Why isn’t God more obvious? The easy answer is ‘He is obvious’. The vast amounts of people who can testify to miraculous salvation (as well as the many other miracles experienced) and the vast historical and archaeological evidence that the Bible is the word of God belie the claim that evidence is scarce. All atheists really mean when they say there has been no evidence for the existence of God is that they do not really wish to look for any. They say ‘Show me the evidence now!’ knowing full well that their demand is impossible, and they walk away smugly, feeling vindicated – but the truth, as we shall see, is that they are behaving injudiciously and setting themselves up for an ill-conceived position.
Obviously an experience of God can only ever be a sample, just as my experience of centripetal acceleration or, much better, gravity, is only a sample of a far greater complex reality, most of which is background activity behind the scenes of this earthly drama. Therefore it is foolish to expect that such a complex entity as God can be experienced by anyone demanding evidence; for even Christians who have a relationship with Him are only experiencing parts of His fullness – a relationship through which He reveals more and more of Himself as we progress on our journey. Thus one must realise that God is an infinitely complex personality and is not necessarily going to deign Himself to everyday human test/refute sampling; nor will proof of His existence necessarily arrive on the doorstep with bells hanging and trumpets playing. What one must remember is that no set of finite moments in which we capture and comprehend a little part of Him are as big as the source object in the Divine realm, and therefore it is unreasonable to demand ‘proof’ in this way; the best we can get is ‘evidence’ of God working in nature and in people’s lives, and from that evidence we can use our rationale to make logical inferences, which will hopefully lead to our receiving revelation and beginning a relationship with Christ.
Having established that an intuitive knowledge of God is evidence relevant to the existence and will of God, and that such ‘evidence’ is a mere sample of God’s work in creation not of God Himself, it seems perfectly obvious that God cannot be presented to a person empirically, like a precious stone or an ancient fossil or a newly discovered mountain. Therefore we must look at the matter of receiving evidence for Him in a different way, by focusing on what God requires of an individual, not what the individual thinks they require of God. This adds weight to the silliness of the insistence that God shows us the evidence at the behest of the stridently assertive atheist, for Christians have said from the beginning that that is not how God does His business with creation, therefore how foolish of them to reject Christianity based not on its true realities but on their own faulty perception of the thing they are assessing. If it seems that God’s presence is too unfamiliar or unnoticeable, it may well be true, as Kierkegaard one remarked, that it His way of giving us the freedom to be ourselves:
Omnipotence which can lay its hand so heavily upon the world can also make its touch so light that the creature receives independence.
When assessing the nature of a personal, interested, willing and loving God, and His apparent absence or intractability, one must bear in mind that God has given us an opportunity for salvation; in fact, it is easier than that which the atheist has demanded – God doesn’t need to show Himself with trumpets playing and bells ringing, appearing in front of us like a genie popping out of a lamp, He will do much more than that – if we ask He will transform our whole personhood; that is the primary evidence beyond all other kinds of evidence, for then He really will be unmistakable, as millions of Christians all over the world will testify.
The Christian says God’s call to ‘seek and you will find’ is a promise fully kept by Christ, yet the atheists deny this, claiming it to be false. So what we have here is a chasm - roughly as follows:
A) The Christian claims that God’s call to ‘seek and you will find’ is a promise fully kept by Christ.
B) The atheist says that a personal, interested, willing and loving God would be more obvious.
Believing as I do that A is correct, it seems that the perceived lack of obviousness contained in B involves a misunderstanding, and I think I can show that this is the case by telling you why my own experience of God indicates to me that this is a misunderstanding, a misunderstanding on a par with ‘What is the point of asking God to do things in prayer when He could have done them anyway if He’d wanted to?’
Let me offer you what I consider to be a better way of viewing the situation. Let us say that God is represented by ‘3’, and let us say that man is represented by ‘1’ - we can then call a man that becomes a Christian ‘2’, that is, not God but not a normal man either - what St Paul refers to in Galatians as a ‘new creation’ – a man who has found God. Please note, this is nothing to do with any Christian/non-Christian superiority, I am simply talking about a position in relation to knowing God.
