"If God is real, there’s a better than average chance that he cares what human beings believe about him. The problem is, there’s no way to check your answers."
Steve, thank you for sharing this. I see a lot of myself in this post, in the questions that you are asking. I am reminded of paths that I went down after the breakdown of my first marriage, when I lost all faith for a time, trying to make sense of my broken life. I think for those with an intellectual and mystical bent, especially those who have experiences that seem hard to cohere into a consistent world view, the idea of what is effectively a form of gnostic perennialism (the idea that all manifestations of faith in the world point, at their heart, to the same hidden God, for those with eyes to see) is always going to be attractive. From a certain perspective, even within more small "o" orthodox expressions of the Christian faith (I cannot speak with any deep clarity or knowledge outside of these traditions) such a statement even has a hint of truth about it: the essence of God is hidden, is too big to comprehend, we are given our material human frame in time and space because the ontological reality of existence is too big for us to comprehend as we are now, and the truth of reality's Creator breaks out (fractally, if you will) within all aspects of the created order, even within religious traditions which (may) owe their origin and allegiance to the demonic because the glory of the truth of existence cannot stay hidden and even the demons serve the Master of all in their disobedience.
But within this heuristic, I think we see the seed of why this position is not going to help us in the end. The vision Arjuna receives of Krishna, whatever it represents (I tend to think it represents a half truth at best, but that is another matter), is not something within which he can reasonably abide. What is needful is not just Truth in an absolute ontological sense (though the human yearning for this Truth is real and good) but a subjective, individual, and personal version of this Truth that touches us and reaches us where we are, in the particularities of our own story. Back in my teens my younger self wanted, I think, to figure out a way to touch the Absolute essence of what I have come to recognize as God the Father, unmediated. I now think that's impossible, a fool's errand born of youthful pride (in fact, for me at least, what it represented was the creation of an idol of my pride, which had become my true god). As you say, Christianity is worth a special look because it posits the God who sacrificially inserts himself into the affairs of man. While perennialism tries to weave this story into some semblance of the "dying god mythos", it never seems to fit very well, being too encumbered by historic particularity and (what is worse) an appalling degradation and humility.
I say all of this just to note that, at least for myself, I struggled for a long time trying to meet God in a way that was bound to result in failure. Your quote that I provided above got me thinking in this direction. Your first sentence seems entirely correct to me, but I wonder based on the content of your second sentence, where you suggest that there is no way to check your answers, whether you may have found yourself struggling with something similar? In an abstract sense you are correct, there is no way to create a proof whereby the veracity of any given theological claim can be measured. But I don't think this has ever been the sense via which humanity, whether in the Christian tradition or any of the other traditions you referenced, have experienced the divine (or, quite frankly, how we have ever experienced ourselves). Visions are great, insofar as they go, but they may be entirely beside the point--I may have once had a relatively minor such experience, but frankly it ultimately didn't do much for me one way or the other. What has been surprisingly useful is dwelling on the particularities of my own story--the things I lost, the people I've hurt, the undeserved pain I've seen, the undeserved blessings I've received, the punishments I've been given that turned out to be blessings, and the utter powerlessness I experience when I consider my place in the fabric of creation--and meditating on this while meditating on the the experience of Christ as recorded in the Gospels. The fruits we glean when we approach this process seriously and faithfully, I think, that actually can be tested, and either found true or wanting, as we incorporate them into the particularities of our lived existence.
Again, your point is taken: Lewis's argument is (frankly) not that good as a logical argument (though it does seem to correlate reasonably well to the evidence born via the historical record as we currently understand it), and there is such a grab-bag of competing cosmological dogmas to choose from. And you could probably take the methodology proposed above, apply it to the prophetic figure of another world faith tradition, and yield something via the endeavor. But you're not a cosmic being approaching this as a rational mind separate from the system. You are an individual historical person, born in a particular place, in a particular time, to particular parents, inculcated in a particular tradition, who has made particular choices. We only experience anything as a particularity, and it is to the history of our actual existence that we owe allegiance, wherever it might lead. So the question is, what approach is most likely to allow you to wrestle with the issues that lie at the heart of your pain (at least insofar as you are able to perceive them, this is an unending well)? Whatever else it might be, I doubt the path of the universalizing myth is likely to yield much fruit.
