Obviously, from the Christian standpoint, knowing God exists is as meaningless as knowing a doctor exists, the point is to have a healing, mutual relationship with him. Knowing God exists save no one, it is by grafting oneself onto the immortal life=giving vine of Christ that we gain salvific immortality, as Søren Kierkegaard once said, —
'To stand on one leg and prove God's existence is a very different thing from going on one's knees and thanking Him.'
Still, what if one gave a logically compelling proof for God, one that proved itself as the most likely explanation for various evidence, one better than any competing explanation - will belief in God justifiably follow ? I don’t think so.
Ultimately knowing something is an integrative approach. If one has never experienced love, or loved himself, and who’s life has been cruel, stunted, who’s known only betrayal and disappointment from his guardians and fellows, who looks out into the world and picks out the ugly horror of life, this person, I’d say, even if presented with good logical proof, would be justified in rejecting it, as it doesn’t “fit” with all his other data points -it doesn’t make sense within the entire narrative of his life experience.
Pascal, for example, starts with his experience of being human, many religions recognize man's greatness, but fail to see man's wretchedness, or vice versa, some even claim we have two souls, evil and good, such an odd things we are, both animal and rational, some call us gods, some devils, but only Christianity sees man for what he really is; man is both wretched and great, a ruined exiled king - The Christian doctrines of creation and the fall alone seem adequately to explain the paradox - man's greatness could be explained in the fact that man was created in God's image.
Still, what if one gave a logically compelling proof for God, one that proved itself as the most likely explanation for various evidence, one better than any competing explanation - will belief in God justifiably follow ? I don’t think so.
Ultimately knowing something is an integrative approach. If one has never experienced love, or loved himself, and who’s life has been cruel, stunted, who’s known only betrayal and disappointment from his guardians and fellows, who looks out into the world and picks out the ugly horror of life, this person, I’d say, even if presented with good logical proof, would be justified in rejecting it, as it doesn’t “fit” with all his other data points -it doesn’t make sense within the entire narrative of his life experience.
Pascal, for example, starts with his experience of being human, many religions recognize man's greatness, but fail to see man's wretchedness, or vice versa, some even claim we have two souls, evil and good, such an odd things we are, both animal and rational, some call us gods, some devils, but only Christianity sees man for what he really is; man is both wretched and great, a ruined exiled king - The Christian doctrines of creation and the fall alone seem adequately to explain the paradox - man's greatness could be explained in the fact that man was created in God's image.
“…philosophical arguments aren’t the natural foundation of religious belief, so ‘God exists’ gains its meaning not from philosophical arguments but from how people experience human life.
….people don’t normally acquire religious beliefs by argument or testing evidence. Instead, they come to an understanding of the world that is expressed in values and a way of living. When someone converts to a religion, what changes isn’t so much intellectual beliefs, but their will, what they value, how they choose to live”
- Esther Lightcap Meek
God said - “Let there be, and it was good,” but, as Meek notes, “Life seems to contain as much curse as it does love. In fact, curses are “let there be”s that are not loving. Curse, too, is normative. It brings brokenness and hurt to be.”
Of course, even that experience implies something larger, she continues, "Curse is connected with broken promises and betrayal. So curse implies a larger context of blessing and of pledge. Curse is devastating. But for this reason curse can never totally wipe out blessing.”
Perhaps, but, if true, that sort of thing must be experienced.
For many, it is the terrible things of life that catches our attention. Esther says, “Each knower has submitted to authoritative guides in order to be taught or trained. Each has embraced a shared way of seeing the world. Each has acquired skill sets and formal theoretical frameworks.”
God said - “Let there be, and it was good,” but, as Meek notes, “Life seems to contain as much curse as it does love. In fact, curses are “let there be”s that are not loving. Curse, too, is normative. It brings brokenness and hurt to be.”
Of course, even that experience implies something larger, she continues, "Curse is connected with broken promises and betrayal. So curse implies a larger context of blessing and of pledge. Curse is devastating. But for this reason curse can never totally wipe out blessing.”
Perhaps, but, if true, that sort of thing must be experienced.
For many, it is the terrible things of life that catches our attention. Esther says, “Each knower has submitted to authoritative guides in order to be taught or trained. Each has embraced a shared way of seeing the world. Each has acquired skill sets and formal theoretical frameworks.”
If true, then the Christian must humbly set himself under Christ, the guidance of elders, other witnesses, one’s priest, to cultivate a sense of wonder, just as others have, consciously or not, cultivated a sense of horror under different signposts and various guides - whether philosophical or personal.
Much in the world is evil, and naturally, being repelled, it is grueling to attempt to make friendship with this reality in order to receive it as a gift, to know it as such.
And to journey toward this vision of a good creation, which must be a great uncertainty, first requires a commitment to it, to let it reveal it’s true nature, to be open and not hostile.
“We pledge to give ourselves to the yet-to-be-known, and to consent to its being. We pledge to take the risk to follow something that may prove not to be there, something that may prove to be way different from what we imagine.
