Why I believe there is a God
There was a young man who said, “God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there’s no one about in the Quad.”(Ronald Knox, 1911)
Dear Sir,
Your astonishment’s odd.
I am always about in the Quad.
And that’s why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by
Yours faithfully
God(1911, probably Ronald Knox again)
This essay is about why I believe there is a God. It is an idiosyncratic essay. I don’t mean that it is odd or eccentric, though you may possibly find it so. I mean that it is specific to me.
What do I mean by “a God”? I mean a first and final cause of the cosmos, who is present and active in its governance. By a “first cause” of the cosmos, I mean whatever it is that caused the cosmos to come into being, assuming there was such a cause. By a “final cause” of the cosmos, I mean the ground of its goals or its purposes which will be fulfilled in the end, assuming it has such goals or purposes. I believe there is one and only one such entity, and I call him God. When referring to the cosmos, I use the word cosmos rather than universe, to reflect its orderly arrangement. In the phrase “a God” I give the word God an upper‐case ⟨G⟩ even though it is syntactically a common noun, because the phrase “a god” with a lower‐case ⟨g⟩ can suggest a person or idol that is revered, but that is not “a God” in the sense that I mean. My use of the personal pronouns he, him, who and whom and the possessive his for God reflects my belief that he relates to me on a personal level, but my use of he, him and his should not be taken to imply that I view God as male rather than female.
This essay is about why I believe there is a God. It is not about why I believe in God, which is a very different thing. Believing in God is far, far more committal than merely believing there is a God. I do believe in God: I trust him, I pray to him, I bow down before him, I render him sacred service. But this essay is not about these things.
This essay is about why I believe there is a God. It is not about why you ought to believe there is a God. That is, if indeed you ought to, which depends on your own life experiences and on how your own mind works. I am well aware that the majority of people in the UK do not believe there is a God, and they are not stupid. The purpose of this essay is to explain why one man believes there is a God: it is not to make converts. I would consider it wonderful if this essay does lead some reader to believe there is a God, but I don’t expect it to happen. Most people who come to believe there is a God come to that belief by means other than the means described in this essay or means like them.
This essay is about why I believe there is a God. It is most certainly not about why the Church says I should believe there is a God. I respect and value the Church greatly, and especially the denomination of Methodism to which I belong, which I find refreshingly free of much of the formality and presumptuousness that is often found in older denominations. I have attended a Sunday morning church service on over 99% of the more than 4,000 Sundays of my life so far, and not a few Sunday evening church services in addition. Most of my friends are church friends, and they keep me sane. But the doctrine that is taught by the Church, including the Methodist Church, while rooted in historical wisdom, is in my view overly reliant on the language of 4th‑ and 5th‑century churchmen, and therefore reflects a way of thinking that can conflict with modern philosophical understanding. I think for myself, and some people outside the Church may find it surprising that I can think for myself and believe there is a God. But conversely, many of my church friends, who of course do believe there is a God, would cringe at some of the things I say in this essay. It is an idiosyncratic essay.
So why do I believe there is a God?
1. I believe there is a God because of the kind of cosmos we inhabit.
Making inferences about God from the cosmos around us is known as natural theology. It is a discipline with a long and distinguished history. I was born and brought up in a Methodist family, and natural theology was impressed on me from the youngest age, even if I did not know what it was called. The cosmos exists because God created it. The cosmos is good because God is good. The cosmos has order and intelligibility because God put them there. Life on Earth was started by a divine spark. Plants and animals look as if they were designed because they were designed. Biological species evolved as they did because God directed their evolution. Human beings have consciousness, free will, intelligence and a moral sense because God has those attributes and he created human beings in his own image. That is what I was taught.
By the age of 11, I was having doubts. I had read about Darwinism and I understood that species evolved by natural selection. I knew that until the 18th Century it was generally believed that lightning was an act of God because no scientific explanation was known, but now that electricity was understood there was “no need of that hypothesis”. I had read Charles Coulson’s Science and Christian Belief, in which he warns against “the God of the Gaps” – a God who is conceived as responsible for all the things in the natural world that lie in the gaps that we don’t understand scientifically, and who gets squeezed out as science fills in the gaps. I could see that attributing lightning to God was to fall into that trap, but I could also see that attributing biological evolution to God was to fall into the same trap, given that biological evolution can be explained by natural selection. The God I had been brought up to believe in was the God of the Gaps.