I have rambled too long, but I would urge you to focus in on what meaning there is to be found in the particularity of your experience, and to take care when considering the apparent profundity of the perennialist myth. I wish you well in your travels, both on the road, and into the depths of your soul.
I'm a computer programmer. Not a theologian (nor a Catholic). Even still I have been considering writing a book on the "proof" of God, as the evidence seems quite overwhelming to me, and yet not many people know about it. I'm talking about the Rare Earth theory promoted by Hugh Ross of Reasons To Believe. He was trained as an astrophysicist and simply pulls straight from scientific journals the ever increasing reasons why it is highly improbable to have a planet like ours. It is especially difficult because it takes billions of years to essentially terraform our planet so we can live here, and that means our planet has to remain stable for several billion years. Each stage of life prepared the way for the next stage of life.
And all that time, you can't have things like the gas giant planets moving into the inner part of the solar system (something that normally happens). You have to have stable tectonic plates, which most planets don't have. You have to be birthed in the inner part of the galaxy to have the elements we do, but thrown out to the correct distance so your system doesn't get sterilized by cosmic rays from the central black hole. On and on it goes, hundreds of criteria that must be met to have Earth. Even if some turn out to not be the case, there are still plenty left to show we are really rare.
We're so rare that you have to bring in a multi-verse to have any chance to get Earth. And once you go there, you're essentially appealing to infinity to make the chances work out in your favor, but then everything becomes possible, which isn't what you want either.
The Rare Earth theory doesn't just show there must have been a Creator who made this possible, but it shows a Creator that is actively involved at each step in the "construction" process. Even more amazing is the implication that He has created the entire universe just to have planet Earth - which implies just to have us. The universe even has to be the size it is or you couldn't have a planet Earth.
In other words, we are living in an age when for the first time in history, man can clearly see just how abundant the evidence is that God made us and put us here for a purpose.
But it doesn't stop there. Hugh grew up a non-Christian in Canada where he knew no one who was a Christian. And yet he reasoned that a god who would create us, must have left a message for us, and so surely one of the holy books of the world should reveal this god. And so he went about studying the various holy books to see if there was anything that showed erroneous views of science. Most religions have clear scientific errors. And then he set aside an entire year to study the bible. Instead of finding errors, his secular mind found things the bible got right time after time. It so stunned him, that he calculated the probability which is astronomical and convinced himself that the bible truly had to be from the God who created the universe.
But then consider all the prophecies from the old testament that accurately predicted Jesus and what he would do. We know for a fact that these were written prior to the time of Jesus because we have the Dead Sea scrolls.
And then you have the Shroud of Turin. It confirms many of the things written about the crucifixion in the gospels and yet even more, it shows an image that science can't duplicate. The scientists who went to study in the 70's, went after they heard that the Shroud contains 3D height information in the image. This is like a scientist hearing you have an artifact from a UFO that that has a property that you know is impossible. You drop everything to study this artifact.
And then you have the symbolism from old testament scriptures that for no apparent reason perfectly demonstrates the gospel story. Think of Abraham, the father of faith, who God asked to sacrifice his son. Or consider Joseph who interpreted the dreams of both the baker and the cup bearer. Why two? He only needed one to tell pharaoh. But the two match the two thieves on the cross with Jesus. One lived, the other died on a tree with the birds eating his eyes out. Or read the story of Jonah, where it describes him sinking to the very bottom of the sea, and sounding very dead. Hmm, dead for three days in the belly of a fish only to be raised back to life causing the city of Nineveh to repent. And Jesus said the only sign the Jews would get was the sign of Jonah. It all fits.
