God: who are you; what are you? Part 3

God: who are you; what are you?

Part 3

Perhaps our experience of God is simply a peculiarity of the way the human mind works – perhaps an accident of evolutionary development. What religious people find most striking is the way the voice of God does indeed seem to them to be external and different to themselves. But perhaps this is just to do with the working of the brain. Perhaps (just speculating) these sorts of ideas are dealt with in a part of the mind separate to the “usual” working parts of the mind, so that when this section of our mind says, “Hey you, I’ve got an idea/message for you”, it seems as though it is “coming from outside” because it is, indeed, coming from an unusual and discrete part of our mind.

These are all good thoughts, but I’m still beating about the bush and avoiding concentrating on the heart of the matter.

Suppose I am mulling over deep thoughts, in a “usual, entirely human” sort of way. I say to myself, “I hope my blog becomes really well-known so that I become famous”. I am immediately able to use my own principles to say, “Denis, that’s terrible; you’re such a vain person”. My own judgement is able to chip in, “What I really hope is that my blog will be of great help to many people”. Now, I’m much happier because I can see that this is a much more noble aim – one that I approve of, and I believe God does too. But then “the voice of God” chips in, “Your blog is irrelevant: what I want to know is whether or not you are at last ready to devote your attention to me”. Though this is a bit artificial, I think it illustrates what I mean by “the 3 strands of thinking” I mentioned earlier, with God’s voice “cutting through” my conversation with myself. Now what is this voice? Is it simply that the mind has “a higher level”? We have the ability to have conversations with ourselves – which we readily understand as an internal debate, but we also have the ability to synthesise, reflect and comment on these conversations and come to a higher-level evaluative judgement. As all thoughts simply pop into our heads (though we may be aware of having been working on them), this is simply another thought, but it surprises us by its profundity. It strikes us as “above the ordinary” and – because we have adopted the framework of understanding that God might talk to us – we take this 3^rd voice to be the voice of God when in reality it is “simply” our best judgement on the subject. As it “pops into” our heads, we think, “Where on earth did that come from? It must be God”. However, really, it is all the work of our own minds.