But the biggest stumbling block for me was that I understood the principles of classical science, in outline, pretty well. Human behaviour reduced to biology, biology reduced to chemistry, and chemistry reduced to physics. Fundamentally the laws of the cosmos were the laws of physics. And the laws of physics were deterministic. Effect followed cause. If you knew in full detail what was happening today, you could in theory work out what was going to happen tomorrow. The natural order could, and did, take care of itself. The cosmos was a gigantic piece of clockwork. Against this, the Bible was full of stories of how God was interfering in this natural order, with so‐called miracles. I could not believe in the existence of a God who would set up a cosmos that ran on beautiful natural laws and would then suspend these beautiful natural laws whenever he didn’t like their consequences. Further, there could be no afterlife, because consciousness was a function of the brain and the brain died with the body. By the age of 12, I was a staunch atheist.
There was one fly in the ointment. I could not figure out how, in a deterministic cosmos, I seemed to have control over my own actions; and I wondered if free will was an illusion.
I continued to attend Sunday morning church at Edinburgh Methodist Mission with the family, largely because I loved the music. I am so glad that I did. I was by now in the Young People’s Department of the Sunday school, age 12 to 15, which was led by two wonderful church members, Mary Macdonald and John Nicholls, both of them scientists, who were modern and open‑minded in their teaching, and who kept me thinking.
Then something big happened. In 1963 when I was 14, my school physics teacher Ian Dow introduced me, after school one day, to quantum mechanics.
Ian explained that just as chemistry reduces to physics, so physics reduces to quantum mechanics. The major discoveries in quantum mechanics were made in the mid‑1920s. Quantum mechanics represents a complete revolution, a paradigm shift, in physics. It is mind‐blowing. Its implications are starkest at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles, but in fact it governs the whole of physics. Classical physics emerges from quantum mechanics as an approximation at larger scales when quantum effects average out.
Ian explained to me that, contrary to common sense, an elementary particle such as an electron has not got any observable properties in and of itself. What it has instead is a mathematical construct called a wave function, which encodes everything that it is possible to know about the state of the particle. I asked him if the wave function is real, and he said it is the only real thing about the state of the particle. I asked him if it is observable, and he said no it isn’t, but it encodes information about observables such as position and momentum. It encodes the probability distribution of where the particle’s position would be if we observed it, and the probability distribution of what its momentum would be if we observed that. But until we observe its position, it has no position: and until we observe its momentum, its momentum is likewise undefined. The act of observation forces the world to choose its state. In the face of my protestations, he assured me that this was indisputable. He explained that there are experiments you can perform, such as the double‐slit experiment, that show that the world behaves differently, depending on whether you do or don’t observe it. Further, we can choose to know the position of the particle or we can choose to know its momentum, but we cannot know them both. He explained that, despite its apparent paradoxes, the predictions of quantum mechanics have been confirmed by experiment to a degree that shows beyond doubt that quantum mechanics is correct.
I asked him, If the wave function only encodes probabilities, does that mean that the cosmos is not deterministic? He said yes, that’s right.
That was mind‐blowing enough for me, but it was only the start. Ian went on to tell me about quantum entanglement. Two particles may be entangled, he explained, in which case they do not behave independently of each other, however great the distance between them. They have a joint wave function which encodes more information than the wave functions of the two particles separately. Observing one particle has instant implications for the behaviour of the other particle, even if they are many light years apart. I said I didn’t see how that could be, as no signal can travel faster than the speed of light. Ah, said Ian, but there is no signal. There is no causal dependence, only a correlation. Quantum entanglement is a halfway house between independence and causal dependence that is profoundly counterintuitive and has no classical analogue whatsoever.
I said I found the whole thing deeply unsettling, and Ian explained, very insightfully I feel for 1963, that it seems unsettling and paradoxical because we can only try to express it in human language: language that has evolved in a creature that perceives the world classically, language that is not well suited to the purpose of describing the world as it really is.
