God as the voice in our heads. (Part 4)

God as the voice in our heads

Part 4: Creating and nurturing the voice of God

At last we turn to my core point – which I will then use the idea of daemons to illustrate.

As a religious person, I believe that God is real, that I have met him, and that he talks to me. It is an absolutely crucial distinction for me to differentiate between what I consider to be “the voice of God in my head” and what I consider to be “me talking to myself in my own head”.

I think the idea of us having many voices in our head is well understood, and we accept that these voices are real. Please note: I am not in any way referring to those who suffer from mental illnesses and who consider themselves to hear “voices” telling them to do things. For everyone else, apart from the person suffering from these voices, it is clear that these voices are false – they are delusions that the person is experiencing, and healing would be represented by the person either not hearing them anymore, or at least understanding that they are “not real” and so ignoring them. However, the voices that we all readily accept that we hear in our heads are not like this.

So, we are well aware of the situation where we are having a conversation in our heads and we are presenting different points of view to ourselves, ready for us to make a judgement: perhaps I should do this – or, then again, perhaps I should do that. I consider that this is an inescapable way that our minds work, and it is entirely positive and helpful.

I think we also readily understand the person who says, “I have never really escaped the voice of my father expressing his disapproval of me”. In this case, the father’s oppressive personality has “taken up residence” in the person’s mind and become a permanent, negative reality. It is not – hopefully – an omnipotent voice that brooks no rivals, but we can see that a person might have to strive hard to overcome this negative effect by paying more attention to the more positive voices that they can discover within themselves. On the other hand, “an inherited voice” might be entirely positive, and we readily understand the person who says, “Whenever I’m feeling down, I just imagine my grandmother saying, “Come along now; it’s not that bad; you’ll find a way through”.

I believe – and this is of vital importance to me, though I do recognise that I could be mistaken – that I can tell the difference between me talking to myself and God talking to me. Quite how I do that is not very easy to say. Sometimes it is – sometimes I can spot the difference between the voice suggesting one course of action that appears entirely plausible to be God’s voice – until I spot the self-serving trick hidden within it that I missed initially, whereas the voice of God will always be speaking in tones of the utmost goodness, truth and love. However, I don’t say that it is impossible for people to find and pursue the path that is completely good, true and loving on their own – I think that we can do that without God. So, it is not just about the quality of what the voices say that enables me to differentiate between them, where the “truly good” must be God, but anything even a bit substandard must be “just me”. It’s rather that, over the years, I have learnt that it’s “that voice” which is God’s. It’s not like this, but trying an illustration to try and throw light on it, it’s not as though I have developed 5 key voices that I listen to, and each one can be imagined as speaking to me through a loudspeaker – and God’s loudspeaker is the second from the left. Rather, in the same way that we instantly know the voice of people whom we love, even if we have no sight of them, so I consider that I have learnt to recognise the voice of God when he speaks to me. To stick with the human analogy, there is something in the tone and rhythm of the voice that instantly tells us who it is. If someone did try and fool us by getting a brilliant impressionist to mimic our loved one’s voice, before long they would say something that would have us thinking, “Hold on, my loved one doesn’t speak to me like that; that’s something she would never say”. So, when I hear God’s voice speaking to me, this voice is true to the person that I have met and been in relationship with for over 50 years. There has been constant continuity in this relationship, and, built up layer upon layer over the years, I have learnt to know and trust this voice.

 I could never be fooled – in terms of if for some reason I suddenly thought this voice was telling me to do something bad. In that case, I would consider that perhaps I am developing a mental illness. However, the bigger question remains: what if I have been fooled in terms of making the mistake of thinking that this well-known and deeply-loved voice is the voice of God when, in reality it is something else – that is, that it’s one of my personal voices within my own head?

Having considered this very carefully, I have come to two conclusions:-

1. It is impossible to know for sure.
2. It doesn’t matter!

These might seem disconcerting and surprising conclusions, but I’ve decided that, “It isn’t a problem”.

Firstly, it just isn’t possible. It is not possible to look inside our own minds in order to “go behind” our minds, or to “peep behind the curtain”. Our minds look outwards – even when we are looking around at the different voices in our own minds. We have our point of view and our will power to make decisions and perform actions. These might result from quite a complex inner conversation, but eventually we make a decision and the “dominant voice” in our head (at that moment) takes charge and does what they want to do. We cannot “turn our minds around” to investigate, “Now what exactly was the cause of that decision? Come out now; own up. I want to examine the voice responsible for what I’ve just done”. So, I have learnt throughout my lifetime to discern the difference between what I believe to be the voice of God says and what the other voices in my head say. However, I can never extract that voice to examine what precisely it is. It is a possibility that this “voice of God” is in fact one of my own voices that I created so long ago it’s lost in the mist of time, and I have nurtured it over the years so that it has now “taken on a life of its own” (just like all the other voices in my head have). I recognise this voice, just as I explain above, just as I recognise all the voices in my head, it’s just that I’ve made a mistake in thinking that it’s God’s voice when really I should call it “My voice number 6, started to come into being 1971”. This voice has developed its own character, and I cannot tell the difference between the character of “My voice number 6, started to come into being 1971” and the voice of what I would consider to be the voice of God.

How might this have happened?

