Religious experiences are real and certain, even if God isn’t. Part 4: Judging from our end of the relationship with God restores the concept of knowledge because we do know what we are experiencing inside ourselves

My hope is that for both believers and atheists they will be able to abandon the idea that the element of doubt means they are not allowed to live a life of faith, or that it undermines and spoils their life of faith.

However, in practice, however God actually is in his inmost, truest self – and only he knows that – from my end of the relationship, I experience God in exactly the same ways as you would expect if it could be shown that the traditional God of Christianity had been scientifically proven.

Given this, I feel happy and content to pursue my life of faith, because that way of life is supremely satisfying. Note: I am not sticking my head in the sand; I am not relying on blind faith, or an obstinate denial of the facts of objective reality. I am taking on board everything that modern knowledge can give us about the material universe, but also everything that we can learn about the inner life and capabilities of human beings. My faith does not require me to believe “6 impossible things before breakfast”; it does not require me to deny the manifest evidence of what happens in the world or in my own life. It simply requires me to acknowledge how faith enriches my life beyond measure, and, taking onboard all the truth about existence that I can muster, allows me to make the reasonable judgement that there are sufficient grounds to justify my life of faith.

Religious experiences are real and certain, even if God isn’t. Part 3: We accept that we’ve lost our former foundation stone but also accept that we have sufficient grounds to justify our leap up to reach God

See how we have by-passed the moment of conflict, doubt and possible rejection of faith – by both believers and atheists. Before, because there was no proof that God existed or that he was the cause of my religious experiences there was an impulse to abandon faith or never take it up and be an atheist. Now, our focus on the value of our religious experiences as supremely precious, enables us to make the personal judgement and faith commitment: whoever, wherever they come, whatever is their cause, I take them to my heart as the bedrock of my life.

Very importantly – and surely this is a “big clue” as to the reality of God -is that the content of our religious experiences is exactly what traditional believers say God is like. When I was a boy I was told that this peculiar invisible person exists who is overwhelming love. Then when I “met God” by having my first religious experience, it was an experience of overwhelming love. I put 2 and 2 together and concluded that what I had been told as a boy was right after all.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, but increasingly important for me: it makes no difference in practice whether God is real or just something I believe in, as, in practice, the effect is the same.

Now I must be careful. I’m not saying that it’s OK to believe there are fairies at the bottom of the garden if that gave people pleasure – even though there are no fairies. Our belief in God is not like that. The experience of transcendent love, joy and peace, which we are capable of receiving and which countless people through the ages have attributed to God, is an undoubted reality.

Provided I feel within myself that there is a reasonable probability that this experience of the transcendent comes from God – and I regard that as entirely reasonable – then I am fine

In effect, I have redefined God, so that when I say the word “God” I mean: “the experience of transcendent love, joy and peace that comes to me in personal terms from a person who is the mysterious stranger, I know not whom, but he loves me”. I know that God understood as that is definitely real. I am happy in my own faith, to believe that this mysterious stranger is the traditional God of Christianity. It’s just that I have to be agnostic about the existence of God understood in that traditional way, but I can be certain that God as the mysterious giver of transcendent love exists – because I receive those gifts of transcendent love.

Religious experiences are real and certain, even if God isn’t. Part 2: We do know what is happening inside us

So, let’s stick with what we do know. The religious experience definitely exists. Whether God is the cause of the experience is not certain – and never can be. Perhaps before your doubts you felt it was certain, but actually, philosophically, you were wrong: you did not know religious experiences were from God, you only believed it.

But we do know the experience is real and that it is wonderful. So, let’s stick with the experience.

It is a self-authenticating experience as we know we feel what we feel. Now, I don’t go along with the modern trend that, “If I feel something is true then it’s true because that’s what I perceive”. The mistake there is to claim that what I feel inside my own heart and mind proves that things are true “out there” in the external world. However, I am keeping agnostic about claiming I can prove it’s true that God exists; that is something I hold by faith, not certain knowledge – but I do know deep down at the core of my being that my experience of what I believe to be the presence of God fills me with inexpressible peace, joy and love. And our encounters with God are enough to justify our judgement that there probably is a God; I’ll find out one day; till then I value my faith in God above all other things.

