In my last post I mentioned that I’m reading this book by Dale Allison called The Luminous Dusk. In it, the author notes that prior to the 17th Century, with the exception of a very few Romans and Greeks, it was hard to find any European who seriously doubted the existence of God.

Furthermore, prior to the Lisbon earthquake of 1700, most devastating “acts of God” caused people to think about themselves and the role they may have played in bringing the destruction upon themselves. But, in that pivotal moment, Voltaire turned the tables on God — putting the Creator in the dock, as it were — and demanded he answer for his actions. When it was determined that his answers were not good enough, modern philosophy simply wished the Creator away to the cornfield.

Now, when we ask why there are so many agnostics and atheists in contemporary society — especially when there were so few throughout the majority of human history — what are we told?

Hume’s declaration that the universe is a closed system will be brought up. We’re told that higher biblical criticism in 19th Century Germany poked holes in the theory of biblical infallibility. We’re told that Darwin revealed the Book of Genesis as primitive mythology, something only believed by superstitious people who have no appreciation of science. We may even be told that religion was helpful for a time but has been rendered obsolete as we’ve continued to evolve.

But Allison suggests a factor so obvious we may end up overlooking it completely, a factor far removed from universities and books and debates, a factor that seems benign…until you think about it more carefully. Here’s what Allison says, “Secularization correlates directly with a growing physical separation from the so-called natural world. In other words, the more we have moved indoors, the less some of us are inclined to believe” (p. 7).

Could it be something as simple as that? Could insulation and central heating/air conditioning, grocery stores and automobiles, overhead lights and electrical outlets be adding to our disbelief in God?

It does seem to me — and this is purely anecdotal — that people who work with their hands outdoors, folks who farm and hunt and fish, who know the feel of the soil and the smell of the rain have a greater sense of their dependence, their limits and the presence of something bigger than this world. People who are asleep when the sun comes up and indoors when the sun goes down, who never really get to see the stars or dig in the dirt find it easier to believe in their own self-sufficiency.

So, what do you think? Does comfort take us farther from God?

In his book, The Luminous Dusk, Dale Allison tells of a study that was conducted among scientists, a poll to determine how many of them believe in God. He says that among those who do believe in a supreme being, most of them are cosmologists — someone who studies the universe as a whole and, by extension, humanity’s place within the universe.

More cosmologists than biologists believe in God. But more biologists than psychologists believe.

Could it be that the closer your field of study takes you to people, the less likely you are to believe in God?

I’ll admit here that when I get alone, say, at the beach or on a mountaintop, I can sit still and contemplate the beauty of creation. This naturally leads me to a deeper contemplation of the Creator. I find peace readily at hand. I experience contentment. The light and momentary troubles of this world seem just that: light and momentary. Perspective returns, and I know the truth of Jesus’ statement, “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

But add a few people into the mix — a nagging wife, her defeated husband and whiny children in tow, or an old bickering couple or a loudmouth businessman yammering away on his cellphone about his fantasy baseball draft or some other strange nonsense — and my “peace like a river” easily turns into a stage-5 rapids.

It’s just harder for me to be a good Christian when there are people around.

Perhaps this is why I chose to become a preacher instead of a counselor. Instead of patiently listening to others tell me about their personal problems for 50 minutes, I’d much rather make them sit and listen to me tell them what to do.

I don’t think I’m alone in this struggle. I spent a lot of time last week with other professional Christians — preachers, professors, authors, etc. And I noticed something strange. When they talk about God, their eyes light up. Their energy level rises. They love talking about God, about the Bible, about Jesus, the Holy Spirit and salvation. They positively glow when they talk about what God has done for us and what a magnificent person he is.

But when the subject changes to church or — more specifically — people in their church…well…their countenance falls. There’s always someone stirring up trouble or threatening to leave. Someone just got a divorce. Someone else is having an affair. A child has been abused. Lies have been told. Money is missing. Forgiveness is withheld. Factions form.

It would be so much easier to be a good Christian if there weren’t all these broken, messed up people around!

And yet, for some strange reason, God refuses to let me deal with just him. He insists that if I’m going to be in a relationship with him, I must also be in a relationship with his people.