Ian then told me that when we observe a system, when we measure it, its wave function collapses, and he explained broadly what that means. That sent my brain into overdrive. I asked him, What do we mean by observing the system, or by measuring it? What is it about observing the system, about measuring it, that collapses the wave function? Ian said that that is probably the deepest mystery of quantum mechanics. Nobody knows. I asked, Measuring or observing a system involves our consciousness: could it be that it is our consciousness that collapses the wave function? Possibly, he said. Among quantum physicists, that is what the late John von Neumann thought, and that is what Eugene Wigner thinks.
Ian rounded off our session rhetorically by declaring that quantum mechanics is the most ridiculous theory imaginable. It is utterly absurd from start to finish. The only thing that can be said in its favour is that it is undoubtedly correct.
I went home gobsmacked. Uppermost in my mind was the prospect that it is our consciousness that collapses the wave function. I thought about little else for days. On the Saturday morning I borrowed an introductory book on quantum mechanics from the local public library, and by late evening I had devoured it from cover to cover. It confirmed everything Ian had told me, except that it did not mention consciousness. Then in the middle of that night I awoke with a heretical thought.
The cosmos has handles on it!
My consciousness, it seemed to me, impinges on the physical cosmos from outside. When I say that the cosmos has “handles” on it, I mean it has a facility whereby it can be manipulated from outside of itself to make things happen. When I observe an object and my consciousness induces wave function collapse, my consciousness is working the handles. When my consciousness impinges on my brain to control my actions, my consciousness is working the handles. Free will is not an illusion: that is how it operates. The cosmos was beginning to make sense to me.
And just suppose there is a God. This was still a long shot for me, but it had to be considered. If there is a God, and if God relates to me on a personal level, then presumably God is conscious. If God is conscious then perhaps his consciousness too can induce wave function collapse. When God impinges on my brain to guide me morally, he is working the handles!
I could now see that the cosmos we live in has just the kind of properties that would be needed for a conscious God to be active in its governance. This did not prove that there is a God, but it completely shattered the reasoning that had convinced me that there is not. More than that, it did, positively, suggest to me that there may well be a God. For I should not expect the cosmos to have just the kind of properties that a God would need, if they were not there for a purpose.
I had often been told that human language cannot satisfactorily express what is divine, and I had regarded that as a cop‐out. I trusted human language, and I had reckoned that if human language could not satisfactorily express what is divine then most likely there was nothing divine at all. Yet Ian had shown me why human language cannot satisfactorily express quantum mechanics, and he had assured me that quantum mechanics is nonetheless correct, and I trusted him.
The physicist Sir Arthur Eddington commented, “It will perhaps be said that… religion first became possible for a reasonable scientific man about the year 1927.” It was not Eddington’s own view that religion first became possible for a reasonable scientific person about the year 1927: he had been a scientist and a committed Christian since long before 1927, and presumably he considered that his stance had been reasonable. But it is certainly true that theistic belief became much easier for a reasonable scientific person around 1927, when Heisenberg, Bohr, Born, Dirac and others showed that the cosmos does not rely solely on causality, but relies in part on the phenomenon of wave function collapse, which may have some deep connection with consciousness. I had now been introduced to these ideas, and the way was once again open for me to believe there is a God, if other evidence warranted that belief.
In the 61 years since that day in 1963, my understanding of quantum mechanics and my understanding of what we mean by “reality” have, I hope, matured. I now know that there are a host of “interpretations” of quantum mechanics: ways in which human language can be used in an effort to make sense of quantum mechanics to the human mind. Ian’s teaching to me followed the so‐called Copenhagen interpretation. But I now believe that, by and large, the dozen or so most common “interpretations” may be valid alternative ways of looking at the cosmos, ways that are complementary to each other and not mutually contradictory. Interpretations that link consciousness with wave function collapse are among those. I have come to embrace the philosophical stance of projectivism: the view that reality is not wholly objective, but is a complex matter from which the observer cannot be excluded. Indeed it seems clear to me that projectivism is essential to understanding a cosmos dependent on quantum mechanics, in which we, the observers, are now known to play a creative part. In a famous quote commonly attributed (perhaps wrongly) to Neils Bohr: “When we measure something, we are forcing an undetermined, undefined world to assume an experimental value. We are not ‘measuring’ the world, we are creating it.” I have come to see that it is possible that, in some interpretations of quantum mechanics, free will may not be real in an objective sense, but yet it remains real in a projective sense: real because it is a necessary and functional part of our lived experience. I believe that our consciousness can reasonably be viewed as something that is part of the physical cosmos, and can just as reasonably be viewed as something that impinges on the physical cosmos from outside.
