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.

Faith for atheists

Part 4: The wonderful gifts that faith brings are a simple reality, waiting to be experienced

So, we need to refocus the appeal of religious claims, and in my view, living a life of faith is the best possible way to live this life – regardless of whether there is life after death or not.

The religious claim is that there is an inexhaustible source of strength and guidance, freely available to us. No-one can take it away from us, block or restrict our access to it, or reduce its effectiveness, against our will. There is a never-failing spring of love, peace and joy that is always to hand. There is a sense of overwhelming acceptance and affirmation given to us, not because we deserve it, but as a gift. There is a means of seeking and finding forgiveness for even terrible faults, achieved, not through self-seeking delusion or selfish refusal to face up to the deep reality of the harm and pain we have caused, but by finding an even deeper source of healing and renewal than our failure. There is amazing clarity of thought, and the ability to embrace the full heights and depth of existence that comes to us, granting us meaning and purpose in life. There is the faculty of finding the precise vocation for us that will bring us that maximum fulfilment that human beings seek. There is the opportunity to immerse ourselves in a value system and principles that strike us as the ultimate that a person can aim for. There is a sense of relationship with someone who loves us utterly, is always on our side, and is always striving for our renewal even when we have given up on ourselves. There is a faculty of union with the absolute, ultimate and eternal such that, in those moments, we could die happy because we know that we have experienced the very fullness of what life is capable of offering us. There are grounds for community that enhances us as individuals, is a template for a just and compassionate society, and which empowers truly moral living in the wholeness of what it means to be human.

In simple summary, our initial issue of what can we do to fulfil our potential is answered. All these things are the natural outcomes of a life of faith.

There is no appeal here to a fairy-godmother sort of God, who waves her magic wand to “make everything alright”. There is no pleading for a miracle to rescue us. There is no fantasy, wishful thinking, or sticking our head in the sand. This faithful way of life is completely consistent with a clear, open-minded acceptance of all the facts of reality in a scientific, material universe. It achieves this because faith is a way of life. But it is a way of life that – as well as accepting the external realities of the material universe, also accepts the internal realities of what human beings are capable of. I am not sneaking religious wishful thinking in by the back door; I am simply pointing out what is available to us through our natural faculties as human beings. It is the testimony of all the great world religions that there is a wonderful experience of the transcendent that brings overwhelming peace, joy and love to the believer, and there is ample testimony that this faculty that human beings have can be nurtured through practice – condensed into particular practices that can be understood as “the life of faith”.

To return to the fundamental issue we posed ourselves: the vital importance of fulfilling our potential, then it seems a bizarre and tragic failure not to follow the way of life that has the best prospect of enabling us to do just that, and achieve the highest of which we are capable.

Faith for atheists

Part 3: If we are after the best deal, it has to be one that pays out now

I will begin by using the idea of fulfilling our potential – and the tragedy of not doing so.

Imagine someone with a skill or aptitude for something. It doesn’t matter what it is: in music, art, sport, intellectual ability, capacity for caring, creative thinking, community building, scientific research, whatever. If someone had this potential, but couldn’t be bothered to use it, we would think that that was in some way wrong. To pluck out just one illustration: if Usain Bolt realised he had the ability to become the fastest runner on earth but couldn’t be bothered to train or even to turn up for the Olympic final, we would regard that as a terrible waste.

Now, let’s consider key religious claims. You don’t get much bigger than the claim that there is an eternal life of bliss on offer in heaven. In previous ages, this gave huge motivation for the religious life. Particularly given that, for most people, life was quite short and very hard, and easily ended by warfare, famine or illness that today would simply take a short course of antibiotics to clear up, the “religious deal” sounded very attractive: “I will worship God; keep his rules; and after this earthly life I will get my eternal reward”. Some believers overtly (though perhaps they kept this to themselves) resented “losing out” in some of the pleasures of life, in order to keep God onside, but the whole package was worth the sacrifice. However, our increasing scientific understanding of the universe and of humanity has made it hard for many people to believe in life after death. Many people think that it may just, somehow, be possible, but I’m not going to bet my life on it, in terms of giving up things that I want to do just to keep God happy – just in case there is a God, and just in case he really does get cross if we break his rules. I’d rather not lose out on the pleasures of this life.

