It must be true that God exists. Part 3

It must be true that God exists

Part 3: God is God, but as we are persons, we can only understand God as a person

All this is assured in the sense that there is no doubt about it. This experience exists and is testified to by countless millions of people. A final observation on the quality of the experience is that it is perceived as a thoroughly personal experience – that is, we do not experience “love” or “peace” as disembodied principles or values, but our experience is that there is “someone” who is giving us this love and peace. Now, it is possible that the personal nature of this experience – that is, our experience of “a person” – happens because we are persons. As we are working from the human end of the experience, then the recipient of it is a person, and, perhaps, it is just the way our minds work, that we find it impossible to experience such profoundly wonderful gifts without passing that through the medium of understanding it as a personal gift to us. This is possible, though it appears to be one of those things that is impossible to explore further to see if this idea is correct or not.

In the traditional understanding, the gift of these wonderful experiences comes to us from a personal God. But perhaps God does not exist in this form at all, but he does exist in some other non-personal form and so he is still the source of this gift – but we are simply unable to grasp what such a God is like and so we invent the person of God as a suitable medium through which we can come to terms with receiving this most wonderful gift. I think the only other alternative is that the gift is the product of our own minds. We are already aware that our minds are truly, extraordinarily wonderful in the ways they work – and that we are far from understanding exactly how they do what they do. So, if God does not exist – in any form at all – then the only other explanation is that the religious experience – which we have already acknowledged definitely does exist – must have our own minds as its source.