So, how do you balance it? Do you ever find spending time with people takes you farther away from God?

Religious experiences can be valid. I’ve already talked about that, but I want to state it explicitly again. Whether it’s a dream your Aunt Gertrude had or that strange warm feeling you felt the day you finally decided to surrender every area of your life to God — I believe that can be legitimate.

I also believe that sometimes it might have been something you ate.

Regardless, how do religious experiences help us when it comes to defending or explaining the existence of God. If someone asks you how you know Jesus lives, can you just look at them and say, “He lives within my heart”? Is that a valid argument?

The argument from religious experience has been attacked on several different grounds. The clearest problem with it is that experience alone cannot be offered as intellectual proof or scientific evidence. An experience is something that happens to someone, and that’s always open to a variety of interpretations. Maybe it was a bad dream. Maybe you’ve been conditioned by your religious community to seek such things out. Maybe you just wanted to have an experience like that so badly that you finally talked yourself into it.

In the final analysis, we either believe a person or we do not. Some would say that if a person is generally trustworthy in other areas, we should take their word for it when it comes to their explanation of some religious experience.

There are others, however, who simply believe that “religious experiences” are nothing more than delusions, hallucinations or outright lies. I’ve heard Christian people (who believe that God has retired when it comes to supernatural activity) say that there are two sources for these kinds of things. It was either God or Satan. Since God doesn’t do that anymore, it must be the other.

We know that religious experiences have an impact on the people who have them. But are they just emotional or psychological occurrences? Can they tell us anything about God, or do they just tell us about the person having the experience?

John Hick (not to be confused with my friend John Mark Hicks), wrote a book called Philosophy of Religion. In it, he offers a general theological view of religious experience:

In short, any special event or experience which can be constituted as manifesting the divine can also be constituted in other ways, and accordingly cannot carry the weight of a proof of God’s existence.

What do you think? Is a religious experience a valid argument for God’s existence? Is it enough to say to people who are struggling with belief, “I know he exists because I’ve felt his presence”? Would it be a good idea to suggest that the struggling person ask God to reveal himself to them in a personal way?

The Bible tells a number of what we would call “religious experiences”.

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple…. “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty” (Isaiah 6:1, 5).

Jesus’ mother, Mary, had a vision:

In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you” (Luke 1:26-28).

Joseph, had a vision as well:

“An angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit’” (Matthew 1:20).

The apostle Paul had a religious experience that knocked him to the ground:

As he neared Damascus on his journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” (Acts 9:3-4).

These pretty well fit the general types of religious experiences people still claim to have. People still claim to experience God in visions and voices, dreams which contain some advice, physical sensations that often cause a person to change their plans or the entire direction of their lives.

There’s nothing uniquely Christian about any of this. Religious experiences occur among people of all faiths. There are plenty of non-religious people who claim such experiences.

People who study these kinds of things claim that religious experiences often happen as a result of expectations placed upon a person by the community of faith to whom they belong. In other words, if your church expects these kinds of things to happen, they are more likely to happen. Moreover, they are more likely to happen the way your church expects them to happen. Roman Catholic people are more likely to have visions of saints than non-Roman Catholics. Protestants, Jews and Muslims do not use images in worship, so they’re more likely to just hear voices. If your church frequently talks about God as a “King”, then you are more likely to see him as such in your vision. Every religious community has its own writings and culture which shape and interpret a person’s experience.

Interestingly, as I was composing this post, I was listening to Chuck Swindoll’s series on the Book of Revelation. He was talking about the apostle John’s vision there, and he admitted that he has never had such an experience. He suggests that most people have not had a legitimate “religious experience”, but he talks about several folks he’s known who have. The point he makes that I thought was really good was this: You shouldn’t try to manufacture something like this.

Certain types of people are more likely to have religious experiences than others. But many people, of all kinds, have them. If nothing else, religious experiences show us that religion is a matter of living faith. It is more than mere intellectual assent. The claim to “know” God is knowledge by acquaintance, not just mental acceptance. It is actually knowing God rather than knowing about God.