Objective factual statements about the world are agreed by everyone – though, of course, often people may lie and refuse to accept the truth, for their own selfish reasons. Faith judgements and personal values are not objective facts; they are personal value judgements. So, when we commit ourselves to a life of faith we are making our own personal value judgement: I put God first. Ultimately, this is where our experiences of God have led us: I choose to live by the love that I have encountered in God. There is no doubt that an experience of transcendent love exists, of being one with the infinite and eternal, of being filled with inexpressible joy and peace, of finding the ultimate in life such that you feel, “If I died now, I could die happy because I have touched the height and depth of what life has to offer”. These, and much more, are what our experiences of meeting with God bring us, and they are definitely real and true feelings; they are supremely precious, and – as we live by faith not sight – they are enough to persuade us to continue with our journey with God.

Religious experiences are real and certain, even if God isn’t. Part 1: The evidence is clear, but we still have a choice to make

Religious experiences are the heart of my faith. I regard myself as very blessed that I have them pretty often.

In Religious Studies philosophy of religion A level terms, the basic argument is this:-

People have religious experiences because God exists and has just given them the experience. The alternative explanation is that, though the experience exists, its cause is something other than God – usually a psychological explanation.

So, as a young person I had lots of lovely religious experiences; I had been told that these could happen and when they did, it would be because God was calling out to me. So, when that did start to happen it was “proof” that God is real and is calling to me. Then you meet the explanation that perhaps your experiences have a purely psychological explanation – nothing to do with God. This could provoke a crisis, and you either give up faith, or master the challenge by making a judgement that the idea that God is responsible for the religious experience is the better explanation. This is a faith judgement; there is no certainty either way; you either choose for or against continuing in faith. This is why, ultimately, I think of faith as a way of life. I regard faith more as a verb than a noun. I don’t deny that faith is a noun too, but I think what trips up both believers and atheists is the view that faith is a thing – let’s use the image of faith as a bar of gold. Atheists say, “Well, I’ve never discovered that bar of gold” But I don’t think faith is like that – not for us believers either. My faith is not like the certainty of holding up a bar of gold I found hidden in a field; my faith is a choice to live in a certain way. It’s a decision to believe in and trust in God. Now believing and trusting are verbs, not nouns. I live by faith because I have chosen to do this even though I have no certain knowledge that it is the right thing to do. If I ever felt that, though there was a possibility that God exists, but really it’s very implausible, then I think I would feel duty bound by my respect for the truth to give up faith, but I don’t need to do that because of my certainty over the reality of my faith experiences.

God is unknowable, but we can experience him. Part 2: Why worry that we cannot grasp God, just delight in meeting him

Now we need to face up to a big problem – for both believers and atheists. We both tend to start at the cause of the argument, not the fulfilment. Many believers feel, “I love God, and I love everything about being a religious person, but I am so beset by doubts. If only I KNEW that God was real, then I could rejoice in all the good things that my faith brings me, but my doubts nag away at me and all the joys of my faith come crumbling down around me”. Atheists often feel (either regretfully or triumphantly), “You’re not going to catch me signing up to any of this faith nonsense until you can prove to me that God is real”.

This proof is the one thing that we are never going to have. Asking for proof is to treat God as though he is some sort of new species found in the Amazon – some people claim to have found it, but others are sceptical and say, “Unless I see this creature for myself, I will not believe”. But God just is not like that. The one thing we know is that God is unknowable – we said that on a point of principle earlier. This is God we are talking about, and surely all our experience as religious people has taught us that God is very mysterious and very wonderful.