So for the purposes here we have:
3 = God
2 = Christian
1= Non-Christian
Now those that claim A is true might refer to position 2 as an inner revelatory experience, yet this is rightly problematic for those in position 1 because in one sense every conscious experience classifies as the mind’s experience of the self and its surroundings, from sense data, through to perception, intuition, and to the deeper cogitations in life. In actual fact, a broad and deep gamut of experience is actually implicated as the agent of any sensation, revelation or new perceptual position or conviction. The intuitive moment of epiphany from 1 to 2 is vogue in many Christian cultures that place greater emphasis on right-brain intuition over left-brain analyticity (particularly the Pentecostal, Evangelical and Charismatic styles of worship), but that depiction probably denies those in 1 from properly apprehending the everyday trail of experience that makes up sense data, perception, intuition, and to the deeper cogitations in life. Please do not misunderstand me, I do not wish to gainsay this approach or cast aspersions over such experiences, for in fact my own style of worship is underlain by a strong affiliation with a very charismatic style of praise for our Lord, so one must accept that the point at which one receives the Holy Spirit can send one’s trail of experience onto a rather ebullient new pathway – eureka moments and sudden bursts of ‘hallelujah’ do happen.
But here we find something very important - the atheist who ‘expects’ such an epiphany or who second guesses precisely how the moment of knowing God might occur could well be weakening the bridge over which he will at some point wish he could cross; that is, he might wait around for the hallelujah moment and always stay waiting because he fails to realise that experience and daily samplings in life play a key part in realising who God is and how He is speaking to us. To make this point clearer with an illustration, let’s call this “Human Potentiality” (HP) – how might God be speaking to the atheist through his own HP?
Bearing 1, 2 and 3 in mind, we must remember that if we were created by God, we are, of course dependent beings that would be nothing without His input in the first place. In other words, without 3, there would be no 2 and 1. Now if we have a quantum of human potentiality (emotional intelligence) represented by HP then clearly for humans HP > 1. God clearly has the choice of granting us a grace impartation whereby knowledge and awareness of the Divine occurs, but it is very obvious that this depends on our abilities for recognition, our willingness to make the transition from 1 > 2 and our readiness in accepting the changes in HP that accompany the blessing that accompanies the 1 to 2 transition.
Now if the command is for those in 1 to seek (S) in the way that God intends then clearly this has a value S3 in Divine terms and S1 in human terms. Thus it seems pretty clear that 1 has a value too low for Divine satisfaction but S1 has a value too high for many that are stuck in a 1 comfort zone – in other words the process of getting to grips with their own desires for salvation is for some a pathway too dark and hazy to contemplate, keeping them rooted in 1. But once one casts aside his own fears and doubts and hands them over to God, even by an outrageous and (what would be to him) a quite irrational dispensation and indulgence of blind trust, the human mind can construct a positive ingress into S1 - a sort of gravitation towards progression by willingness to do all that is asked of Him - by innovating a series of precursors that can be modified according to his truest and most lucid experiences. What this really amounts to is facing up to the fact that it is rather silly rejecting or dismissing the demands of God based on one’s own terms – much more sensible to embrace the situation on His terms – after all, if Christianity is the truth we are only likely to realise it if we accept what Christ has to say.
This really amounts to a person saying with all honesty - ‘God, if you are up there, I really want to know you’. Thus the instruction to seek will be a rewarding and fruitful instruction if one progresses towards greater and more expansive growth with the desire to make the changes that are necessary. That is why the final step is often the hardest, and why I have known many people that were able to believe that Christianity is the truth, yet still take incommensurably longer going forward from 1.9 to 2. What you have to remember is that upon seeking, when God says ‘you will find’ He means with respect to S1 not with respect to 1. It is no use bemoaning the fact that a supposedly personal, interested, willing and loving God would be more obvious, because we are bound to leave a residue of unfulfilment and dissatisfaction when we approach God on our terms and not His – because we fail to consider what is wrong in our own hearts and what it is that is stopping a genuine search.
And here we have identified the central problem with demanding evidence with bells ringing - it won’t work. Many have asked God to reveal Himself with 1 rather than S1 – they have enquired on the wrong terms – not His but their own. If the truth be known each man that does this is a recusant in supplicatory clothing - in other words, in his heart he might kid himself that he tried his best to make a genuine search, but in his head he knows that he never really offered himself up to God.
But the great news is that for those that do search with all their hearts and without artifice, their prayer will be answered. God will only reveal Himself when He knows we’re ready, and when we say that it is only possible when He shows Himself, we mean with respect to HP - that is, it is incremental growth where the increments are consistent with S1 not 1. Thus, failure to meet the standards should be seen in terms of the absence of contour stability given that by itself, if one always holds back, HP = 1. Bearing in mind that even those that have no initial belief in Him whatsoever can still pray for wisdom and clarity, my guess is that most atheists who ask on their own terms instead of on God’s find it difficult to get a determinable purchase on S1 - and in seeing the failure connotations as insuperable they lower their standards so they can be catered for in ‘earthly’ experiences instead of acceding to God’s desire that we look to God for the gift of S1. And with a complex personality like God, presumably the anthropomorphisms are applicable in as far as God has traits that closely parallel our concept of personality (love, grace, justice, intelligence, thought, consciousness, anger, yes - even anger) and can thus be useful in our coming to Him on His terms instead of our own. But the key to receiving His revelation has always been in searching out the terms on which Christ Himself says we will ‘find’ – for only then will those demanding evidence with bells on it be in a strong position to search successfully.