I’ve seen some very interesting things on my journey of faith. I’ve seen people slain in the Spirit. I’ve heard people speaking in tongues. I’ve had people approach me with “a word from the Lord”. I’ve prayed for people who were instantly healed. I can’t explain that, but it happened.

I’ve never really had something that fits the traditional definition of a “religious experience”. I’ve never been knocked over by the Spirit of God. I’ve not heard any kind of voice that I can say with any confidence was God or an angel of the Lord. As much as I have tried to be, I am no mystic. God communicates to me the “normal” ways: through the Bible, through circumstances, through other people and through a still, small voice — the inner witness of his Spirit — and I probably miss it more often than I hear it.

There are two points I want to make here:

First, religious experiences are fairly common, and we shouldn’t be overly skeptical of them. When someone claims to have had some encounter with God, we shouldn’t think them deluded or possessed by a demon. Well…if they claim God appeared to them and told them to do something illegal, immoral or unethical…there’s room for a healthy dose of skepticism.

Second, religious experiences are not a sign of maturity. There are some communities of faith where people are led to believe that if they aren’t having visions and dreams and stunning encounters with God then there’s something immature about their faith. That’s not the case.

A couple of weeks ago I posted on the song “He Lives!” It was a hymn we sang in church growing up and deals with how a person can know that God exists. The song makes this bold statement: “You ask me how I know he lives? He lives within my heart!”

On this blog, I’ve talked about different ways people throughout history have tried to prove that God exists. We’ve looked at arguments based on reason and arguments based on faith, but what about the argument from religious experience? Is there any validity to saying, “I know God exists because I just had an encounter with him”?

One of the best-known example of a religious experience (and there are many) is the follower of Jesus known as “Doubting Thomas”. Many of Jesus’ other followers had seen their fearless Leader after his resurrection, but Thomas had not. When they tried to tell him about their experiences, Thomas did not believe them. This seems a little odd given the fact that Thomas had been living with the rest of these guys for more than three years (give or take). After everything they’d been through together, all the miraculous things they’d seen, the miraculous things they’d participated in, you’d think Thomas would take their word for it. But he doesn’t. And this brings us to an important point:

Because their story sounded impossible, Thomas was pre-disposed to disbelieve it. He had some presuppositions, and he reasoned from those presuppositions to a pre-determined conclusion — even when that conclusion was wrong and disagreed with the conclusions of all his trusted companions.

In other words, his philosophy prejudiced him against reality.

The argument from religious experience simply says that God exists because people have experiences with God and can tell us about them.

Obviously, there are some difficulties already because there are so many different definitions of words like “religious” and “experience”. Mostly, a religious experience is like pornography or art — you may not know how to precisely define it, but you know it when you see it.

Religious experiences tend to change a person’s life and have lasting effects. They usually leave people feeling more able to cope with things afterwards or give a person a sense that their life has new meaning.

I had a conversation in the cafeteria of Pepperdine University a couple of years ago with Ross Thompson, Jeff Peterson and Edward Fudge about these kinds of experiences. We couldn’t quite put our finger on them. They were always fuzzy around the edges and had a whiff of “too-good-to-be-true” to them. But we took turns going around the table and sharing our best “experiencing God” stories. Some had happened to one of us personally. Some were relayed second-hand. All had left an indelible impression.

So, let’s hear yours. I’m sure many of you have had a remarkable experience with God — a truly religious experience. Let’s hear it.

It’s been a while since I posted something about Aquinas, but his arguments for God’s existence still occupy my thoughts. These days, the debate over whether or not God exists has shifted. We don’t hold a medieval worldview anymore. Aquinas believed his proofs were as much scientific as they were theological, but now there is an ever-widening gap between scientific language and theological language (not necessarily science and theology — just the language the two camps tend to employ) which many people have a difficult time bridging.

Many contemporary thinkers think it’s unlikely that a scientific demonstration of God’s existence can be given. They point to Aquinas’ prior faith in God as the basis for the proofs he offers. In other words, Aquinas believed in God and reasoned from that belief to a pre-determined conclusion. Of course, the same can be said of Hume and others on the other side of the debate. People tend to believe what they believe and reason outward from the belief.