Archeology keeps uncovering more evidence that backs up things written in the bible. But just look at the story of Lot in Sodom. More recent digs at a tel in the Jordan river delta show it was destroyed by an air-burst meteorite that hit around the time that fits the bible. Read the story again and you'll see the angels telling Lot he has to hurry and then dragging him to get moving. They knew a meteorite was headed their way and time was of the essence. And then look at Lot's wife who looked back on the city just as it was hit. That 2000 degree shock wave sent out molten salt and sand that could well have instantly encrusted over her body if she was at the right distance.
Or just pick up a leaf and ask yourself how did it get here? What did it take for that leaf to exist at this time on this planet? Most people have no clue what was needed to happen to get that leaf. Nor do they know how absolutely impossible it is to get the first cell through random chemical reactions. Watch some of Dr. James Tour's videos on YouTube for details on the impossibility of abiogenesis.
Or just look at our perfect moon. It's size alone saved Earth from becoming tidally locked to the sun which would have destroyed all life. And only over the last few million years has it been in the correct position to give us perfect solar eclipses. This is so rare in itself that there are likely few other planet moon systems that have perfect solar eclipses anywhere else in the entire universe. Talk about a sign in the heavens!
Our planet is perfect. Our moon is perfect. Our sun is perfect. Our solar system is perfect. Our galaxy is perfect. Our local galactic group is perfect. Everything is just right and shows beyond any doubt that we were put here on purpose, by a God who has spoken to us through scriptures, and who came in person to teach us and die for us.
And now we can see it. Which means we're here at the climatic last part of the entire story God has been writing. It used to take faith to believe in Him. Now, given the evidence, it simply takes the will.
If I were searching as you are for the True Faith, I'd not only consider the other major faiths of the world, but also read the lives of the great saints of Christianity. And there are non-Roman Catholic saints. (See Orthodoxy.) Start with Padre Pio and St. Francis of Assissi, for example. Those are the only two priests that have had the stigmata of Christ to my knowledge. They are both super-novas. Then, read "Light of the Faith" which is a streamlined summary of St. Thomas Aquinas thought. One cannot prove the divinity of Jesus Christ. That is not how faith works. Why doesn't Jesus just come forth and reveal Himself? He does, but when He does, it's a calling, and to whom much is given, much is required. St. Paul saw Christ. So did Padre Pio. Padre Pio was beaten regularly in his cell in the evenings by furious demons--because he was converting millions. St. Paul was stoned to death (snatched up into the Third Heaven and told things he could not repeat). St. Paul was regularly beaten up by the Romans. He was imprisoned, in chains. No indoor plumbing. Rats runing around across his chest as he tried to sleep. All for us. St. Peter was crucified upside down. All for us.
So how do I reconcile myself to not bieng a fully faithful Catholic, knowing and believing what I think I know and believe? That's my fault. I'm flawed. And I'm also lazy and a pragmatist and somewhat immature in the faith. I don't yearn to be tortured to death for Christ. If I said so, I'd be lying. I think I'd die for Him, but endure the Spanish Inquistion at the hands of Torquemada? Not unless I got some incredible graces while being put to the test.
Seek and you will find. You have to pray habitually and sincerely and then trust God hears you and will answer in His time and way. That was how I encountered Him (I encountered the Holy Spirit, you know the story and I'm not repeating it here). I encountered Him in a RCC confessional (what a surprise that was, and I think for the priest, too, who was, I later realized, a "high priest" (he had a charisma). Anyway, changed my life, forever and always. That was about 34 years ago. So how did I know it was the Holy Spirit (5 or 7 second, drenched in the spirit, it was ecstasy, almost levitated). I had to re-read the entire gospels (took 6 months) to figure out what happened to me. I reached the passage in John where Jesus tells Nicodemus one must be "born again" in the Spirit to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. So I'm a born-again Catholic Christian Third Order Carmelite now, forever and always. Why me? (God has no favorite people.) To those to whom much is given, much is required. It was a calling to serve and witness.
Happy journeys, happy search, I am hopeful for you and yours and keep praying for everyone, doubters, believers, those in prison, the hostages, those in war zones, the aborted babies. God is listening and He loves you all,always and forever!
