Why do I believe I am surrounded by God’s grace?
Part 2: Life without God can be wonderful; does God add anything?
Life is – or can be – wonderful. We are glad to be alive. If our life is in any way sustainable, then there will be many good aspects to it. We will have enough to eat and somewhere to live, and some people whom we love and who love us. We will have a sufficient sense of security and safety. So, it is an important question as to whether people who have never known anything except living in terrible poverty or oppression are able to experience God’s grace. I know that many people who do experience awful poverty or misfortune, that would crush me, are able to continue in faith in God. However, I don’t have sufficient knowledge to say if faith is possible without having at some point in our lives known the goodness of life. If my suggestion (which I hope is wrong) that our experience of the grace of God just is the experience of the goodness of life is correct, then I would expect that it is NOT possible to experience grace if life has always been awful. I suspect though that there are many people who live lives of faith despite constant hardships through their lives, and this would suggest that “God” is something extra to the experience of life as wonderful and something to be loved and cherished.
If the experience of God’s grace is really an entirely natural experience of coming to awareness with the wonder of life, it seems strange to me that humanity should have bothered to add on to the experience a claim that they are encountering a person called God. We know that the human mind is a wonderful, and strange and complex, thing, but in many other respects we are capable of enjoying profound satisfaction in aspects of life without bringing in a (supposedly) imaginary figure.
For us fortunate citizens of modern Britain, life is for most people saturated with good qualities. Therefore, it should be the most natural thing in the world for people to relate to my concept of “God’s grace”, even if, as secularists, they might call it something else – “the joy of living”, or some similar title. It’s interesting then that, as society has become much richer in material terms – and this translates into many other social goods, not necessarily linked to our personal wealth – it has become less inclined to faith in God. I really do not know the range of inner conversations that secularists have with themselves. I try to guard against the derogatory conclusion that, as secularists don’t have what I hold precious that therefore they must have nothing. All people value love and goodness, truth and trust; they have aesthetic and moral inspiration and unspeakably rich inner and outer emotional lives. Are they experiencing the same things as me, simply translated from the religious idiom to the secular? By analogy, is it no more than translating French into English? This is, of course, not easy to know for sure. The issue boils down to whether God adds anything or not. Of course, we can answer immediately that God adds a multiplicity of things of inexpressible value to the believer, which the atheist lacks. However, our question is whether – once our “translation exercise” has been done, there is anything in the believer’s life that the atheist simply cannot have?
Spiritual Devotion 