Category: Spirituality

The Uncertain, Vital Value of Personal Experience with God

Atheists are not alone in being skeptical of personal experience. And with good reason, but….

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In a conversation on the Unbelievable? Podcast, Coming to faith through Dawkins – Part 2: Is there a new New Atheism?, Alex O’Connor (a/k/a the Cosmic Skeptic) commented about the book, Coming to Faith through Dawkins. He agreed that the most interesting aspect of the book is the prominence of story and experience, but he finds it unconvincing for the same reasons.

In case you don’t know, the book is a compilation of the stories of twelve people who were influenced by Richard Dawkins in their journeys from atheism to belief in the God of the Bible. Dawkins, of course, is one of the original (and most vocal) of the “new atheists. Thus, the title and subject matter of the book is ironic, intriguing, and not a little controversial.

O’Connor’s critique of the people whose stories are recounted in the book is that they seem to focus on their personal experiences. He says he is not convinced by the personal stories because they focus too much on personal experience and too little on syllogisms, rational arguments, and logical processes in their coming to faith.

This statement, as we shall see, is not a little ironic. O’Connor, though, expresses the modern western sensibility about personal experiences that are discounted and dismissed in favor of more objective evidence.

To be fair, many of the stories in the book recount the intellectual paths people trod on their way to faith, though the stories do not rigorously lay out the arguments, logic, and proofs. We shouldn’t be surprised by that, as the book focuses on peoples’ stories, and people’s stories are personal experiences.

Each of these journeyers from atheism to faith found problems, errors, bad philosophy, and nonsensical statements in Dawkins’s positions that led them to question his underlying assumptions (which were their underlying assumptions also). This, itself, was a rational process. The intellectual problems they saw in Dawkins’s positions made them skeptical of his skepticism.

O’Connor’s critique of the experiential nature of the stories might be discounted on that basis, but I want to focus on something else. This critique came up in the second of two segments. I want to go back to the first segment and contrast his critique with another statement O’Connor made to get to my point today. (See Coming to Faith through Richard Dawkins Part 1)

When asked what might convince him of the existence of God in the first segment, O’Connor said (without hesitation) that personal experience would be the most likely thing. Therefore, the critique O’Connor made in the second segment (complaining of the overly experiential nature of the stories) is ironic in light of O’Connor’s own admission that personal experience might be the one thing that could convince him that God exists (if he had such an experience).

This incongruity in O’Connor’s criticism about personal experience, and the value of personal experience in what we believe, is the thing I want to explore today. Atheists are not alone in being skeptical of personal experience. And with good reason. But personal experience is, nevertheless, vital to our human understanding of anything.

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Do Our Past Actions Impact Our Present Choices?

‭”[T]he Pharisees and the experts in religious law rejected God’s purpose for themselves, because they had not been baptized by John.”

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Byzantine mosaic of John the Baptist at Hagia Sofia, Istanbul, Turkey

My thoughts today might seem a little obscure, but let me set the stage first.  Imagine the scene when two followers of John the Baptist were sent to ask Jesus a question. News of what Jesus was doing had traveled far and wide. People even reported that Jesus brought a dead man to life!

This is the backstory. Jesus happened upon a funeral procession. (Luke 7:11-17) The dead man being carried to his final destination was the only child his mother had, and she was a widow. Jesus was filled with compassion, ands he did the unbelievable. Jesus brought that dead man back from death!

This man and his mother were locals. They lived in a nearby town. They were talking, and it wasn’t just them. People saw it, and they were talking about it also. A crowd had witnessed the whole spectacle.

News about Jesus spread throughout Judea and the surrounding country, so that people were coming to Jesus from all around. John the Baptist heard about these things also, and he sent two of his followers to ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?”

(Luke 7:20) (As an aside, Luke does not tell us why John did not come himself, but we know from Mathew that John was in prison. (Matthew 14:1-12)

The “one” John the Baptist wondered about is the Messiah who had long been expected. John and his ancestors kin had been reading about the Messiah in the prophets for centuries. The time seemed right. Many had come recently, claiming to be him, but they were killed, and their following faded. Still, expectation was in the air.

John was imprisoned because he was open and blunt with criticism of Herod the Tetrarch, the local governor, who married his brother’s wife. Herod imprisoned John to silence him.

John was equally straightforward and to the point with the question he sent his followers to ask, “Are you the one?”

John the Baptist’s followers arrived on the scene as Jesus was curing people with diseases, sicknesses and evil spirits, healing people and even giving sight to the blind. When they asked him whether he is the one, or whether there is someone yet to come, Jesus said

“Go back and report to John what you have seen and heard: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor. Blessed is anyone who does not stumble on account of me.”