I can't begin to add to or subtract from what you have written. Any effort on my part to pretend I can intelligently write words which might seem like I am on your level would be embarrassing.
Allow me to write a brief story.
One upon a time, in a land filled with people who seemed to believe that there are such things as absolutes, life for a little girl named Debby was good. Her Mommy was very careful to impress upon her throughout her childhood that things called absolutes were unchangeable, and that there were many entities, not necessarily having at heart the best interests of others, who sought to corrupt and ultimately change them.
And so, little Debby lived accordingly, only to encounter hostility and cruelty for believing absolutes were as her Mommy taught her. Truth, she told me, is all that matters and should be fought for at any cost, even if you must die trying.Truth IS the absolute, she said.
It seemed simple enough. How hard could it be? Well, little Debby had a rude awakening.
Walking down a path one day, she came to an intersection of countless paths, each one with a sign pointing to "The Truth". She walked each one..It took her decades.
If all those paths lead to absolutes, then there is no such thing, she concluded. A little bit of truth does not a whole truth make. She remembered a childhood game, where one child whispered words into another's ear and thirty ears later, we all laughed because by the time those words reached the last child, the original words were unrecognizable.
The moral of the story? Little Debby remembered het Mommy's advice and never wandered again.
“If I weren’t so compelled by its authority structure to offer religious obsequience to these things I might still be able to be Catholic.” That’s exactly how I felt, but of course, it’s possible to be Christian without being Catholic. Read Kierkegaard, Simone Weil, or Eric Voegelin. The world needs people who have faith in the Good.
Wonderfully written, as always! Have you read Hart's "Experiencing God; Being, Consciousness, and Bliss" ? He touches on what you bring up here, and much more.
To Lewis's trilemma, agnostic biblical scholar Bart Ehrman posited a fourth "L" - "legend." That Christ may have done some good things and taught some practical wisdom, but the supposedly divine stories of him were mere legends.
On some levels, he has a point. We know that dozens of apocryphal Gospels were written about him in the 2nd century and beyond. There was obviously lore surrounding Jesus of Nazareth, and many Greco-Roman Christians added to the Gospel narratives by creating their own fanfic storiez of Christ and the apostles.
But to me, the bigger question is why Him? Why Jesus? He was just a carpenter in some remote Jewish province. You don't see the amount of additional writings about other historical figures who were emperors and kings. So Ehrman would have to explain (maybe he does, I haven't read his books covering this subject) why of all people in the ancient world, so much focus was on Jesus? It would be like if in the Roaring Twenties, some country bumpkins from Arkansas went to New York City to spread the teachings of a rice farmer and the whole urban cultural scene became enamored with him. The most haunting line for me in all of Scripture is near the end of St. John's Gospel when Pilate asks Jesus, "where are you from?" Because he didn't actually mean to ask Jesus if He was from Nazareth or Jerusalem, or any other locale. It was a rhetorical question because as that moment Pilate realized that Christ was not from this earth. That line gives me chills every time I read it.
Steve, this is an excellent post and a very important question.
If God does exist, then we really should be asking who He is and what does it all mean.
To me, it seems that humans are hardwired to believe in the existence of a supreme being. The question is, which of the many religions in the world is true, if any at all?
Also, does the hypocrisy of the adherents of that religion negate the Truth it professes?
Finally, if I am practicing a particular religion, do I really believe it or am I going along on autopilot because that is what I was raised in?
I guess the one thing that distinguishes Catholicism from all the other religions is that it could be proven wrong. If they find Jesus' skeleton, then that's pretty much the end. If the Catholic Church clearly and blatantly contradicts itself (and I'll admit that some of the "no salvation outside the Church" stuff is teetering near the edge), then I'll become a Buddhist or a Roman Stoic. But none of the other religions are falsifiable.
Thank you, Steve. Such an interesting frank post. I appreciated it much.