And whatever may be the connection between consciousness and the human brain, and however we may express that connection in human language, since 1963 my faith has never wavered that quantum processes within the human brain must provide the foothold – moving the metaphor now from the hand to the foot – must provide the foothold for conscious, freely willed, control of the body by the person.
In my later teenage years, my faith that there is a God was gradually restored, but it was restored with a more nuanced interpretation of what the Bible says. There is a huge amount of metaphor in the Bible, and I try to recognize it when I see it. I see it in the Old Testament teaching that God created the cosmos. Plainly the Old Testament is not telling us that there is a God who sat at a desk and built the cosmos like modelling clay. God has not got “hands that flung stars into space” as one of our hymns grotesquely puts it. That would have been a good way for him to get his hands burned. But I do believe that consciousness was involved in the cosmos from the start. Specifically, I believe that consciousness was necessary for wave function collapse in the early cosmos. That consciousness was, I believe, God’s consciousness. He “worked the handles”. (Metaphor!) In that sense he was the “first cause”, the Alpha, of the physical cosmos. He ‘created’ it in the same sense that when you or I observe the world, we are not ‘measuring’ it but creating it. I am sure there are other ways of looking at the matter (pun intended!) but that is the way I look at it.
Did the consciousness that created the cosmos create it from outside or from within? The Bible teaches that God is both beyond the cosmos (transcendent) and within it (immanent). Thus God’s consciousness, like human consciousness, can reasonably be viewed as something that is part of the physical cosmos, and can just as reasonably be viewed as something that impinges on the physical cosmos from outside.
2. I can broadly accept the biblical accounts of anomalous events.
This section of my essay now takes a right‐angle turn, and explores different ground from the first section.
The Bible narratives include myth, legend, semi‐history, and history written from a theological perspective. Biblical scholars have varied views on where the boundaries between these genres may lie.
These Bible narratives are full of accounts of anomalous events, by which I mean things that happen otherwise than through physical laws of the kind familiar to present‐day scientists. There are the plagues of Egypt, prophets foretelling the future which appears to imply backwards causation, the Old Testament miracles of Moses, Aaron, Joshua, Elijah, Elisha and many others, the agency of heavenly angels, and, above all, the stories about Jesus of Nazareth: his use of prayer, his miracles, his transfiguration, and his resurrection. The Bible presents these accounts as significant reasons (though certainly not the sole reasons) for believing in God’s existence. These accounts pervade the whole of the Bible narratives: myth, legend, semi‐history and history alike.
But do anomalous events happen? I want to spend some time now on that question, and here is why. The Church’s teaching about God is to be found, for the most part, in the pages of the Bible. Because the Bible is full of accounts of anomalous events, any reader who believes that anomalous events don’t happen will be unable to accept these accounts as literal accounts of historical events. Some such readers may be happy to interpret the accounts symbolically or metaphorically instead, throughout the Bible, including those parts of the Bible that are mainly historical, as indeed many modern Christian scholars do. But others may not be drawn to do that, and they may therefore find that these accounts damage their trust in the testimony of the Bible in general, and their trust in what it says about God in particular.
Now, I regard myself as a scientist. I have never been a scientist by profession, but I am a scientist both by nature and by education. As a scientist, the easiest course for me would be to join with the scientific consensus and say that anomalous events don’t happen. Most scientists would deny altogether the hundreds of Bible stories of miracles and other anomalous events, on the grounds that anomalous events just don’t happen. But, for better or worse, that course is not open to me. That is because, throughout my life, I have experienced anomalous events. Dozens of times. Some of these have been Christian experiences, such as answers to prayer, but not all of them. I have experienced telepathy, clairvoyance, synchronicity, many precognitive dreams, one poltergeist, table‐tipping, and contact with departed souls. I know that these things happen. They are not figments of my imagination, unless I am mad, and there is no evidence that I am mad. I don’t even think that I am particularly suggestible.