Luke 7:22-23

These words were familiar to John. They come from the book of Isaiah, one of those the prophets that foretold the Messiah to come (see Isaiah 35:5 and 61:1). The Messiah was predicted to be the cornerstone of a new order, but the prophets also warned that he would be rejected, and he would be a stumbling block for many. (See here)

The Pharisees and religious leaders also would have known exactly what Jesus alluded to in his response to John’s followers, though they didn’t even ask the question, and they probably were not privy to the answer. For them, Jesus was a stumbling block. The way Luke describes their response is what prompts me to write today.

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An Invitation to Test and See Whether God Exists

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The title of this piece is a bit of poetic license. I am combining the Psalmist’s challenge to “taste and see that the Lord is good….” (Psalm 34:8) with Paul’s admonition to “test everything”. (1 Thess. 5:21) The general thrust of these two verses is an invitation to seek God and truth and to test what we think we know.

Tasting suggests that we can experience that God is good, and testing suggests that we can measure, in some respect, that experience with God. While the existence of God is not susceptible to testing and measurement like we do with science in a laboratory or in physics (for many reasons), these statements are claims that we can in some sense measure, prove, and have confidence in our conclusions.

Both writers are talking about experience in these passages, something that is frowned upon as evidence in our modern, western culture. I will come back to that. First, though, I want to make some observations.

It should go without saying that tasting and testing requires some commitment to the process. Tasting is highly experiential. If we are going try to “taste” something, we have to engage in that process.

We cannot taste through another person’s experience. It requires our own engagement in the tasting, and that requires some willingness on our part to engage.

On the subject of being scientific about spiritual experience, we can and should listen to what others say who claim to have tasted that God is good. We can and should weigh the “results” and conclusions of various people who make these claims.

In that process, we could categorize, compare, and contrast the tasting and the testing and reach some conclusions purely on basis of the data collected. I have done that anecdotally for years, and I suspect I could find some more objective data pools of these largely subjective “experiences”. The larger the data pool, the more objective we can be in our analysis of them, though they are subjective for the individuals involved.

Tasting and testing, as we are challenged to understand it in the Bible, however, is more personal than that. We can study other peoples’ experiences for a lifetime and never really know what the experience is like in the “biblical” sense of knowing.

These thoughts today are inspired by the following quotation by CS Lewis from his seminal book, Mere Christianity:

“A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works; indeed, he certainly won’t know how it works until he’s accepted it.”

The emphasis on accepting something without knowing how it works seems to run counter to the way we do science, but I don’t think it really is. We do a lot of science on a hunch without knowing whether we are right or wrong. We might call those hunches educated guesses. We don’t know whether a hunch or educated guess is right until we put it to the test, and we understand it better in the process.

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Is God an Ancient Elitist?

God and His message are hidden to so many people, but it isn’t a mystery. It is “hidden” in clear sight!

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Some people seem to think God is an elitist. Some people believe that God can only be understood by people who crack God’s code and discover access to His secrets. Another, label for this kind of thinking about God is the occult, though we sometimes put a more acceptable sheen on this kind of thinking.

This kind of thinking even creeps into churches and personal views on God. Christians sometimes give into temptations to divine the future or hidden truth in numerology, astrology, tarot cards, palm reading, tea leaves, etc.

Other people find in the “hiddenness” of God reason to doubt His existence. They argue that God shouldn’t play hide and seek with the world, that God should be obvious to all, and the fact that He isn’t obvious to all people means that God doesn’t exist.

I don’t find truth in either proposition. At the very least, neither proposition describes the God of the Bible. I have addressed the hiddenness of God several times in my writing, I don’t recall addressing the occult, much. Today this view on spiritual reality that I am describing here as the elitist view of God comes by way of inspiration from Dr. Michael Guillen.

My inspiration for this post comes specifically from a podcast episode titled, Numerology, Gematria & Kabbalah, in which Dr, Guillen spent most of his time talking about the cult of Pythagoras, numerology, gematria and Kabbalah in a thoughtful, objective way. Did you know that Pythagoras worshipped numbers? Especially the number 10?

You probably have heard of claims that the Bible is full of hidden wisdom and truth that can be uncovered with the right application of a numerical code. You will learn some interesting things if you go to the link and listen to whole podcast episode.