Obviously an experience of God can only ever be a sample, just as my experience of centripetal acceleration or, much better, gravity, is only a sample of a far greater complex reality, most of which is background activity behind the scenes of this earthly drama. Therefore it is foolish to expect that such a complex entity as God can be experienced by anyone demanding evidence; for even Christians who have a relationship with Him are only experiencing parts of His fullness – a relationship through which He reveals more and more of Himself as we progress on our journey. Thus one must realise that God is an infinitely complex personality and is not necessarily going to deign Himself to everyday human test/refute sampling; nor will proof of His existence necessarily arrive on the doorstep with bells hanging and trumpets playing. What one must remember is that no set of finite moments in which we capture and comprehend a little part of Him are as big as the source object in the Divine realm, and therefore it is unreasonable to demand ‘proof’ in this way; the best we can get is ‘evidence’ of God working in nature and in people’s lives, and from that evidence we can use our rationale to make logical inferences, which will hopefully lead to our receiving revelation and beginning a relationship with Christ.
Having established that an intuitive knowledge of God is evidence relevant to the existence and will of God, and that such ‘evidence’ is a mere sample of God’s work in creation not of God Himself, it seems perfectly obvious that God cannot be presented to a person empirically, like a precious stone or an ancient fossil or a newly discovered mountain. Therefore we must look at the matter of receiving evidence for Him in a different way, by focusing on what God requires of an individual, not what the individual thinks they require of God. This adds weight to the silliness of the insistence that God shows us the evidence at the behest of the stridently assertive atheist, for Christians have said from the beginning that that is not how God does His business with creation, therefore how foolish of them to reject Christianity based not on its true realities but on their own faulty perception of the thing they are assessing. If it seems that God’s presence is too unfamiliar or unnoticeable, it may well be true, as Kierkegaard one remarked, that it His way of giving us the freedom to be ourselves:
Omnipotence which can lay its hand so heavily upon the world can also make its touch so light that the creature receives independence.
When assessing the nature of a personal, interested, willing and loving God, and His apparent absence or intractability, one must bear in mind that God has given us an opportunity for salvation; in fact, it is easier than that which the atheist has demanded – God doesn’t need to show Himself with trumpets playing and bells ringing, appearing in front of us like a genie popping out of a lamp, He will do much more than that – if we ask He will transform our whole personhood; that is the primary evidence beyond all other kinds of evidence, for then He really will be unmistakable, as millions of Christians all over the world will testify.
The Christian says God’s call to ‘seek and you will find’ is a promise fully kept by Christ, yet the atheists deny this, claiming it to be false. So what we have here is a chasm - roughly as follows:
A) The Christian claims that God’s call to ‘seek and you will find’ is a promise fully kept by Christ.
B) The atheist says that a personal, interested, willing and loving God would be more obvious.
Believing as I do that A is correct, it seems that the perceived lack of obviousness contained in B involves a misunderstanding, and I think I can show that this is the case by telling you why my own experience of God indicates to me that this is a misunderstanding, a misunderstanding on a par with ‘What is the point of asking God to do things in prayer when He could have done them anyway if He’d wanted to?’
Let me offer you what I consider to be a better way of viewing the situation. Let us say that God is represented by ‘3’, and let us say that man is represented by ‘1’ - we can then call a man that becomes a Christian ‘2’, that is, not God but not a normal man either - what St Paul refers to in Galatians as a ‘new creation’ – a man who has found God. Please note, this is nothing to do with any Christian/non-Christian superiority, I am simply talking about a position in relation to knowing God.
So for the purposes here we have:
3 = God
2 = Christian
1= Non-Christian
Now those that claim A is true might refer to position 2 as an inner revelatory experience, yet this is rightly problematic for those in position 1 because in one sense every conscious experience classifies as the mind’s experience of the self and its surroundings, from sense data, through to perception, intuition, and to the deeper cogitations in life. In actual fact, a broad and deep gamut of experience is actually implicated as the agent of any sensation, revelation or new perceptual position or conviction. The intuitive moment of epiphany from 1 to 2 is vogue in many Christian cultures that place greater emphasis on right-brain intuition over left-brain analyticity (particularly the Pentecostal, Evangelical and Charismatic styles of worship), but that depiction probably denies those in 1 from properly apprehending the everyday trail of experience that makes up sense data, perception, intuition, and to the deeper cogitations in life. Please do not misunderstand me, I do not wish to gainsay this approach or cast aspersions over such experiences, for in fact my own style of worship is underlain by a strong affiliation with a very charismatic style of praise for our Lord, so one must accept that the point at which one receives the Holy Spirit can send one’s trail of experience onto a rather ebullient new pathway – eureka moments and sudden bursts of ‘hallelujah’ do happen.
