“At long last I saw, I felt, I believed. Scales of pride and prejudice fell from my eyes. A new world came into view.” (Page 12, Big Book)
“I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.
Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.
But this is only a very simple example of the difference between looking at and looking along. A young man meets a girl. The whole world looks different when he sees her. Her voice reminds him of something he has been trying to remember all his life, and ten minutes casual chat with her is more precious than all the favours that all other women in the world could grant. lie is, as they say, “in love”. Now comes a scientist and describes this young man’s experience from the outside. For him it is all an affair of the young man’s genes and a recognised biological stimulus. That is the difference between looking along the sexual impulse and looking at it.” (C. S. Lewis, Meditation in a Toolshed)
It is very hard to convince someone with no experience of
God to believe in God.
Part of the problem is this:
They are looking ‘at’ God from the outside, trying to
understand the ideas presented, and judging the ideas as true or false in the
same way that a physicist and neurologist might describe precisely what is
going on when someone is watching a sunset. The physicist’s and neurologist’s
descriptions would yield no valuable information about what watching a sunset is
like. Moreover, without implicit trust in the reliability of the scientists and
the veracity of their theories, the notion of one particular combination of
light effects—and not another—producing particular psychological effects and
emotions would seem quite implausible.
An external understanding of the appreciation of a sunset
has its own value, but the thing itself is the appreciation.
Thus with God. The theologian, unlike the scientist, is not
implicitly trusted. The person with no experience of God takes the theologian’s
explanations of God to be fantasies. Someone who simply does not have the
retinal apparatus to see colour will simply dismiss others’ appreciation of
colourful sunsets as moonshine and will view the theologian’s explanations as
hooey. If you had never seen a sunset and had never appreciated one, the
physicist’s and neurologist’s explanations might appear logically sound but
fundamentally specious, untestable against ‘reality’ and not grounded in any
observable experience.
It is only when the retinal apparatus is adjusted and a
sunset can finally be appreciated that everything falls into place.
The job with someone who does not believe in God is
therefore to convince them that they are actually presently lacking a
perceptual faculty. This is virtually impossible to do, however, without
patronising and mortally offending the individual. I wouldn’t respond well to
that approach.
We are left in an impossible situation. Only someone who is
utterly desperate will ‘take our word for it’ and be willing to demonstrate for
themselves that what we say is true by undergoing, as it were, the retinal
rectification procedure.
Then they will see.
That’s what happened to me.
And I felt a little silly, afterwards.