When I was 15, I read an extraordinary book called An Experiment with Time, published in 1927 by the aviator and philosopher James Dunne. I should perhaps warn you that the findings of the book are not accepted by present‐day mainstream science: but then if I were restricting myself to what is accepted by present‐day mainstream science, I should not be writing an essay about God. The book is about precognitive dreams: dreams that, somehow, appear to include fragments of our future as well as fragments of our past. The author describes a large number of precognitive dreams from his own experience and from the experience of his friends. He concludes that our dreams include material from our past personal experiences and our future personal experiences in approximately equal measure. He prescribes a method for the reader to test this personally, a method that sets out techniques for recalling dreams upon waking, writing them down, and reviewing them 24 hours later to note similarities with experiences in one’s life in the day before the dream and in the day after. Until I read that book I had not been aware of any precognitive dreams in my own life. But I followed the author’s instructions, and I quickly found that my own experience tallied with what he was saying. Since then, having got into the habit of recalling my dreams, I have been aware of precognitive dreams throughout my life. Most of them are trivial. That is to be expected: most of our retrospective dreams are trivial also.
There was a period in my life, lasting several years, during which my brother Donald and I used to have dreams that seemed to involve each other’s consciousness, even though we lived 50 miles apart. On several occasions after I had a dream involving Donald, I phoned him to compare notes, and on at least one occasion Donald phoned me in like circumstances.
Here is an example. On the morning of 26 July 1998 I dreamed that Donald and I were together on a large expanse of grass along with a large number of other people. People were sitting in small groups on rugs that they had brought with them. I needed to visit the toilet and I found that the toilet arrangements were unsatisfactory. In search of a toilet I climbed a spiral staircase, but there was something wrong with the geometry of the staircase: something to do with a confusion between the numbers 12 and 13. That was the dream. Later in the day, having the feeling that this was “one of those dreams”, I phoned Donald to see if it tallied with anything in his experience. As I recounted the dream, Donald was saying “Yes… yes… yes”. I finished my account and asked Donald if anything tallied. Yes indeed, he said. The previous evening (the evening before my dream) Donald had attended a Son et lumière event with a few friends in the grounds of Glamis Castle, about an hour’s drive from his home in Crieff in central Scotland. I had known nothing about this. Son et lumière is a form of outdoor night‐time entertainment that uses sound and light effects to present the history of a historic site, but I was not familiar with it. Indeed people were sitting on rugs on the grass. Indeed the toilet arrangements were unsatisfactory. And then of course (Donald said) there was the confusion between 12 and 13. That meant nothing to me and I asked him what he meant. Surprised, he asked if I did not know the story of the rooms in Glamis Castle. He said that on the first floor above ground level there are 12 rooms, all accessed from the same side of a straight corridor, each room with a solitary window. But viewed from outside the castle there are 13 windows. The extra window belongs to a blocked‐off room with no door.
I thank Donald for his permission for me to give the above account here. I trust it speaks for itself.
One precognitive dream, or rather a pair of such dreams, is embedded in our family history. Shetland, the northernmost group of islands in Scotland, is well known for the reputed second sight of its islanders, and my father’s father, David Smith, was a Shetlander. David was brought up in a family of eight children in the village of Cumliewick in Shetland, which at that time consisted of just a few scattered houses, each on its own croft. As a young man David moved south to Edinburgh, the capital city of Scotland, to further his education. By 1931 he was a primary school deputy head teacher in Edinburgh, aged 53, married with three children, and apparently in good health.
Back in Cumliewick on the morning of 10 June 1931, one villager had a dream in which she saw David being carried up to heaven in a chariot. This disturbed her so much that later in the morning she recounted the dream to another villager in Cumliewick, who told her she had just had exactly the same dream. When the telegram arrived that afternoon, the folk in Cumliewick hardly needed to open it. They knew. David had collapsed and died of a heart attack at the breakfast table 300 miles away in Edinburgh that morning.
I was given that story by my father when I was a small child, and years later it was confirmed to me by one of the villagers who had the dream.
These stories are not exceptional. Indeed they are normal. Humanity has understood for millennia that the dreaming mind appears to have access to information across boundaries of time and space. Precognitive, telepathic and clairvoyant dreams are reported in the Old and New Testaments, and in the sacred writings of other world faiths besides Judaism and Christianity. Anomalous events in general are reported particularly in the lives of holy people, in island communities, in indigenous peoples, and in the lives of people who are close to nature. Humanity has tended to forget this in our modern industrial and scientific age.