But here we find something very important - the atheist who ‘expects’ such an epiphany or who second guesses precisely how the moment of knowing God might occur could well be weakening the bridge over which he will at some point wish he could cross; that is, he might wait around for the hallelujah moment and always stay waiting because he fails to realise that experience and daily samplings in life play a key part in realising who God is and how He is speaking to us. To make this point clearer with an illustration, let’s call this “Human Potentiality” (HP) – how might God be speaking to the atheist through his own HP?
Bearing 1, 2 and 3 in mind, we must remember that if we were created by God, we are, of course dependent beings that would be nothing without His input in the first place. In other words, without 3, there would be no 2 and 1. Now if we have a quantum of human potentiality (emotional intelligence) represented by HP then clearly for humans HP > 1. God clearly has the choice of granting us a grace impartation whereby knowledge and awareness of the Divine occurs, but it is very obvious that this depends on our abilities for recognition, our willingness to make the transition from 1 > 2 and our readiness in accepting the changes in HP that accompany the blessing that accompanies the 1 to 2 transition.
Now if the command is for those in 1 to seek (S) in the way that God intends then clearly this has a value S3 in Divine terms and S1 in human terms. Thus it seems pretty clear that 1 has a value too low for Divine satisfaction but S1 has a value too high for many that are stuck in a 1 comfort zone – in other words the process of getting to grips with their own desires for salvation is for some a pathway too dark and hazy to contemplate, keeping them rooted in 1. But once one casts aside his own fears and doubts and hands them over to God, even by an outrageous and (what would be to him) a quite irrational dispensation and indulgence of blind trust, the human mind can construct a positive ingress into S1 - a sort of gravitation towards progression by willingness to do all that is asked of Him - by innovating a series of precursors that can be modified according to his truest and most lucid experiences. What this really amounts to is facing up to the fact that it is rather silly rejecting or dismissing the demands of God based on one’s own terms – much more sensible to embrace the situation on His terms – after all, if Christianity is the truth we are only likely to realise it if we accept what Christ has to say.
This really amounts to a person saying with all honesty - ‘God, if you are up there, I really want to know you’. Thus the instruction to seek will be a rewarding and fruitful instruction if one progresses towards greater and more expansive growth with the desire to make the changes that are necessary. That is why the final step is often the hardest, and why I have known many people that were able to believe that Christianity is the truth, yet still take incommensurably longer going forward from 1.9 to 2. What you have to remember is that upon seeking, when God says ‘you will find’ He means with respect to S1 not with respect to 1. It is no use bemoaning the fact that a supposedly personal, interested, willing and loving God would be more obvious, because we are bound to leave a residue of unfulfilment and dissatisfaction when we approach God on our terms and not His – because we fail to consider what is wrong in our own hearts and what it is that is stopping a genuine search.
And here we have identified the central problem with demanding evidence with bells ringing - it won’t work. Many have asked God to reveal Himself with 1 rather than S1 – they have enquired on the wrong terms – not His but their own. If the truth be known each man that does this is a recusant in supplicatory clothing - in other words, in his heart he might kid himself that he tried his best to make a genuine search, but in his head he knows that he never really offered himself up to God.
But the great news is that for those that do search with all their hearts and without artifice, their prayer will be answered. God will only reveal Himself when He knows we’re ready, and when we say that it is only possible when He shows Himself, we mean with respect to HP - that is, it is incremental growth where the increments are consistent with S1 not 1. Thus, failure to meet the standards should be seen in terms of the absence of contour stability given that by itself, if one always holds back, HP = 1. Bearing in mind that even those that have no initial belief in Him whatsoever can still pray for wisdom and clarity, my guess is that most atheists who ask on their own terms instead of on God’s find it difficult to get a determinable purchase on S1 - and in seeing the failure connotations as insuperable they lower their standards so they can be catered for in ‘earthly’ experiences instead of acceding to God’s desire that we look to God for the gift of S1. And with a complex personality like God, presumably the anthropomorphisms are applicable in as far as God has traits that closely parallel our concept of personality (love, grace, justice, intelligence, thought, consciousness, anger, yes - even anger) and can thus be useful in our coming to Him on His terms instead of our own. But the key to receiving His revelation has always been in searching out the terms on which Christ Himself says we will ‘find’ – for only then will those demanding evidence with bells on it be in a strong position to search successfully.
No comments:
Post a Comment