I myself feel very torn between these poles. I think that in some ways, temperamentally, I would be a materialist, and I see the world that way to a large degree; and yet it is too clearly incoherent. After that, I would be dispositionally drawn to some kind of all-religions-are-true perennialism as you outline here. The appeal of it is powerful, and I think it has to be more true than fully orthodox believers like to believe.
And yet..... that said. So many details get swept beneath the rug. Dogma turns out to be so important after all, and so I find myself fighting to preserve my grasp on it (sometimes by seeking out forgotten interpretations of the terms), for outside it, I find only chaos. So I find myself still a dogmatic Christian, and yet believing more than many of my brothers that some little parts of the truth are also elsewhere.
But not all of it, or even most of it. I think Chesterton is strong on Buddhism, for example. So much is the same, and yet -- at its heart, is there not a counsel of despair, of negation? Well, surely that is to over-simplify a huge religion; but I do think there is a real, substantive difference that must simply be brushed away by over-simplistic attempts to declare all the religions but different faces of the one. There is a reason missionaries went over the world, and a reason too why people converted. (Off topic, but have you read this review? If not, I highly recommend it. It's by an atheist. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-rise-of-christianity )
I often think, recently, that there are big clues in the *manner* of God's revelation -- clues that we sometimes ignore in our rush to the content of it. Jesus comes in a back corner of the world. The Jews had been prepared for it after a fashion, true -- but the rest of the world wasn't paying much attention to that. The holy texts are narrative and poetic and epistolary, not systematic. And if we're being honest, they don't answer most of the questions we would really, really like them to. His deeds and His message trickle out in human time, slowly (super fast by the standards of religion, but still on a scale of centuries). Why is it done like this?
"The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened."
Why did it take so long? After all, "God so loved THE WORLD," and yet how many lived and died in some other system? And still do? If we take seriously that He loved the world, *must* there not be glimmers of him in other places? Indeed, doesn't Paul say that there is in Acts 17:22-31?
And why does the parable of the Sheep and the Goats not mention faith, and why do the sheep sound so surprised?
As I say, I think there are clues in the shape of the story; but fewer in the text itself. We want answers, but the only answer we get is what *we* must do, and the message *we* must share. I suppose that is all we need.
Sorry to ramble.
I will close with another CS Lewis quote. The last paragraph resonated quite a bit with something you said, I think.
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As a Christian, I am very much aware that our divisions grieve the Holy Spirit and hold back the work of Christ; as a logician I realize that when two churches affirm opposing positions, these cannot be reconciled.
But because I was an unbeliever for a long time, I perceived something which perhaps those brought up in the Church do not see. Even when I feared and detested Christianity, I was struck by its essential unity, which, in spite of its divisions, it has never lost. I trembled on recognizing the same unmistakable aroma coming from the writings of Dante and Bunyan, Thomas Aquinas and William Law.
Since my conversion, it has seemed my particular task to tell the outside world what all Christians believe. Controversy I leave to others: that is the business of theologians. I think that you and I, the laity, simple soldiers of the Faith, will best serve the cause of reconciliation not so much by contributing to such debates, but by our prayers, and by sharing all that can already be shared of Christian life.
If the unity of charity and intention between us were strong enough, perhaps our doctrinal differences would be resolved sooner; without that spiritual unity, a doctrinal agreement between our religious leaders would be sterile.
In the meantime, it will be apparent that the man who is most faithful in living the Christian life in his own church is spiritually the closest to the faithful believers in other confessions: because the geography of the spiritual world is very different from that of the physical world. In the latter, countries touch each other at their borders, in the former, at their center. It is the lukewarm and indifferent in each country who are furthest from all other countries.
Ok, but we have to learn how to ask the kind of questions that will get us answers. If God is real, what is He like? What are His attributes? What is *necessarily* true about God if God is really real, and is actually God? It's legitimate and useful to look at what other cultures and times in history have said about God or the gods, but understanding how to sift through that data to get to useful, meaningful conclusions takes some intellectual work, for which we Modernians are perhaps uniquely disadvantaged. (if you'll forgive my turning a noun into a verb for a moment.)