Another class of anomalous events, for the practising Christian, is the effects of prayer. I pray as I am taught by the Bible and by the Church. I do not pray every day as I know I ought, but I do pray several times a week. My experiences of prayer give me evidence that there is a God, though not conclusive evidence. Here is an example.
In April 2009 I had an appointment with my lawyer to update my will. On the morning of the appointment I went to look out my existing will, and I couldn’t find it. I searched high and low in my house for over an hour, and still I couldn’t find it. I sat down and began to pray. I prayed, “Lord God, I don’t even know if this is a proper use of prayer, but please help me. I need to find that will. Please show me where it is.” Immediately a voice said in my head, “Eric look in the car”. I did not hear the voice as physical speech like the child Samuel’s experience: it had more the character of a memory of speech that I had previously heard. But I heard those exact words and I heard them with speech characteristics: the voice was monotone and fast, it was the voice of an older woman, it was in a Scottish accent, I did not recognize it as the voice of anyone I knew, and there was no comma after the word Eric. I protested: my will could not possibly be in the car, it had never been in the car, and if I had looked it out and put it in the car in readiness for my meeting with the lawyer then I should undoubtedly have remembered doing so. And the same voice said, “Eric dae as ye’re telt” (Scots dialect: “do as you are told”). I huffed and puffed and went to the car. My will was not in the car. But I did find in the car another document, a less important one, that I had mislaid. I took it back into the house, thinking “It’s an ill wind that blows no good.” I went to my filing cabinet to file it where it belonged. And there, exactly where I was filing it, I found, misfiled, my will.
I’m not putting that forward as proof that God answered my prayer. I am well aware of the power of the subconscious mind. It is quite conceivable that I knew subconsciously where my will was, and that my mind devised a ruse to help me find it. But my prayer was addressed to God and it was answered. It felt to me as though God answered it. I take it as a working hypothesis that God hears and answers prayers like that. That hypothesis tallies with the teaching of the Bible and the Church. It feels to me natural and right to follow that hypothesis. Indeed I believe that my prayer being answered by my subconscious mind and my prayer being answered by God may both be valid ways to look at the same phenomenon. We are taught that God can act through the human mind.
I mentioned earlier that, at the age of 11, I believed there could be no afterlife, because consciousness was a function of the brain and the brain died with the body. I now believe there is a conscious afterlife. Yes the brain dies with the body, but I no longer believe that consciousness is exclusively a function of the brain. From the age of 16 for some years I was interested in Spiritualism. Mindful of the cautionary stance of the Methodist Church towards Spiritualism, I will say as little as possible here. But I have personal evidence from Spiritualism, and in my judgement that evidence conclusively shows something anomalous. And, in my view, the most natural interpretation of my personal evidence from Spiritualism, the most natural interpretation of the near‑death experiences reported by many people, and the most natural interpretation of biblical teaching, is that there is a conscious afterlife.
I can understand why anomalous events are not accepted within the scientific community. By definition they do not happen through physical laws of the kind that present‐day scientists are familiar with. Scientists are naturally suspicious of phenomena that they cannot explain. For hundreds of years, ball lightning was ridiculed as pseudoscience, and even today (14 September 2024) the Wikipedia article on ball lightning reports, absurdly, that “Owing to the lack of reproducible data, the existence of ball lightning as a distinct physical phenomenon remains unproven.” In that kind of atmosphere, what chance have anomalous mental events got? Remember that present‐day physical science is uncomfortable with the concept of consciousness in the first place. Scientists generally suppose that the human brain creates consciousness, but they have no idea whatsoever of how it might do so. Human consciousness itself is therefore “anomalous” in the sense in which I am using the word, but I cannot doubt its existence. Cogito ergo sum.
Notably, there is a greater receptiveness among philosophers to the possibility of anomalous events than there is among scientists. Many philosophers advocate cautious openness, emphasizing that the current lack of scientific evidence does not rule out the existence of anomalies for which there is a lot of anecdotal evidence. They encourage ongoing critical inquiry and suggest that anomalies may highlight gaps in current understanding. They point out that anomalies might be not supernatural but unexplained natural occurrences. Anomalies might arise from non‑material aspects of reality such as consciousness or mind more generally, or they might be unsuspected consequences of quantum mechanics. Following Thomas Kuhn’s writings on scientific revolutions, some philosophers argue that anomalous phenomena could eventually lead to a shift in scientific paradigms if they are consistently observed. Overall, the philosophical community tends to be relatively free of the power dynamics of the scientific community in which phenomena of certain kinds may be dismissed as “pseudoscience” without proper investigation, and in which institutional authority tends to shape the boundaries of acceptable theory.