Instead, people in the UK expect that – given a reasonable roll of the dice – they can look forward to 80+ years of interest, achievement and enjoyment. I am not at all decrying interest, achievement and enjoyment, and we will return to this point. Likewise, I am not overblowing the criticism that life has been taken over by a consumerist mindset. However, there are elements of consumerism that, almost inevitably, invade our understanding of life itself. If, through absurdly lucky chances, I find myself alive in the modern age, in a peaceful and prosperous country like the UK, and if this life is going to end in about 80 years and that will be the complete end of me, then I have an opportunity – no, a responsibility – to maximise my fulfilment before this wonderful gift of life is taken away from me. This does not, of course, exclude altruism, principled commitment to good causes and sacrificial service, for all these things may be part of individual’s understanding of what fulfilment entails. However, we can see that, in an atheist mindset, if other individuals choose to maximise fulfilment through indulgent self-interest, there are no sure grounds for criticising them, for they are simply doing what life is for: fulfilling their potential according to their own standards of what they think is worth bothering about.

Therefore, to appeal to atheists to adopt the life of faith, I think we need to appeal entirely to this life on planet earth. Life after death may be a reality, but we cannot be sure, and no-one in this life is ever going to prove it.

Faith for atheists

Part 2: Atheism only appears to be on high ground by attacking a false view of religion

It’s an impressive attack, and we must show why it is false, and how religion can be again the saving grace needed by atheistic society. I aim to do this entirely by using ideas that are easy for atheists to accept. For, it seems to me, religious and atheist arguments often appear to exist in different realms. Religious ideas gain no traction with atheists because they have rejected the entire package of ideas used by believers. So, they end up making appeals to atheists that atheists have already rejected as simply false. Clearly, many religious people still believe them to be true, but that cuts no ice with atheists. So, leaving traditional religious people happy in their faith, I am going to go seeking atheists using only ideas that make sense within atheism. I believe I will be able to show that having faith is an entirely reasonable and beneficial thing to do.

I should stress that I am not necessarily rejecting traditional Christian belief; it’s just that I don’t see any point in me happily continuing in forms of belief that atheists will not even consider. You will see that I am putting forward considerable modifications in my understanding of Christianity, which I think may be a better way of understanding true reality, but, ultimately, I am not in a position to judge with any certainty whether traditional faith is true or not. No-one is in a position to know that for sure. However, what I can do, is show that it is not necessary for me to persuade anyone that traditional Christianity is true. It may, or it may not be. What I can do is show that a modified understanding of Christianity can definitely be accepted by all.

Let’s go back to the deal that is the implicit basis of faith for many people: “You help me, God, and I will believe in you” – a deal that many people feel that God has broken and so such an idea of God needs to be rejected.

I agree! I reject that view of God too. I think it needs to be rejected, not simply because it’s too difficult to get the facts of people’s lives to fit into this view, but also because a better relationship with God is available if it is not dependent on this simplistic deal which is – perhaps – not very morally elevated.

Let’s consider the facts of people’s lives first. Great ingenuity is employed by religious people to show that the deal is, in fact, honoured by God. There are profound arguments to justify how evil and suffering can exist alongside an omnipotent and all-loving God, and in people’s ordinary lives it is often perfectly possible to show that a good God has guided and sustained you through the trials of life. Things did go wrong; life was very tough at times; but we held to our faith and God has drawn us safely through. However, these are the arguments of the survivors; the people who did not make it safely through are no longer here to accuse the faithful that they too had faith but it was to no avail. So, a different understanding of God and what faith in him means is required.

Then we can challenge whether the implicit deal with God was justified in the first place. I do not mean to assert that religion IS based on a deal between us and God, but I think that, in practice, the faith of the great mass of people in previous generations was fuelled to a considerable degree by this idea of a deal. Hence the mass of people in the UK have abandoned faith. I think there is a widespread view among such atheists that those who haven’t given up faith must therefore be somehow dim, or blind, or fooled into believing something that they can see is palpably false. However, I think we will find that many of those who are still faithful are able to do this because they have adopted a wonderfully profound understanding of who God is, and of what it means to live a life of faith, and it is this that I would now like us to explore.