1. Discard the modern/Protestant mindset that values individual conscience and belief above all else
2. Find a religious tradition that is culturally congruent with your background (preferably one that is very old -see Lindy’s law) and most importantly demands obedience
3. Be obedient to the tradition - even if the leaders are hypocrites. Matthew 23:1-3
[1] Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, [2] “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat, [3] so do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do. For they preach, but do not practice.
Faithfulness is not primarily a matter of belief but of obedience - Christ gave us the Church for this reason.
"If God is real, there’s a better than average chance that he cares what human beings believe about him."
The thing is, if God is real, why would this be the obvious conclusion? If God is real and is omnipotent and omniscient, why would such a creature:
1.) Care about individual pieces of his creation and even if he did, how would we know what his "care" even constitutes? Our understandings of "care" are completely tied up in the human intuitive experience. It goes without saying that the intuitive experience of an omniscient and omnipotent being (that created the universe) would be vastly alien compared to our own. So we cannot guess what he cares about by imposing our own understanding of "care" on him.
2.) Even if he did care about us, why would he be jealous of our affections? This too is imposing human intuition (of how a human monarch would react - care about me or else) on a being that is not human at all.
Personally I find the idea of a God very convincing, but what I find less convincing is our instrumentalizing of God into a kind of "service provider" for human interests. If he is real and real in the form I described (omnipotent, omniscient, created existence), he would be far beyond such notions. Because of this, I find human attempts to grasp at God interesting and sympathetic but not authoritative.
As context, I am coming at this from the opposite end of yours. I started out an atheist in an atheist context and with a very atheist personality type. For a variety of reasons, I have spent a decade or two gravitating more and more closer to theism. I have tried to get into Catholicism several times, but it has never worked, because it seems to be a mostly human invention (but with a spark of divine inspiration) tied to a very human managerial hierarchy. The human parts put me off, so for now, I am some kind of deist.
"If God is real, there’s a better than average chance that he cares what human beings believe about him. The problem is, there’s no way to check your answers."
Steve, thank you for sharing this. I see a lot of myself in this post, in the questions that you are asking. I am reminded of paths that I went down after the breakdown of my first marriage, when I lost all faith for a time, trying to make sense of my broken life. I think for those with an intellectual and mystical bent, especially those who have experiences that seem hard to cohere into a consistent world view, the idea of what is effectively a form of gnostic perennialism (the idea that all manifestations of faith in the world point, at their heart, to the same hidden God, for those with eyes to see) is always going to be attractive. From a certain perspective, even within more small "o" orthodox expressions of the Christian faith (I cannot speak with any deep clarity or knowledge outside of these traditions) such a statement even has a hint of truth about it: the essence of God is hidden, is too big to comprehend, we are given our material human frame in time and space because the ontological reality of existence is too big for us to comprehend as we are now, and the truth of reality's Creator breaks out (fractally, if you will) within all aspects of the created order, even within religious traditions which (may) owe their origin and allegiance to the demonic because the glory of the truth of existence cannot stay hidden and even the demons serve the Master of all in their disobedience.
But within this heuristic, I think we see the seed of why this position is not going to help us in the end. The vision Arjuna receives of Krishna, whatever it represents (I tend to think it represents a half truth at best, but that is another matter), is not something within which he can reasonably abide. What is needful is not just Truth in an absolute ontological sense (though the human yearning for this Truth is real and good) but a subjective, individual, and personal version of this Truth that touches us and reaches us where we are, in the particularities of our own story. Back in my teens my younger self wanted, I think, to figure out a way to touch the Absolute essence of what I have come to recognize as God the Father, unmediated. I now think that's impossible, a fool's errand born of youthful pride (in fact, for me at least, what it represented was the creation of an idol of my pride, which had become my true god). As you say, Christianity is worth a special look because it posits the God who sacrificially inserts himself into the affairs of man. While perennialism tries to weave this story into some semblance of the "dying god mythos", it never seems to fit very well, being too encumbered by historic particularity and (what is worse) an appalling degradation and humility.