Biblical accounts of anomalous events number in the hundreds. For myself, I think it is likely that some of these are literal accounts of events that actually happened, and that some are not. To take an obvious (if perhaps trivial) example of an account that I don’t take literally, I don’t believe that Balaam’s ass spoke Hebrew. Of the accounts of events that did not actually happen, it may be that some were intended by the authors to be taken as historical, and some were not. But because of my own experience that anomalous events happen, I can take a relaxed attitude towards most of the accounts. I don’t feel any need to categorize them rigidly into ones that I take as historical fact and ones that I do not. Thus I can take a flexible and noncommittal view of these stories that is broadly compatible with the literal interpretations favoured by Christian fundamentalists, and is at the same time broadly compatible with the symbolic or metaphorical interpretations favoured by modernist or liberal Christian scholars. I can take meaning from these stories, whether or not they are historical.
I am mindful that some of my friends may feel uneasy about this section of my essay. Indeed different friends may feel uneasy about it for opposite reasons. On the one hand, some of my scientific friends, who reject all anomalous events, may think me gullible in believing that anomalous events happen at all, not appreciating the overwhelming personal evidence that I have for them. On the other hand, some of my church friends may wonder, “What gives Eric the notion that telepathy, clairvoyance, synchronicity, precognitive dreams, poltergeists, table‐tipping and contact with departed souls have anything to do with Christianity?” So let me throw in some disclaimers. I am not saying that anomalous events like precognitive dreams are part of my religion. I am not saying that they necessarily have anything to do with Christianity. I am not saying that they are generally sent by God (though I am open to the possibility that some of them may be). I am not claiming that the practice of Spiritualism is healthy. What I am saying is that I feel very grateful and privileged that I have first‐hand experience of so many anomalous events, because that first‐hand experience allows me flexibility in interpreting the biblical accounts of such events. These biblical accounts are the writings of earnest men steeped in ancient wisdom, struggling to make sense of things then just as we struggle today: they are not the senseless ramblings of an ignorant and superstitious people. But if I had not got first‐hand experience of anomalous events myself, I think I should have found the biblical accounts much more difficult, and I suspect that my trust in the Bible in general, and my trust in what it says about God in particular, would have been damaged. I have seen and believed: blessèd are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.
3. I believe there is a God because of the kind of man Jesus is.
As I move on to this the final section of my essay, I suddenly sense that I am onside again in the eyes of my church friends. I believe there is a God because of the kind of man Jesus is.
Some writers in Judaism and Christianity talk disparagingly about “the God of the philosophers”, which they contrast with “the true God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”. These writers would no doubt criticize, or even dismiss, my essay so far on the grounds that I have been concerned only with “the God of the philosophers”. That criticism needs to be unpacked. There are not two separate entities or putative entities, “the God of the philosophers” and “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”. There is one God. I hope that the God I have been talking about is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But I concede that I have not, so far, said much about those attributes of God by which Abraham, Isaac and Jacob would have recognized him. That exposes an imbalance in my language about God in this essay so far. I don’t know if that imbalance was avoidable or unavoidable, given what I had to say. But in either case let me try now to redress the balance by addressing matters that most Christians will feel more comfortable with.
