“We found, too, that we had been worshippers. What a state of mental goose-flesh that used to bring on! Had we not variously worshipped people, sentiment, things, money, and ourselves? And then, with a better motive, had we not worshipfully beheld the sunset, the sea, or a flower? Who of us had not loved something or somebody? How much did these feelings, these loves, these worships, have to do with pure reason? Little or nothing, we saw at last. Were not these things the tissue out of which our lives were constructed? Did not these feelings, after all, determine the course of our existence? It was impossible to say we had no capacity for faith, or love, or worship. In one form or another we had been living by faith and little else.” (Page 54, Big Book)
When necessity arose, I had to believe. I had no other option. If I was to live, I needed a supernatural power, and I took the actions necessary to contact that supernatural power. The result: I accessed that power, and the question of belief was swept from the table forever. I went from not believing to knowing, which presupposes belief.
How does someone who does not believe in God approach the question?
The first point to note is that there are far too many people who are thoughtful, sensible, educated, and even scientific who believe in God for belief to be dismissed as a fiction of the primitive, dim, or brain-washed. There is a definite case to answer.
Secondly, the argument is not an equal one. The assertion that something exists, in this case the metaphysical realm and everything that goes with it, is of a fundamentally different nature than the assertion that such a realm does not exist. To prove that a batch of strawberry jam jars contains at least one jam jar in which there is a stray blueberry requires only one blueberry to be found; to prove that no blueberries are contained in the batch requires the contents of all jars to be thoroughly examined. Now imagine that there are endless strawberry jam jars. The non-believer’s job is never complete. However, one genuine experience of the metaphysical realm would show all non-believers to be wrong. The aggregate experience of all non-believers by contrast proves nothing, any more than a hundred blueberry-free jars of jam prove that there is no blueberry in any of the other, infinite jars. It’s not a fair fight, and, from the side of the believer, one feels almost reluctant to engage in the question, because the opposing side is so heavily disadvantaged.
Before I believed in God, I took the conclusion that there was no God as the starting point of the investigation, crossed my arms, and challenged ‘the world’ to prove me wrong. However, I skewed the game by insisting that, if there were a metaphysical realm and a being in it, it ought to be somehow measurable with physical means, and, if no physical proof were furnished, well, there was no metaphysical realm. This is like attempting to prove that there is no infrared light using an ordinary camera, when what one needs is an infrared camera. Even in the material realm, you have to use the right tool to detect the presence of something.
The only way to detect the presence of God is internal: one has to use internal, in other words metaphysical, tools. Do you love Marjory? Can you prove it scientifically in the ordinary sense? Absolutely not. One has to rely on the subjective observation that one loves Marjory to conclude that one does indeed love Marjory. Numerous other states of affairs are subject to the same reliance. It turns out that, to live, one cannot live by scientific proof alone, and, in fact, scientific proof furnishes an extensive array of essentially trivial truths. The really important truths, the ones that create the warp and weft of the fabric of life, are determined subjectively. The physical truths are imprints on the surface of the fabric. They are not its substance.
Daniil Kharms tells a story of a gentleman who sees a man in a tree shaking his fist at him, but his eyesight is poor and he can see the man only when he is wearing his glasses, so he concludes that the man in the tree is an optical illusion. In this example, the use of a particular device, namely glasses, to perceive something does not mean that the means have produced the thing perceived, any more than a Geiger counter is creating the radiation it is measuring. The means for detecting the presence of the metaphysical realm and indeed of God is introspection. But introspection is not a blunt tool that can be used like a chimpanzee might use a rock to hit an orange. Even if introspection in an intellectual or psychological sense is highly developed in a person, the introspection required for metaphysical investigation is of quite a different nature. A clever person beginning a spiritual journey finds themselves at the beginning of an entirely new process, even though they may have sophisticated introspective tools in another department of their life. The failure to ‘find God’ by first introspection on the matter is like turning on a radio and hoping it immediately to be tuned into an orchestra playing Mahler Five. One has to know how to tune the radio, where to look on the spectrum, and when the particular station is going to be playing Mahler Five. Hearing white noise in your Chevrolet does not prove that Mahler was not born on 7 July 1860.
The only way, therefore, to acquire a belief in God, short of a bolt from the blue, is to acquire the means of detection, to develop one’s spiritual faculties. If you had no experience of music and were presented with a piano plus a recording of someone playing some dazzlingly virtuosic piece of piano music, say Gaspard de la Nuit, and you were then told that that player was using a piano just like the one before you to produce the sound, and then you were told that the player was a child of seventeen, and then you sat down at the piano to see how far you could get, you would conclude that you’re being fibbed to. It would simply not be credible that anyone could produce Gaspard de la Nuit by sitting down at a piano and striking the keys. The proposition would be preposterous. Yet you would be quite wrong.
That, however, was my protestation when I first ‘looked inside to see if I could find God’. I was expecting to see the face of God straight off the bat, like sitting down at a piano and expecting to play Gaspard de la Nuit. That’s not how it works. It takes instruction and practice, and both require humility.
Does God exist? I’m afraid I won’t convince anyone by argument. The most I can do is to show that the assumptions on the basis of which an individual has concluded that there is no God are untenable.