Some have even come to question what terms like “God” and “exists” actually mean. If God exists, how does God exist? The traditional notion of God as a personal, loving Father and all-powerful Creator who is actively involved in our world, who desires community with humans is now seen as naive or superstitious.

Paul Tillich (1886-1965) was one of the most important and influential theologians of the last century. He suggested a new definition of faith: “Ultimate Concern”. Tillich was an existentialist and claimed that God doesn’t exist in the same way everything else exists. But he followed that up by saying that if God doesn’t exist in the same way everything else exists, then maybe God doesn’t really exist at all.

Tillich came to believe that the representation of God in the Bible is really a picture of ultimate human experience. He rejected the belief in a personal God and said that God was really just “the ground of our being.”

If that language sounds a little inaccessible, it is. It took a man named John A.T. Robinson to translate these ideas into popular language. In 1963, Robinson published Honest to God. In it, Robinson suggested that the life of Christ contains an example for all to follow and insights for all to share. Rather than viewing Jesus Christ through the lens of deity, he said, we should view him through the lens of human potential. The truly good life became actualized in Jesus and was now possible for the rest of us. That, he said along with Tillich, is the real truth and strength of Christianity.

The language and nature of the debate over God’s existence has shifted substantially, but the fact of the debate has not. People exist. The world exists. But does God exist? And if so, how does God exist? And how do you know?

When I was a kid, we used to sing a song called “He Lives!” The chorus went like this:

He lives! He lives! Christ Jesus lives today!

He walks with me and talks with me along life’s narrow way.

He lives! He lives! Salvation to impart.

You ask me how I know he lives?

He lives within my heart.

This is what is known as “The Argument from Religious Experience”. I know it because I’ve experienced it. But is that a good enough reason? Would that kind of argument ever convince someone else?

Thomas Aquinas set out five ways or “proofs” of God’s existence.

IN WAY ONE, Aquinas offered the evidence of change in the world. He wrote, “Now anything in process of change is being changed by something else.” Using Aristotle’s idea of an Unmoved Mover, Aquinas reasoned, “If the hand does not move the stick, the stick will not move anything else. Hence one is bound to arrive at some first cause or change not itself being changed by anything, and this is what everybody understands by ‘God’.”

IN WAY TWO, Aquinas focused on cause and effect in the world. “Now if you eliminate a cause you also eliminate its effects, so that you cannot have a last cause, nor an intermediate one, unless you have a first.” Aquinas did not believe in an infinite chain of causes and effects reaching back into eternity. “One is therefore forced to suppose some first cause, to which everyone gives the name ‘God’.”

IN WAY THREE, he takes up the idea of being and non-being in the world. The fact is that things exist, but they don’t really need to exist. On top of that, there was a time when they did not exist, and there will be a time when they no longer exist. “Now everything cannot be like this, for a thing that need not be, once was not, and if everything need not be, once upon a time there was nothing….” Aquinas asserted that if nothing in the world needed to exist, there must have been a time when nothing existed. Logic told him that nothing can come from nothing. “One is forced therefore to suppose something which must be, and owes this to no other thing than itself; indeed it itself is the cause that other things must be.” In this, Aquinas actually sounds a lot like Anselm. Both believed that objects in the world have contingent existance (they can exist, but they don’t have to exist), but only God has necessary existence (God must exist to be God). If God did not exist then nothing could exist, because creation is dependent upon God’s necessary existence to exist at all.

IN WAY FOUR, Aquinas concentrated on degrees of goodness and perfection in the world. “For example, things are hotter and hotter the nearer they approach what is hottest. Something therefore is the truest and best and most noble of things, and hence the most fully in being; for Aristotle says that the truest things are the things most fully in being.” Aquinas went on to write, “There is something therefore which causes in all other things their being, their goodness and whatever other perfections they have. And this we call ‘God’.”

IN WAY FIVE, Aquinas pointed to goals and order in nature. “For their behavior hardly ever varies, and will practically always turn out well; which shows that they truly tend to a goal, and do not merely hit it by accident. Nothing that lacks awareness tends to a goal, except under the direction of someone with awareness and understanding; the arrow, for example, requires an archer. Everything in nature, therefore, is directed to its goal by someone with understanding, and this we call ‘God’.”

There you have the five ways or “proofs” of God’s existence offered up by perhaps the most brilliant mind of medieval theology and philosphy. His ideas have been debated and criticized, but they’re still around. Like most people with an “NT” temperament (I’m an INTJ for those of you interested in such things) I find that Thomistic Spirituality really resonates with me.

Now, let me ask you a question: Do you think any of these Five Ways might be helpful if you were talking to someone who didn’t believe in God or wasn’t sure? Which one(s) and why?

Thomas Aquinas began by asking three questions:

1. Is it self-evident that there is a God?

2. Can it be made evident?

3. Is there a God?

Aquinas himself was convinced that the existence of God was not self-evident. You can’t describe God the way you describe a tree or a mountain. You can’t see, hear, smell, taste or touch God. He was also convinced, though, that the natural features of the world provide a great deal of evidence for God’s existence.

In order to prove God’s existence, Aquinas began with what people saw and experienced every day. Unlike Anselm, he did not believe that understanding the term “God” is enough to show that God exists. He rejected Anselm’s a priori Platonic proof, which begins in the mind, and concentrated on five a posteriori Aristotelian proofs, which begin with the real world.

Aquinas figured:

The awareness that God exists is not implanted in us by nature in any clear or specific way. Admittedly, man is aware of what by nature he desires, and he desires by nature a happiness which is to be found only in God. But this is not, simply speaking, awareness that there is a God, any more than to be aware of someone approaching is to be aware of Peter, even should it be Peter approaching. Many, in fact, belive the ultimate good which will make us happy to be riches, or pleasure, or some such thing.

In other words, God is not obvious.

So, Aquinas rejected Anselm’s Platonism and thought it was impossible to climb from “truth” to “Truth” and call that Ultimate Truth “God”.

There are some today who argue with the very existence of truth (never mind “Truth” or “Ultimate Truth”). Perhaps, if Aquinas lived today, the question he would wrestle with would be: If we can define neither truth, Truth nor Ultimate Truth, can the term “God” have any meaning at all?

In other words, in a world where truth has not merely gone out of fashion but is considered non-existent, how can one become convinced of the existence of God? And what kind of God would that be?

Anselm’s argument for God’s existence is based totally on thought and not experience. His proof raises an important question when we talk about the nature of God: Is God’s existence a “predicate”?

A tree is made of wood. That’s part of what makes a tree a tree. We don’t have to say, “That tree is made of wood.” We simply say, “There’s a tree.” The assumption is that if it is a tree, it is made of wood.

Triangles have three angles. Bachelors are unmarried men. These things are called “predicates”. There are no married bachelors, five-sided triangles or metal trees.

So, the question arises: Do we have to say, “God exists”? Or is that a given? Does the notion of God necessarily include the fact that God must exist?

Anselm thought so, and he thought that way because of how Plato had influenced his understanding of reality. Others have not been so convinced, and many have accused Anselm of cheating somehow.

The first critic of Anselm’s ontological argument was another monk named Gaunilo from Marmountiers in France. Anselm had suggested that his argument was strong enough to pursuade the “fool” who “says in his heart that there is no God” (Psalm 14:1). Gaunilo wrote a response titled On Behalf of the Fool. In his response, he takes Anselm’s reasoning and applies it to the most perfect island imaginable. According to Anselm’s reasong, to exist in reality is better than existing in thought only. Therefore, Gaunilo reasoned, this most perfect island imaginable must exist.

Obviously, such an island does not exist. So, Gaunilo was really saying that Anselm’s proof was philosophically sound but practically unreasonable.

Anselm’s answer was more than bluster (as has been suggested). His counter was that the argument applied only to that which is self-existent. An island is a dependent thing — a part of creation — it is contingent. God alone is independent and self-sustaining; only God is necessary. God, by reason of being God, has to exist.