Instead, let’s focus on the experience, rather than the cause of the experience. For there is an unacknowledged assumption going on for both believers and atheists, that if the cause of the religious experience is not provably God, then it’s a worthless experience. But the experience of God’s presence – whatever it is that causes it – is supremely precious. All the world’s great religions testify to the existence of an experience of transcendent love. Though the cause of the experience is debatable, there is no doubt that the experience exists, and it’s wonderful.

So, doubts about God’s existence as the cause of our religious experiences shouldn’t derail our faith, as the experience of believing in God is supremely precious.

God is unknowable, but we can experience him. Part 1: We cannot measure God to assess him.

It’s a bedrock of faith in God, from the very beginning, that God as he truly, fully actually is, is unknowable. Our ability to express in words the full wonder of who God is, is inadequate. Even more fundamentally, our ability to take in his full wonder is inadequate. However, that does not mean that we are bereft in our understanding of God. To hold a little bit of the infinite God in our hearts is the same as holding all of him. And we do know something about God, even if we do not know him completely.

Here’s what I hope will be a helpful image:

Let’s think of the human soul as having the capacity of one pint. Imagine, not a physical container inside us, but a spiritual one, and in most people it holds about “one pint of spiritual “stuff””. So, when we are uplifted – say in prayer or worship – we might register one quarter of a pint and feel encouraged and strengthened and forgiven. Other spiritual experiences might fill us half full or three-quarters full.

Now imagine that God gives us 2 pints of spiritual uplift. We can only hold 1 pint; that’s all we can measure; we do not know what it’s like to hold 2 pints of spiritual stuff. And, of course, God is infinite, so we are utterly incapable of understanding God, or knowing him in the fullness of who he is. But! But! As people whose soul has the capacity of one pint, we DO experience that we are full and overflowing. We cannot measure 2 pints, but we can experience we are full and overflowing. If you think of this image of pouring 2 pints into a 1 pint pot, it fits the image pretty well of a stream of living water welling up and overflowing.

So, why worry that we cannot contain God within our hearts in such a way that we could measure and know him fully. By definition, we are never going to be able to do that with God. But let us pay attention to the experience of God’s presence, and we CAN know so much about God as we discern what it is that he is filling us with. If God fills us with joy and peace and strength and hope, then what we know about God is that he is the sort of person who gives us joy and peace and strength and hope. In fact, our experience of God is all that we are capable of knowing. The “Ding an sich” as Kant said, in German – “the thing in itself”, is beyond our ability to know, and Kant is never wrong.

Introduction. Part 2: A few “framework” issues

Many atheists have abandoned, or never begun, a life of faith because of the obvious weaknesses in our position, such as proof that God acts in the world to make things better, and scepticism that life after death is possible. They assume that people who haven’t given up faith must therefore be stupid, blind, or so sucked into the religious system that they can’t think for themselves to escape. But the picture of God that atheists have rejected is one that many believers have rejected too. We can often say, “I don’t believe in that God either – it’s far too simplistic and ignores vitally important facts”. However, we believers continue to believe often because we have developed an extraordinarily profound and sophisticated understanding of who God is and what he does.

Note: I do NOT reject the traditional or evangelical view of God as invalid; it is an entirely legitimate faith. In many ways, left to my own devices, it is my preferred way to understand God. And after many personal struggles, I feel that I could happily continue to the end of my life believing in this sort of God.

The difficulty for me is that there are many people in Britain today (I suspect a large majority and growing) who do not, and cannot, accept my traditional picture of God. I do not want to simply carry on happily in my faith if I am not going to be able to share that faith with others because they have comprehensively rejected the entire system of thought in which my faith is held.

I’m afraid, as usual, I will be talking about myself a lot. Partly this is just a character weakness on my part, but it is also, I think, unavoidable on this occasion. I will be talking a lot about religious experiences and the spiritual life, and, really, I don’t know very much at all about anyone’s religious experiences except my own. So, I am simply hoping that my experience is pretty normal, and you will be able to relate to many of the things I’m saying. If you sit there thinking, “This isn’t how I see things at all” then please discount what I’m saying as largely irrelevant to you, and just hone in on anything that is.