Michael Guillen has a personal history with numbers. At UCLA, he earned a B.S. in physics and mathematics. He went on to Cornell University, where he earned an M.S. in experimental physics and obtained a Ph.D. in physics, mathematics and astronomy. Guillen’s own “affection” for numbers gives him unique perspective on mathematics and the love of numbers.

If anyone with religious inclinations might be tempted to worship numbers, Dr. Guillen would be a likely candidate. He even wrote a book titled Five Equations that Changed the World: The Power and Poetry of Mathematics.

One might doubt that a legitimate scientist would be so ignorant as to be religious at all, but history is full of scientists and great thinkers with particular religious leanings. Pythagoras, who headed up a cult that worshiped numbers, is an example. Not all religious leanings are the same, though.

As a young seeker and avid learner in college, I encountered religious thought for the first time in a World Religion class. Though my professor described all religions as roads to the top of the same mountain, I saw a difference in one religion and one religious text.

If you listen to Dr. Guillen tell his own story, which he does at various times in his podcast episodes, he saw the same thing. One religion and one religious leader stands out, and one aspect of that difference can be understood with the observation that Guillen makes: God is not an elitist.

We are tempted as human beings to think that truth is something that only the smartest and most clever people are able to figure out. Perhaps, this is why we are fascinated with books like The Da Vinci Code. The less religious among us might say that only those people with privilege, means, and a good education are able to know and understand truth; the rest of us are doomed to ignorance.

My thoughts today are on the former group of people. Guillen challenges the claims of people who believe that the Hebrew Scriptures contain a hidden, numerical code that can be deciphered with the right “key”. Guillen asserts that the truth of the God revealed in the Bible and Jesus, who claimed to be God in the flesh, are not hidden behind a code in the text that needs to be deciphered, and I agree with him.

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Taking the Hand of God, Literally; How We Read the Bible

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Heaven is my throne, and the earth my footstool. What sort of house will you build for me? says the Lord, or what will be my resting place? Did not my hand make all these things?

Acts 7:49‭-‬50 CSB

I have thought and written about the fundamentalists and the atheists of the world who, ironically, approach the Bible in the same way. Both groups of people read the Bible in a wooden, inflexible, literal kind of way. (See Sam Harris Podcast with Bart Ehrman – Part 2 – Wooden Fundamentalism)

This passage above gets me thinking about these things again. The passage quoted above is from Steven’s address to the Jewish leaders who had him stoned after calling them stiff-necked like their ancestors in the desert (among other things).

Steven recited the Jewish history to them, including the Ark of the Covenant that was created for the Ten Commandments and Tent of Meeting that was carried through the desert. The Tabernacle with the Ark of the Covenant became the inner sanctum of the Tent of Meeting. These structures the people carried with them became the place they would meet with God.

David desired to build God a home, a permanent place for the Ark of the Covenant and Tabernacle, and Solomon accomplished David’s dream. David knew, however, that God does not live in a temple made by human hands. Solomon, David’s son who built the Temple, acknowledged this when he dedicated the Temple:

“But will God really dwell on earth? The heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot contain you. How much less this temple I have built!

1 Kings 8:27

They understood that the Tabernacle, the Tent of Meeting, and the Temple were symbolic. These physical structures and the activity organized around them and in them were meant to point to a metaphysical reality of much greater substance.

It’s ironic that David, a man after God’s own heart, knew these things, but the people of God generally often did not. David was a man after God’s own heart, but the Israelites on the whole were often stiff-necked, as Stephen said.

I find it ironic that people who try to interpret and apply the Bible in the most literal way fall on opposite ends of the spectrum. Fundamentalists and atheists both tend to interpret the Bible literally. They are the two sides of the same interpretive coin.

At the end of the passage quoted above, the Lord poses the rhetorical question, “Did not my hand make all of these things?” Does anyone literally believe that God’s hand made the universe? (Only one hand?)

I would venture to guess that nearly everyone understands this phrase to be allegorical. Yet, there are so many things in the Bible that people try to take and apply literally that are, perhaps, not as obviously allegorical.

I’ve heard the counter statement that we cannot pick and choose the things we believe out of the Bible. We must believe every word of it, or reject all of it. This is the literalist approach – all or nothing. Never mind that a verse like the one quoted above is clearly not intended to be taken literally!

Not to pick on “fundamentalists” (whatever that term might mean), but those people we tend to label with that term tend to push a very literal interpretation of Scripture. They, in a sense, double-down on the “facts” stated in the Bible and believe everything. Many atheists dig in on the same literal way of interpreting the Bible, but they believe none of it. They both approach the Bible the same way, but one believes 100% and the other believes 0%.

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