This argument has failed to silence his critics, and Anselm has had both followers and dissenters ever since. Descartes, for example, used a form of Anselm’s argument often. Spinoza used the ontological argument in his Ethics (though his definition of God was vastly different from Anselm’s).

On the critical side, Aquinas believed that Anselm made a mistake in claiming to know God’s nature before he knew his existence. In other words, Aquinas didn’t disagree with Anselm that there was a God; he simply didn’t believe Anselm’s argument worked the right way around.

Immanuel Kant — following the footsteps of David Hume — believed that existence could not be part of the definition of any idea. Kant believed that there was a gap between the world of ideas and the world of reality that could never be truly bridged. God, he suggested, is only to be found in our minds.

Bertrand Russell claimed that the word “exist” was being used incorrectly. To say “dogs exist” is to have an idea of a dog in your mind then find an animal that roughly matches your idea and attach the name “dog” to it. You can’t do that with unicorns, because no such animal exists. The same is true of God. We can understand what the phrase “God exists” means, but there is no apparent reality to which this phrase can be attached. Therefore, God’s existence cannot be proved using the ontological argument.

Oddly enough, Anselm’s ontological argument just won’t go away. Lots of philosophers and theologians have written volumes and volumes about it, and they all disagree about what exactly is wrong with it. Most think there’s a flaw in there somewhere, but they can’t seem to put their finger on exactly where the problem is.

It’s important to remember what Anselm thought he was doing. He was aiming to show how reasonable faith is — not offer an airtight proof of it. It’s a testimony to his brilliance in creativity that we’re still talking about it today. The idea that God is “that-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought” still draws thinkers to contemplate and search for the meaning of the existence of God.

As such, it is one of my favorite sentences of all time.

We’ve talked about this briefly before, but it was a long time ago. One of the most intriguing arguments for the existence of God came from a French monk who lived during the Middle Ages. His name was Anselm, and he had been heavily influenced by Augustine’s thought that a person must believe first in order to understand. Following Augustine, though, Anselm also believed that once a person believed, their faith would necessarily seek understanding.
His explanation of why God must exist is often referred to as the “ontological argument”.

Anselm (1033-1109) was born in Aosta, Piedmont — in modern Italy. He entered the Benedictine monastary of Bed, in Normandy, when he was 26. He went on to become the prior and finally the abbot there, before being named the Bishop of Canterbury (1093-1109). Though he remained Bishop until he died, he spent the majority of that time in exile because of his constant bickering with kings over the balance of power between church and state.

He was the first great theologican of the midieval period and founded a school of thought known as Scholasticism. The church was gaining political power and momentum, but Anselm brought theology back to the foreground and restored it to its place of prominence by allowing philosophy a distinct role in theology. During the centuries after Roman rule had crumbled throughout Great Britain — The “Dark Ages” — monastaries became great centers of learning and culture.

Anselm was once asked by the monks in his monstary if he could prove the existence of God. He set out to provice a “proof” that would work by reason but which would line up with his Christian faith: “The rational mind alone of all creatures is able to mount an investigation of the supreme being.”

Eventually, he produced the Monologion in 1071. It was a huge book that basically asserted that since we can see degrees of goodness in the world, these forms of goodness must ultimately come from an Ultimate Form of Goodness — which we can call God. Sounds a little like Plato. Unfortunately, the book was so difficult to read that the monks asked him if he could sum it up — preferably in one sentence.

This stumped him for some time until one evening, during Mass, it came to him. A year after the publication of his enormously unreadable Monologion, Anselm produced the Proslogion (originally titled “Faith Seeking Understanding”). There he defines God as “that-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought”.

Basically, the argument goes like this:

• Whatever the greatest thing you can imagine is, we can call that “God”
• It is greater to exist in reality than just in our imaginations
• Therefore God must exist

It’s a frustrating argument, isn’t it? One critic said it’s like watching a magician pull a rabbit out of his hat. You don’t exactly know how the rabbit got in there, but you’re pretty sure the magician had more to do with it than magic or the rabbit did.

So, what do you think? Did Anselm express the obvious? Or did he just define God into existence?