God as the voice in our heads. (Part 2)

God as the voice in our heads

Part 2: The importance of the framework of understanding

I am very keen on analysing this, because I believe that it is vital for making sense of anything and everything. However, although everyone has a framework of understanding – this is inescapable – I think it’s likely that a very large proportion of people have never considered the matter, precisely because we usually take our framework for granted. It consists of ways of looking at the world and understanding reality, using absolutely core ways of thinking, principles and values that are so basic to our way of thinking, and which we adopted so long ago and have used ever since, that we simply have no awareness that we are using them. They are our classic assumptions that we have taken for granted. We regard them as so obvious, such basic building blocks of our thinking, that we do not think about them, find it hard to believe that anyone else could possibly see things differently, and are horrified when we find people who disagree with us because we literally cannot understand how anyone could possibly see things differently. How can they possibly be so stupid and/or biased? We find it offensive to be challenged in this way, for it seems to us that other people are saying “up” is “down” and “right” is “wrong”.

This is not simply about people disagreeing with each other. People have always done that, and very angrily and passionately too. It’s a more fundamental issue about how we see things, about the way we look at the world. Perhaps an example from politics will help. I think this is a readily understandable example because we don’t have to dig very deep to uncover the framework ideas, and for those who are politically astute, they may be well aware of the theoretical background in which their political policies are set. However, I hope a simple example will help us to see the point – and then we can appreciate that there are basic assumptions hidden more and more deeply.

So right-wingers and left-wingers always disagree about how high taxes and government spending should be, with right-wingers saying both need to be low to encourage business and although they’d like to spend more on the poor we can’t afford it, while left wingers want them both to be high because their focus is on helping the poor and they believe there’s lots of money to spend if only the rich paid the right amount of tax. Both sides may be unaware that these political arguments are supported by “hidden” framework ideas. So, right-wingers will have picked up from experience that government interference in the economy often makes things worse and so government needs to be kept small to allow the power of free markets to generate wealth to flourish – especially as government spending is often inefficient. In contrast, left-wingers see free markets as either bad, or, at least, a necessary evil to generate wealth, but they see government intervention as good – governments intervene to put right the injustices that free markets produce; government spending might be wasteful but all spending is good because you’re giving poor people money they wouldn’t otherwise have.

The idea of our framework of understanding goes even deeper than this, and we can bring in Wittgenstein’s idea of “language games” to help us. This is the crucial idea that words (and the ideas that they represent) get their meaning from the way in which they are used – Wittgenstein called this “the game” in which they are used. So, for example, a football team which had 5 “tries” but only scored 2 “goals” will lose against a team that had 3 tries and scored 3 goals. However, a rugby union team that had 5 tries and scored 2 goals has got 31 points, and has beaten the side who had 2 tries and 5 goals because they have only got 25 points. This is because the words “try” and “goal” have different meanings in football and rugby. This rather easy example alerts us to the fundamental point that the things we say get their meaning from the mental framework in which we use them.

If we turn to the world of religion and its utter contrast to the secular way of looking at the world, we can see why the two parties are simply arguing at cross-purposes. And this is why I try to argue from within the secular mental framework, trying to use ideas that they accept as valid ideas – even if initially they don’t agree with the religious points that I am promoting.

So, as a religious person, I believe that reality is made up of two parts: the physical universe, but also the metaphysical realm. In the metaphysical realm we might find entities like God, the soul and heaven. This is my basic framework of understanding – I walk through life with this point of view, and so I take it as a simple truth that I might have an encounter with God; I might not, but it is a possibility. You might think that this all sounds rather dry and theoretical, but not a bit of it, for the practical upshot of having this outlook is utterly transformative. So, when I wake up in the morning, as soon as I turn my attention to the fact that I believe that God is a reality and that he loves me, then I may well – and this often happens – experience a sense of God’s love enfolding me. It is, as it were, that the moment I remind myself of my basic understanding of my life, that I am opened up to the experience of all the good things that I believe about God and about my relationship with him. I don’t consider that this is wish-fulfilment or mind over matter. I am not conjuring out of nothing something that does not exist. Rather, because of my beliefs in what constitutes the sum total of reality, which includes the person of God, so meeting with him becomes a possibility. As I’ve said before, I cannot control this, because, in my view, God is not a creation of my own mind, he is an independent person. However, my framework of understanding sets out the parameters of what is and isn’t possible. In a most wonderful way, the very act of turning my attention to God, generates or “sparks into life” the very reality that I believe in.

Hence, we immediately see that the secularist’s dismissal of the reality of God closes down the possibility of meeting with God. As a believer, I consider that God does have the ability to “break into” a secularist’s consciousness, but, generally speaking, except in emergencies as it were, God does not force himself onto us, but “hovers” waiting to be invited in. Very often, secularists will have experiences that put them “on the brink” of meeting with God – circumstances have led them to a point where the gulf that usually separates them has grown thin, and then God and the person might “bump into each other” on the boundary between secular and religious ways of understanding the world. And then conversion, or a journey potentially leading to conversion might begin. However, very often, events and experiences that would have me dropping to my knees in adoration, because I quickly perceive the presence of God in this moment, are simply missed by the secularist, because the experience does not fit into any of their ways of interpreting the experience.

So, there is no point talking to secularists about God’s love for them, because in my framework, what I mean is that a person – God, who is different to and external to me, and who dwells in a metaphysical world of the spirit, which world also overlaps with our physical world, is reaching out to me to bestow his love upon me. However, the secular person simply “cannot compute” this because for them there is no God, no spiritual world, no spiritual entity who loves them.

I must just say that I don’t deny for a moment that secular atheists fall in love, are moved to tears by the beauty of nature and music, that they love their friends, their country and their football team. All these qualities of personhood can rightly be called “metaphysical” because they are intangible qualities. However, secular people will understand these things to be aspects of the physical world in that they are outcomes of the ways our mind works. However, they do not believe in the metaphysical realm that I believe in as a religious person.