Jesus of Nazareth is the greatest human being who has ever lived. He was immersed in the Hebrew Scriptures (broadly, the Christian Old Testament) from early childhood, and he absorbed them fully. At the age of 12, he sat among the religious teachers in the temple in Jerusalem, listening to them and asking questions, and all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. At the age of about 30, he gathered a band of followers and began his ministry, preaching with authority. It was second nature to him that there is a God. He believed he had an intimate relationship with this God, whom he called his Father. He taught his followers about this God, confirming Old Testament understandings but going beyond them, and stressing this God’s love. He prayed to this God earnestly and deeply, and he taught his followers to do the same: worshipping this God, calling for his will to be done, asking him for sustenance, asking him to forgive their sins, asking him for the grace to forgive other people who had wronged them, and asking him to guide them morally. Jesus practised what he preached. He healed the sick in body mind and spirit, attributing this healing to the power of God working through him. He showed God’s love by his own conduct throughout his life, displaying unconditional love and caring for all people in all circumstances, especially for the poor and the outcast. He spoke of God with authority. His teaching, his healing and his caring for the outcast angered the worldly religious authorities, and they persuaded the occupying Roman governor to sentence him to a flogging and a horrible death nailed to a wooden cross. Such was his faith in God that he was able to face that death with great courage, and such was his love for the whole of humanity that while dying he was able to ask God his Father to forgive his killers.
Jesus had foretold that he would rise from the dead, and he did so. I want to say just a little here about my understanding of this, surely a partial understanding at best. I ask for God’s forgiveness if I am being impertinent. Dead corpses do not come to life again. But Jesus appeared intermittently to many of his followers in the 40 days after his crucifixion. He appeared across boundaries of time and space. His appearances gave his followers great courage, and turned them in a matter of a few weeks from a bunch of devastated and terrified men and women, hunted by the authorities, meeting in secret, locking their doors, into a Church of confident missionaries, able to address a large crowd and convert 3,000 people to Christianity in a single day. Of one thing we can be sure: something wonderful happened.
I have already explained in this essay that I have come to embrace the philosophical stance of projectivism: the view that reality is not wholly objective, but is a complex matter from which the observer cannot be excluded. I believe there is a projective element to everything that we experience, and what the apostles experienced in the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ will be no exception to that. I don’t know what a video camera would have shown. But I do know that Christ’s mind and Christ’s love transcended his bodily death. The apostles experienced the Risen Christ because of the way the cosmos is structured and the way that they, the observers, were structured. What they experienced will not have been purely objective, but neither was it an illusion. They experienced the Risen Christ because of the way their minds were working, because of the way that Christ’s mind was continuing to work after his bodily death, and because of their great love for Christ and Christ’s even greater love for them. They were not mistaken. Nothing had gone wrong with them. On the contrary, everything had come right with them. They encountered the Risen Christ because he was there.
Different people have first‐hand knowledge of different aspects of reality. I am by nature and by education a mathematician, and I know that the natural numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… have an objective reality, in what I call the Platonic realm, and are not mere social constructs. I know the natural numbers at first hand. I am intimately familiar with them. If I were in discussion with any person on that topic, I could assure that person that the natural numbers have an objective reality, and I would expect that person to trust me on the matter.
Jesus of Nazareth had first‐hand knowledge of God. To use a somewhat crude metaphor, he positively oozed God. Jesus assures me, through the pages of the New Testament, through his Church and through my personal prayer, that God is real. He expects me to trust him on the matter. And I do. Why should I not?
Jesus believed that his life, his death and his resurrection would buy humankind back from the depths of sin, and bring God and humankind closer together. And I trust him on that also.
Jesus continues the Old Testament teaching that the cosmos is moving towards the fulfilment of God’s will: a future where God’s glory is fully revealed, his kingdom is established, all creation is restored, and all nations are blessed in a renewed relationship with God. In those senses God is the “final cause” of the cosmos: the ground of its goals or its purposes which will be fulfilled in the end, its Omega. I find that to be entirely consistent with my understanding that consciousness – human consciousness and divine consciousness – cuts across time and can relate to the future as well as to the past.
So, to summarize, why do I believe there is a God? I believe there is a God because of the kind of cosmos we inhabit, because of my experiences of Christian prayer, because I have evidence for a conscious afterlife, because I trust the Bible, and because I trust Jesus Christ. For me, these fit together as a coherent whole which accords with my reason, my instincts and my upbringing. I am able to trust the Bible because its teachings harmonize with my understanding of the cosmos, including my understanding of consciousness and my experience of anomalous events. I am able to trust Jesus Christ because his ministry harmonizes with the whole of the Bible, he spoke with authority, his love for humanity and for me is absolute, he died for me, and he conquered death as he said he would.
I know that my Redeemer lives.
Eric P Smith
14 September 2024
Further reading
- Quantum Approaches to Consciousness, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy