If God were logically proven to exist, should you then believe in Him ? Not necessarily…

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.

“…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.”

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. ”

“We begin to move from deep hurt and need, choosing to move beyond shutting down, to reach out beyond ourselves, to the possibility of new being, and invite its gracious involvement.”

- 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?"

"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.”

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.”

The Way of Knowing God

Of course there are many ways to know God - prayer, participating in ritual and liturgy, spiritual reading…but there’s a specific way to engage reality that can, in fact, orient one, and invite a relationship with, the very living God.

These excerpts from Esther Lightcap Meek, “A Little Manual for Knowing” will explain how we can adopt a posture that will bring us into contact with God.

“Where we have presumed that reality is impersonal, of course this seems an unwarranted superimposition. But why should we think that reality is, first, impersonal?

 We love in order to know. Love, not bare information amassing, should characterize the way we relate to the world.

“The loving-to-know approach helps us notice and take seriously some things that in our heart of hearts we sense have everything to do with knowing—things that the knowledge-as-information approach doesn’t accredit or allow, and therefore can’t tap: things like desire, wonder, notice, and self-giving.”

“ It is a kind of receptive waiting that humbly consents to the being of, and invites the coming of, the as yet hidden real. But this emptied waiting is a pledged self-giving….Love is the gift of the self. It takes a gift of the self in order to know.”

“What starts the venture is notice and wonder. Something about reality catches our attention. To start to know is actually first a response to a dimly heard beckoning of the wonder-full real. If we can see knowing as a relationship between knower and known, we can see that reality makes the first overture. We can associate this call with our sense of wonder. ”

“To notice and wonder at something is itself a highly sophisticated act that must occur for you to come to know. You actively attend to something significant. You assign value to it as something to notice, picking it out from a background. And you must consent to the wonder, give yourself to it, responding hospitably to its overture. This seemingly tiny first response is big with sophisticated interpersonhood.

We can and should cultivate wonder—a posture of wonder. This is a trained readiness to be astounded.

“Not even a solitary knower is ever entirely solitary. A solitary knower has already appropriated a language, a culture, a tradition. 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.”

“Out of our distinct love, we notice distinct aspects of reality, and reality responds to us along the lines of our distinctive care.”

“The goal is no longer comprehensive, mystery-eliminating, reality-denuding information. The goal is communion—the communion of knower and known. Communion is the fulfillment of love. The goal is ongoing friendship. Friendship requires our ongoing pledge.”

“No pledge, no ed[ge] . . . ucation”

“Any knowing venture requires the knower to take responsibility for it, to pledge him or herself to it. Commitment is the way we dispose ourselves toward the thing we want to know. We take a responsible, highly sophisticated, human, step of choice to bind ourselves in covenant with it. Commitment is different from curiosity, if we mean by curiosity an indifferent, uninvested, responsibility-free stance.”

“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. ”

“love and pledge. These defining postures frame the knowing venture and anchor inviting the real”

“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. ”

“We begin to move from deep hurt and need, choosing to move beyond shutting down, to reach out beyond ourselves, to the possibility of new being, and invite its gracious involvement.”

“Personal wholeness comes when we accept the gracious prospect of new being and become able to give ourselves in love. Mutual gift giving is the being-in-communion that full humanness is.”

“There is one big thing that this involves, something a knowledge-as-information mode utterly overlooks: our body. ”

“We have to indwell and bodily feel that response. It’s not enough to know what it is; we must know what it feels like in our bodies. It is not mindless processing of opaque information.”

“Learning to identify, care for, trust, and tap our felt body sense is a key to effective knowing ventures. ”

Welcome -

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.”

“It is gracious consent to the being and presence of the yet-to-be-known other.”

“It is a space that accords dignity and liberty to the other. ”

“In the welcoming space the host must be disposed toward the other, and at the other’s disposal. ……Respect, humility, attentiveness, obedience to the other’s desires, and patience, all characterize the good host. All these are gestures of welcome that furnish the hospitable space. So they are important practices to invite the real.”

“Strategy 2: Placing ourselves where reality is likely to show up”

“Indwelling involves empathetically putting ourselves inside the thing we want to know and taking it inside us.”

“We should see our knowing venture as born of wonder and love and constituted in pledge. In it we extend hospitable welcome to invite the real. We cultivate ourselves as knowers in the maturity of love that readies us for knowing, maturing to give ourselves in love as candidates to romance the real. We comport ourselves as gracious hosts, in humility, attentiveness, and obedient response. We strategize in our choice of guides. We seek out a vantage point to which the real may come. We cultivate active attentiveness and listening that evokes the real. And we seek to indwell and be indwelt by the yet-to-be-known.”

“indwelling involves empathetically putting yourself inside the thing you want to know, and taking it inside you. Indwelling is a strategy to invite the real. Indwelling is what it looks like to give oneself in love in an effort to know. It is part of what welcome looks like, what trust looks like, and caring attentiveness.”

“what indwelling looks like is this: relying on clues “subsidiarily” to shape a complex focal pattern.

“Before the outset of our venture, we are looking at an apparently disconnected, meaningless array of particular items. Yet our love- and pledge-motivated wonder, our unspecifiable sense of a deeper meaning and of future prospects, our inexplicable excitement, our puzzlement over a problem, hint of a hidden reality. This, our already longing and loving to know, is itself signposting, and thus becoming subsidiary to a farther, half-hidden focus.”

This is an act of trust and submission, rather than a matter of indifferently amassing already lucid information. ”

“We have to find a way to empathetically put ourselves inside the yet-to-be-known—to indwell it. We are probing to make sense of the situation, to connect the dots. ”

“But our struggling to indwell the clues in a way that invites the real is itself a strategy to invite the real. And then, although there is no guarantee, we may find ourselves graciously blessed with integration—with insight and understanding.”

“It is a moment of communion in which we are intimate with the object of our quest. Our love invited the real; the real comes into our love and flourishes there. The relationship we have with it is invested, compassionate, connected. It’s not a mercenary help-yourself.”

“Reality is not passive, indifferent, collectible information tidbits. It is dynamic, generous, always surprisingly new. It responds to overtures of love. We hold a special place in its regard: we could say it wants to be known by us”

“And it is less like it answers our question and more like it reshapes the question. It changes our reality more than fitting into it. Rather than it fitting into our sense of what makes sense, it fits us into its sense of what makes sense. ”

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.

“A profound discovery doesn’t so much answer our questions as reshape our questions. It reshapes the way we see the world and the inquiry we pursue from that point on. A pilgrimage of knowing can be a journey of course corrections. We may have begun facing west, so to speak; gradually we find ourselves facing another direction, moving toward an endpoint that we could in no way have imagined at the outset.

So insights recalibrate our coordinates as we pursue our knowing venture. Each fresh perspective is one that accords more harmoniously with the world. The knower has been transformed to dwell in deeper communion with the yet-to-be-known.”

“Keeping this very human, relational, ceremonial dimension in mind keeps our knowing balanced on the keel of love. We honor and invite a person-like reality through our gentle, pledge-like overture…

All this underscores the idea of etiquette. Our knowing ventures can be rendered more effective, we have seen, by identifying, and practicing with intentionality, the pledge that constitutes a venture, and the etiquette appropriate to persons.”

“Each move is a gesture of hope—in hope of gracious response. Each partner has to be okay being off balance for a time, and waiting for and trusting the upcoming move of the partner.

This is the dynamic of the knowing venture, also. We bind ourselves in pledge and discipline to the inquiry; but we wait in hope for insight. We may not presume. What comes is often not exactly what we anticipated, and we find that is perhaps better. We move forward again, taking a risk that our effort will be rewarded, and waiting to see if it is.”

“To say, “Welcome!” is a very personable, highly sophisticated “let there be.” Creating a hospitable space confers liberty along with dignity—liberty for the yet-to-be-known to make itself known truly. It takes welcome and liberty to avoid a pressure that compels a skewed disclosure or issues in no response at all.”

“ The goal of knowing is not complete information; it is communion.

If we think that knowledge is so much information to amass, then the goal of knowing is comprehensive information. We surmise that this isn’t possible, and so we can feel that we are condemned, like Sisyphus, to the journey. However, an epistemology of love transforms our outlook”

“We can choose knowledge as information, indifferently, impersonally, passively amassed, to the end of a comprehensive package. Or we can choose the posture of loving in order to know, and knowing to the end of communion.”

“Is a vision of life, of reality, as finally about love and shalom something that we can believe? Or are we compelled to think that ultimately reality is personless, meaningless, chaotic, warring? The latter is well-suited to seeking power and domination.

But the vision of shalom cannot be false, if it is to be itself. We have to really think this in order to seek it. Is it wishful thinking? Yes, definitely. But it is not delusional. It is true—not in the sense of correct, certain information. It is true in the sense of troth. Troth is the old word for a pledge or covenant. We pledge to this vision of life. It is true in the sense of a T-square or a plumbline. This vision brings reality in line with itself. In this we recognize knowing’s necessary dimension of covenant. We choose to be . . . true.”

Stephen Clark - Could consciousness evolve ?....No.

Tiff's of Stephen Clark's essay, Could consciousness evolve ?

Click on each for a larger view 

Can Modern Science and Evolution be Theologically Salvaged ?

Modern philosopher Paul Tyson asks in a paper "Can Modern Science be Theologically Salvaged ?”

Not really. He reflects on Conor Cunningham’s brilliant book, Darwin’s Pious Idea, which is to date the finest reconciliation of evolution with serious, philosophically informed orthodox Christianity…but, in the end, says Tyson, modernity and liberalism have rendered science too metaphysically bankrupt to hold real Truths.

Here are some fine extracts from the essay HERE

….scientific knowledge is modernity’s functional metaphysics and that modernity’s metaphysical integrity—and this is not science itself—is intellectually moribund.For within a frame of belief premised on the acceptance of an entirely immanent nature and on the nominalist subject’s internally situated epistemological capacities, the modern knower can have no certain knowledge of objective reality. So the modern approach to truth—having turned its back on faith, participation, revelation, and certainty—redefines truth to mean, not a genuine knowledge of reality, but rather a probable and ever-revisable psycho- social construct which is only ‘true’ because it is instrumentally useful to us .

We have replaced reality with the legal fiction of empirical objectivity, and we have replaced truth with the instrumental criteria of pragmatic utility. Further, modernity has replaced meaning—a notion not amenable to the terms of empirical objectivity—with the syntax of language and with the epiphenomenal subjective belief-secretions of culture. 

Thus modernity’s theoretical premises hold that truth and meaning are functions of power, use, and fiction. What truth really is, is instrumental power. What meanings really are, are imagined fictions that have some psycho-bio- social use when overlaid upon the meaningless objectivity of the world, understood in probabilistic, empirical terms. 

…it is enormously philosophically loaded: all the terms of its materialistically reductionist methodology betray prior existential commitments and a set of assumed metaphysical, methodological, and epistemological assumptions. 

For it is simply the case that truth and meaning cannot be functionally dispensed with if we are to remain, in normal, daily life, recognizably human. So idols must be fashioned out of tangible and controllable materials to stand in for truth and meaning so that we have something graspable to orientate value, choice, identity, and meaning in our lives. This collective worship—as with all public cultus— legitimates its way of life and upholds the continuity of its life-form over time. And it is the pseudo-scientists—those who speak in the name of science to tell us what the truth about reality is, what the real meaning of our lives is, and what our human values and cultural narratives really amount to—who are the priests of our secular, materialist public cultus. 

Reducing reality to only having meaning within a reductively materialist metaphysical frame is a move that rests on an existential preference that entails the self-defeating implication that all existential preferences and metaphysical convictions must be equally meaningless.

As prior, one must have faith in them rather than seek to prove them in derivative terms. This modern urge for the proof of what Aristotle calls “the primitives” is at the core of modernity’s deep irrationality and intellectual futility. This modern refusal to ground reason in a living and grateful faith in meaning and truth is at the core of its hubristic folly and its hopelessly disintegrative approach to knowledge. 

For where first philosophy comes before science, then the important questions of truth and value must not be determined by science, but rather the use and meaning of science must be determined by theology—that is, by a divinely revealed, analogically framed apprehension of real reality. 

….our culture’s commitment to liberalism in relation to religious beliefs—the privatisation of religious belief itself—means that practically, it is only meaningless and merely instrumental ‘facts’ that we now can collectively believe in as publically true. 

Science is never just science to us moderns, but it is the integral public discourse of modern liberalism. Modern liberalism says that science is one thing—just about value neutral facts—and each person, be they religious or not, interprets the meaning of their own subjective experiences and decides what values they will embrace entirely on the grounds of their own freedom of conscience. 

I cannot see that Christianity can do without the belief that the whole of nature still needs radical redemption. I find I cannot dispense with the Pauline notion that the whole of creation was subjected to futility by sin and is in travail waiting for its full redemption, and the church is the sacrament and foretaste of this radical eschaton in which all of material reality is to be caught up. 

Yet the idea central to modern scientific natural history is that things have always been the way they now are, from the lifeless and meaningless beginning of time so many billions of years ago, and will always be this way until the equally lifeless and meaningless end of time, so many billions of years hence. Modern naturalism recognizes only one age, only one nature. Life is a strange and transitory visitor in such a picture of reality. Without some sort of true meaning to Eden, the radicality of goodness in creation, which persists but is marred by sin, death, scarcity, and disease, is lost, and the radical eschatological horizon of total redemptive hope for nature is also lost. 

If we are to hold onto any real notion of Eden we cannot simply accept the one age, one nature view basic to modern naturalism. But any real notion of Eden cannot be understood in scientific terms; there can be no recourse to Creation Science here. For the logic of fundamentally different orders of nature which are at the alpha and the omega of the biblical narrative makes any prelapsarian order of nature as inaccessible to the knowledge categories of the present natural order as is the post-eschaton natural order.

 This logic of different natural orders is, for all intents and purposes, the same as the logic of alternative universes. Hence myth and irreducibly symbolic imagery are the only revealed access we have to both of those ages (or different universes). 

So it cannot be avoided that any commitment to Eden and to different natural orders is going to be a stumbling block to the one age/nature assumption of natural history, which is simply presupposed by modern science. Equally, any reduction of Christian doctrine in order to fit a one age/nature understanding of natural history is going to render the cosmogenic, cosmological, and teleological tropes of Christian belief’s sacred narrative as having no actually true redemptive meaning for us who seek to inhabit this poignantly beautiful veil of tears in hope.


John Henry Newman has said : 

“It is not reason that is against us, but imagination... The ways in which we ‘see’ the world, its story and its destiny; the ways in which we ‘see’ what human beings are, and what they’re for, and how they are related to each other and the world around them; these things are shaped and structured by the stories that we tell, the cities we inhabit, the buildings in which we live, and work, and play; by how we handle – through drama, art and song – the things that give us pain and bring us joy. What does the world look like? What do we look like? What does God look like? It is not easy to think Christian thoughts in a culture whose imagination, whose ways of ‘seeing’ the world and everything there is to see, are increasingly unschooled by Christianity and, to a considerable and deepening extent, quite hostile to it.” 

The imaginative landscapes of cosmogonies are very culturally powerful, and we should think very carefully before we concede truth to the assumptions of a modern, naturalistic cosmogeny. 

Jacques Ellul, too—no fundamentalist by any measure—sees that in all our modern scientific sophistication, we cannot better the Genesis myth, and we do it a terrible injustice if we seek to interpret it in a manner compatible with modern science. 

I suspect that modern science is too deeply embedded in a ‘one age’ imaginative mythos of originary contest and nihilistic materialism to contain insights compatible with the truths of Christianity. 

Sociologically, modern science’s cosmogenic speculations, cosmological assumptions, and teleological nihilism, are foundational to modern liberalism and modern secular reason. 

For these reasons I do not think modern science, as inextricably enmeshed with modernity as it is, can be accepted if one believes that Christ is the alpha and the omega of all that is, and if one is to think about nature and reality in the light of divine knowledge which is given (and hence nothing we own, possess, or stand over) to us by the grace of God. 

I think we have a problem with the operational scope and methodological assumptions of modern science itself, and with the implicit natura pura frame of interpretation which cannot be simply extracted from modern science—and in the final analysis, I do not think modern science can be theologically salvaged.

* See Louise Dupré, Passage to Modernity,  and Goetz & Taliaferro, Naturalism, 2008. The notion that there is a discrete nature and a discrete super-nature, and functionally only a ‘pure’ nature without any participation in a transcendent dimension prior to and beyond the directly tangible, is the functional foundation of modern science. Modern science works within this anti-metaphysical cosmology. This cannot be squared with any orthodox doctrine of creation. The science that is produced from within the operational framework of natura pura, then, should not be expected to align with Christian faith regarding the nature of nature, the meaning of human life, and the alpha of primeval goodness and the omega of redemptive glory which is the origin and teleology of creation as understood by the Christian faith.