“We pledge also to open ourselves to the transformation and to the new reality that the yet-to-be-known will bring us. We must be willing to have it change us, without specifying or holding at arm’s length the change we will undergo. ”
We also must WANT the world to be good. For this, one must suspend any grievances, resentments, and hostilities toward the Cosmos, to let the possibility of another vision break in.
“The healing path requires that we embrace the possibility of nonbeing that hurtful experiences involve. If we deny the threat, or resign ourselves to it, we aren’t doing the healing thing with the Void. The healing thing is to admit our need truthfully and cry out for deliverance. This is what happens when we come to the end of ourselves and start to look in hope beyond ourselves for help. We open ourselves to what we cannot manufacture and cannot presume to deserve. We open ourselves to what can only come graciously: the possibility of new being.”
“In the Void, we must cry out in hope for the gracious deliverance and inbreaking of new being. This is a key act of inviting the real. ”
- Esther Lightcap Meek
"Inviting the real, then, includes maturing in love. Greatly beloved lovers make great knowers. They can bring to the knowing situation the kind of welcome that invites the real. Welcome is the key posture of a knower wooing the yet-to-be-known.”
This is a “Pledge-based verification” :
“We never replace the loving-in-order-to-know orientation or revert to a knowledge-as-information model. Truth isn’t a bare collection of obvious facts. It is a profession of allegiance—a highly sophisticated, pledge-like human act. Proof doesn’t begin a journey, and it doesn’t end it either. Rather, responsible pledge figures in to the journey accompanying the vast range of subsidiary clues on which we rely.”
There are, obviously, many clues that also point to the meaninglessness of creation, and one can indwell those as well. We are trying to transform our outlook. Ceremony and ritual are useful here.
As Newman and James have shown, temperament, passion, intuition, and sentiment affect the beliefs we take as basic and our attitude toward evidence." Newman has written extensively about illative reasoning, and James about the relevance of "the will to believe" or, so to speak, pragmatic reasoning.
Some things can only be known in this way, from within a commitment to them, a commitment which may be called ‘faith.’
What is needed, argues theologian Paul Moser, is a shift from thinking "What does God have to do to prove that he exists?" to "What do I have to do to show that I am open to God existing and making claims on my life?" Or as Moser puts it the questions we are responsible for is not "Do we know that a perfectly loving God exists?" but "Are we willing to be known and thereby transformed by a perfectly loving God?"
As Newman and James have shown, temperament, passion, intuition, and sentiment affect the beliefs we take as basic and our attitude toward evidence." Newman has written extensively about illative reasoning, and James about the relevance of "the will to believe" or, so to speak, pragmatic reasoning.
Some things can only be known in this way, from within a commitment to them, a commitment which may be called ‘faith.’
What is needed, argues theologian Paul Moser, is a shift from thinking "What does God have to do to prove that he exists?" to "What do I have to do to show that I am open to God existing and making claims on my life?" Or as Moser puts it the questions we are responsible for is not "Do we know that a perfectly loving God exists?" but "Are we willing to be known and thereby transformed by a perfectly loving God?"
"If God could be put to the test for authenticity, we humans could be put to the test too. Some immediate test questions for us humans, including skeptics, are: (1) Are we willing to receive a perfectly loving God's authoritative call to us for what it is intended to be, including a challenging call for enemy-love and enemy-forgiveness? (2) Are we willing to engage in the attentive discernment integral to receiving with due care and respect a perfectly loving God's authoritative call? (3) Having received God's authoritative call for what it is intended to be, are we willing to be correctively judged and then remade by the power of a perfectly loving God's unselfish love? (4) Are we willing to let a perfectly loving God be God even in our won lives, that is, the Lord whose will is perfectly authoritative and supreme for us regarding our attitudes, actions, and lives? (p. 66)"
Stanley Hauerwas remarks :
“Of course, for this faith to make sense, it must be connected with the practices that make it intelligible: prayer, the sacraments, and the virtues.
In a chapter entitled “Why Theologians Must Pray for Release from Exile,” the theologian Dr. D’Costa suggests that “prayer is the necessary condition to secure the objectivity of theology, because theology cannot be done with intellectual rigor outside the context of a love affair with God and God’s community. The formal object of theology is God, and, like other disciplines that require practices and virtues constitutive for knowing the object of their investigation, theology requires prayer.”
In a chapter entitled “Why Theologians Must Pray for Release from Exile,” the theologian Dr. D’Costa suggests that “prayer is the necessary condition to secure the objectivity of theology, because theology cannot be done with intellectual rigor outside the context of a love affair with God and God’s community. The formal object of theology is God, and, like other disciplines that require practices and virtues constitutive for knowing the object of their investigation, theology requires prayer.”
Thus, logical proofs are of little use if their truth is not CONNECTED to our lives, one must love one’s way into knowing God, this is a long, arduous, risky journey, whose end is uncertain. James K.A.Smith says,
"Worship is the arena in which God recalibrates our hearts, reforms our desires, and rehabituates our loves. Worship isn’t just something we do; it is where God does something to us.”
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