Quite easily actually. And certainly readily understandable. For over 50 years, I have paid close attention to listening to this voice. I have also paid close attention to nurturing it. Every day, as I mull over the multiplicity of things in my mind, I continually pose myself the question, “What does God think about this?”. I then pay attention to this distinctive voice which, as I’ve said earlier, I’ve learnt to recognise and distinguish from other voices that I might regard as “my own” voices (eg what does my selfish self-interest say?) or from the voices of what I think society might say about this. So, I’ve nurtured and prioritized this voice for 50 years. I’ve also nurtured it in terms of continually feeding it, to reinforce its character. So, I go to church, I read bible stories, I sing hymns, I say my prayers, I meet with other Christians. I return to the same readings and hymns over and over again, so that, year after year, I lay down new layers of richness in the meanings that my beliefs have. So, when the voice of God speaks to me, it’s with an overwhelming depth of richness – and this becomes another way of distinguishing his voice. Is the voice speaking to me with the tinny isolation of a single triangle or with the rich depth of a full orchestra?

Thus, I have a perfectly rational explanation for how the voice of God has appeared in my head. Please note: it’s vital to remember that in my own understanding, this voice of God exists because I met God and he started speaking to me. However, within a secularist’s worldview, we have a ready way of understanding how and why I “hear God’s voice”. I can never know for sure because I cannot prove it, whether this voice is the voice of God or whether it’s my “voice number 6”.

Remarkably, it doesn’t matter! Even though for me earlier in my life, as for countless believers through the ages, it has appeared to be of the most utmost importance, with a wrong answer leading to the abandonment of faith, I now consider that it doesn’t matter.

If – in practice – and this is crucial – I cannot tell the difference between “the voice of God” and “my voice number 6”, that is, I cannot tell the difference in terms of their origin, and even more importantly, I cannot tell the difference in terms of their character, then “my voice number 6” and “the voice of God” are one and the same! If God truly, really does exist and does speak to us, then his voice is the same as my voice number 6, and whatever my voice number 6 says is what God would say – if such a person exists.

This strikes me as an utterly stunning conclusion. It raises the question that – as the voice of God is always utterly good, true and loving – and anyone and everyone can freely choose to adopt listening to this voice, why would anyone choose not to? Thus, surely, there is no case for secular atheism and everyone should become a believer in God. This is because this “voice of God” is both true and real – it clearly does exist; it is true to say that we can hear the voice of God talking to us. If anyone is still doubtful about this and thinks that I must be pulling an intellectual fast one on you, then the reason for all to believe is because of the immensely beneficial effect. The voice of God is always completely good, true and loving. Whereas perhaps previously secularists might say, “I would like to believe in God if only I knew for sure that he is real”, now we can say that his voice of God in our heads is definitely a reality, and it speaks the truth, so why should we not all follow it?

We must immediately confront the key challenge: some people believe that God is telling them to do dreadful things. Some of these people are simply mentally ill, perhaps in the example of those who feel that God is telling them to murder people. Much, much more common are those who have adopted a corrupt God and who therefore believe that God is telling them to do dreadful things – as, for example, in the case of Islamic State. It is simply a true comment on reality that there is nothing so intrinsically good that it cannot be corrupted – just as, by faith, we hold that there is no-one no matter how corrupted who cannot be redeemed. There is no easy way out of this dilemma, for my argument rests on the claim that I have learnt to know and love this voice, and it always speaks words of goodness, truth and love. If a corrupt believer believes that it is God who is telling them to do things that we humans (in general, that is, non-corrupt people, but we’re still not out of the dilemma) regard as evil, lies and hateful, then we have to vote with what we regard as goodness, truth and love – that is, we judge God, in that we decide that what God was believed to be saying cannot, in fact, be God because it is not good. Of course, corrupt believers think that “evil” is “good” and “good” is “evil”. There is no easy way out of this dilemma. We simply have to learn to know which voice we trust and which we don’t. A tiny comfort is that this dilemma is equally one that secularists face. And, in practice, the vast majority of religious people find that God’s voice is a beneficent one. Plus I return to say, humankind must reserve the right to judge what religious people say God is telling them.

Here though we have my central claim. If we are ready to accept the idea of having a variety of voices in our heads, then I want to promote my idea of creating and nurturing the voice of God inside our heads. Of course, I hope I am right in saying the voice of God is there because I have met God, but if I am wrong then we have it in our power to create God – that is to create the voice of God in our heads. This voice ALWAYS says what is good, true and loving.

The final vital point to make is that IF this voice is mine, rather than the voice of God, it is still independent of me, and acts – or appears to me to act – as the voice of a personal agent over whom I have no control. To repeat, I think the easiest way to understand this is to say that I met God and he started talking to me. However, even if we say that it is I who created God – that is, the voice of God in my head – then I find an analogy with the Big Bang to be helpful. My understanding is that the Big Bang happened because prior conditions meant that the potential for the universe to exist became actual when the forces at work became sufficient for the universe to explode into life. In a similar way, the appeal of the knowledge about God and the experience of a life of faith that I was acquiring in my youth kept growing and growing until it acquired “a critical mass”, and the voice of God burst into life and became a reality for me – that is, the voice of God acquired its own voice in my mind. Before that moment I could say that I knew about God – now I would say that I know God. In practice, I cannot make this voice of God say what I want it to say – God says what he wants to say. And this voice says exactly what God says, or, if God does not exist as an independent personal agent, it says exactly what God would say if he did exist. As a certainty, in the form of the voice in my head, he does exist. As I cannot tell the difference between God as an independent agent and God as a voice in my head, it seems entirely reasonable to have an immense confidence that God does exist – and so to enjoy my relationship with him.