(This article comes from the text of a Quiet Day. It has 5 sections and many parts. We may be finished by Christmas!)

 Introduction. Part 1: My personal journey

I have reached an interesting point in my life.

I have absolutely no doubt at all about the value of my spiritual life, or that a life of faith in God is supremely precious, and that my experience of God’s presence enriches my life beyond all measure and is what life is ultimately all about – it is the pinnacle of fulfilment in life.

Yet I have no certain foundation on which my spirituality, my faith, and my experience of God rests.

Remarkably, I have come to the conclusion that I don’t really care about that – it doesn’t matter. That’s because the value of what I find through my faith in God is so supremely precious that whatever it is, and wherever it comes from, I feel certain at the very core of my being that this is the most that life can offer.

But, I have to admit, that throughout large periods of my life, it did bother me intensely that I should have a certain foundation for my faith that I did not doubt. It has now become my quest to investigate what is actually going on in my life of faith; and I really want to demonstrate to people who don’t have faith that it is entirely reasonably justified to believe in God.

For, it’s all well and good for me to be happy in my faith. I have only reached this position through a long, convoluted life history, in which I could have given up on faith several times, and it’s a journey that I might not have embarked on if I had known when I was 20 what I had come to understand when I was 40. By the time I was 60, I was fully content with my faith, but it’s a journey I started because of the generation of faith that I was born into, which simply does not exist in the UK anymore.

So, how can I trace links from my faith to make connections with what atheists hold to be true, so that I  can say, “Look, if you believe what you do as an atheist, then there are no obstacles to you believing in God and committing to a life of faith”. I’ve always argued that a life of faith is the best life possible, but now I want to show that anyone can follow it. Atheists may have thought that they can’t accept the peace and joy of a spiritual life because they reject relying on “faith”, as though it is some mysterious “zapping” that some people get “infected” by. I say that living by faith is an entirely reasonable thing to do.

Faith for atheists

Part 5: Faith brings fulfilment!

Why would anyone reject a source of happiness on a doctrinaire basis of, “I don’t believe in that”? Yet this is the position atheists have got themselves into. By rejecting an inadequate notion of God (the discredited one that rests on the idea of a deal) atheists think they have “settled all that religious nonsense” and so are free to live life totally unencumbered by religion. In doing so, they give up their opportunity to live up to their potential – a potential that is not, in this sense, a matter of belief, but is simply a matter of using the human faculties that we have.

There is still a huge amount of faith needed to live this newly defined life of faith, in that it requires an immense personal commitment to live in a certain way and to adopt a particular way of looking at life. However, it is not “faith” in the sense of, “If I believe this hard enough it will come true”; it’s the faith of, for example, an athlete who believes that if she trains hard she can become better at her sport. She can, of course, decide not to train. She can make a “faith decision” that she’s not really bothered that much to put in the effort that’s needed. She might doubt that she can improve enough or that becoming a better athlete is really worth it. She might get distracted by other things that strike her as more attractive. And, of course, no-one has to become an athlete. But with the religious quest, we are claiming that it is the ultimate experience, and we were using the example of an athlete as someone who had set her heart on becoming the best athlete that she had within her. The example is to show that, in this redefined religious quest the attitude of faith is as important as ever, but we can see now that faith is definitely not wishful thinking that contradicts the known facts of the universe; it is now a faith commitment to achieve the good goals of your faith in a way that is entirely consistent with how we know the universe to operate. Huge numbers of people have given up on faith in God because “the deal” which they had hoped to make was shown to be hollow, but here we have an understanding of faith whereby the benefits of faith will certainly come to you with spiritual practice, as surely as an athlete’s muscles become stronger with exercise.

We close, not simply with the testimony of all the great religious and spiritual leaders through the ages, but, even more importantly, with the testimony of countless “ordinary” people whose lives are evidence that they gave themselves to a way of life that connected them to an experience of transcendent bliss, which overflowed into altruistic and often sacrificial loving service, and in this way they considered themselves to have found complete fulfilment.