mind Descartes was so fond. You have a mind, but is that the location of who you are?

Whenever I search through this list of “body, emotions, and mind” in an attempt to locate the core of who I am, I am always left unsatisfied. It is not until I reach “spirit” that I find something that seems right and true to both my feelings and my thoughts. The religious tradition I am a part of has claimed for eons that when we talk of a “you” or “me” we are not simply talking about beings with physical, rational, and emotional aspects, but ones that are foundationally spiritual.

In my opinion, this is the source of the intuition that there is something more.

Even though we can’t see or readily perceive whatever that more is, it is our spirits that recognize it and alert us to it. It is why we admire and are drawn to artists, those who are adept at catching glimpses of the more in ways many of us are not trained to see. We love them because they show and tell us about the Good, Beautiful, and True. It’s why we admire and are drawn to religious mystics. We sit at their feet because they have managed to pull back the veil to introduce us to the Eternal.

But we have to be clear: This spiritual intuition alone is not proof that there is a god.

My intuition that there is “something more” is but the starting point. Only when that intuition is coupled with other arguments made by theologians and philosophers throughout the years (and all credit to theologian Shirley C. Guthrie for helpfully compiling them in his seminal book Christian Doctrine), what comes into focus is a compelling picture only a fool would deny.

Throughout the years, theologians have called this set of arguments pointing to the existence of God General Revelation. It’s a “revelation” because we are being shown that there is a god, but it’s “general” because we don’t yet know anything about this god.

Beyond the intuition that there is likely something beyond what we can perceive, something more, the first piece of evidence for God is actually the seemingly unanswerable question: “How?” How is this world possible? How did it come to be? Moreover, how does it all stay together?

When it comes right down to it, the Earth is just a big rock precariously floating in space in the most perfect location to sustain life. We can learn information about the path this rocks took to reach the form it is in, but even coming to know about the Big Bang doesn’t explain how The Stuff That Banged™ came to be in the first place. The world is not self-explanatory. We can observe that life does exist – we can see birth and life and death and then new life – but our observations alone leave us in the dark about how it was all possible in the first place.

Something or someone beyond us must have done it.

We also can’t answer the question: “Why?” We can see the ways our complex body parts function together in harmony, we can learn about the complex relationship trees and plants have in themselves and with one another, we can marvel at the systems our minds have been able to conceive up and create, but nothing in those observations tells us why that is all possible. Why does the food chain exist? Why is it that removing wolves from a forest fundamentally alters that ecosystem? Is it sheer accident that the Earth sifts on a tilted axis? We have come to learn how the parts of a system go together, but nothing tells us the why. Why is there harmony and a rational order to the universe? Why is there not chaos?

It seems someone or something has a plan for where this is all going.

And the plan is clearly working. Even if we turn our attention only to the scope of human history we find the movement is a forward one. As Shirley Guthrie says, “Over and over again throughout the course of history, forces of injustice and evil have been defeated and forces of justice and righteousness have finally prevailed” (Christian Doctrine, page 42). What begins as simple competitive chaos always results in complex harmonious cooperation. Even in our own lives what we, at first, think are dead ends or last stands often prove to be yet one more step (even if small) in a long process towards wholeness. Why is there a way out when there shouldn’t be one? Something or someone has a reason for my continued existence and flourishing.

And why do I feel compelled to participate in the flourishing of others and the world? Why am I naturally drawn to act in moral and ethical ways? As children, we have an innate sense of caring for others. It is not until we are older that we “learn” we should look out just for ourselves. As the great Broadway lyricist Richard Rodgers once told us:

“You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,

Before you are six or seven or eight,

To hate all the people your relatives hate,

You’ve got to be carefully taught!”

This moral sense must come from somewhere. The innate understanding of right and wrong, fairness and justice, and care and duty must have their origin in something beyond us that pervades and animates creation.

One of the most glorious experiences of my life happened one morning at White Sands National Park. It was an hour after sunrise, and I was in the midst of lining up my camera to take a photo. It was a simple scene, but one aching with beauty. I had been shooting for a little while and had been marveling (as one does!) about the history of the place and the fortune we humans have of being able to experience it. Why did we get to know about this? Why had it been preserved, let alone made in the first place? And, in that moment, I began weeping uncontrollably for more than a minute. I had never experienced anything like it in my life, this feeling of being totally and completely overcome with gratitude. I was grateful someone or something made that place. I was grateful humans saw fit to preserve it, when it could have been eradicated or exploited. I was grateful to see, right before my eyes, the harmony and order of a seemingly wild place.

In that moment, I had a crystalline understanding that there was a god.

I could not deny it, my heart would not let me. Nothing about that place told me much about this god except, perhaps, that this god is good. But I didn’t need to know that in that moment. All I needed to do then was see and acknowledge that there is so much beyond all this. As I’ve said: if it looks like a duck…

Once we acknowledge, there’s something beyond us, we might feel a bit of relief or awe or terror or… Humans are creatures who need to make meaning of their lives, so, naturally, we are going to work to make meaning of this new realization.

Part of meaning making is knowing, and that’s what I want to explore next week.