I say all of this just to note that, at least for myself, I struggled for a long time trying to meet God in a way that was bound to result in failure. Your quote that I provided above got me thinking in this direction. Your first sentence seems entirely correct to me, but I wonder based on the content of your second sentence, where you suggest that there is no way to check your answers, whether you may have found yourself struggling with something similar? In an abstract sense you are correct, there is no way to create a proof whereby the veracity of any given theological claim can be measured. But I don't think this has ever been the sense via which humanity, whether in the Christian tradition or any of the other traditions you referenced, have experienced the divine (or, quite frankly, how we have ever experienced ourselves). Visions are great, insofar as they go, but they may be entirely beside the point--I may have once had a relatively minor such experience, but frankly it ultimately didn't do much for me one way or the other. What has been surprisingly useful is dwelling on the particularities of my own story--the things I lost, the people I've hurt, the undeserved pain I've seen, the undeserved blessings I've received, the punishments I've been given that turned out to be blessings, and the utter powerlessness I experience when I consider my place in the fabric of creation--and meditating on this while meditating on the the experience of Christ as recorded in the Gospels. The fruits we glean when we approach this process seriously and faithfully, I think, that actually can be tested, and either found true or wanting, as we incorporate them into the particularities of our lived existence.
Again, your point is taken: Lewis's argument is (frankly) not that good as a logical argument (though it does seem to correlate reasonably well to the evidence born via the historical record as we currently understand it), and there is such a grab-bag of competing cosmological dogmas to choose from. And you could probably take the methodology proposed above, apply it to the prophetic figure of another world faith tradition, and yield something via the endeavor. But you're not a cosmic being approaching this as a rational mind separate from the system. You are an individual historical person, born in a particular place, in a particular time, to particular parents, inculcated in a particular tradition, who has made particular choices. We only experience anything as a particularity, and it is to the history of our actual existence that we owe allegiance, wherever it might lead. So the question is, what approach is most likely to allow you to wrestle with the issues that lie at the heart of your pain (at least insofar as you are able to perceive them, this is an unending well)? Whatever else it might be, I doubt the path of the universalizing myth is likely to yield much fruit.
I have rambled too long, but I would urge you to focus in on what meaning there is to be found in the particularity of your experience, and to take care when considering the apparent profundity of the perennialist myth. I wish you well in your travels, both on the road, and into the depths of your soul.
I'm a computer programmer. Not a theologian (nor a Catholic). Even still I have been considering writing a book on the "proof" of God, as the evidence seems quite overwhelming to me, and yet not many people know about it. I'm talking about the Rare Earth theory promoted by Hugh Ross of Reasons To Believe. He was trained as an astrophysicist and simply pulls straight from scientific journals the ever increasing reasons why it is highly improbable to have a planet like ours. It is especially difficult because it takes billions of years to essentially terraform our planet so we can live here, and that means our planet has to remain stable for several billion years. Each stage of life prepared the way for the next stage of life.
And all that time, you can't have things like the gas giant planets moving into the inner part of the solar system (something that normally happens). You have to have stable tectonic plates, which most planets don't have. You have to be birthed in the inner part of the galaxy to have the elements we do, but thrown out to the correct distance so your system doesn't get sterilized by cosmic rays from the central black hole. On and on it goes, hundreds of criteria that must be met to have Earth. Even if some turn out to not be the case, there are still plenty left to show we are really rare.
We're so rare that you have to bring in a multi-verse to have any chance to get Earth. And once you go there, you're essentially appealing to infinity to make the chances work out in your favor, but then everything becomes possible, which isn't what you want either.
The Rare Earth theory doesn't just show there must have been a Creator who made this possible, but it shows a Creator that is actively involved at each step in the "construction" process. Even more amazing is the implication that He has created the entire universe just to have planet Earth - which implies just to have us. The universe even has to be the size it is or you couldn't have a planet Earth.
In other words, we are living in an age when for the first time in history, man can clearly see just how abundant the evidence is that God made us and put us here for a purpose.
But it doesn't stop there. Hugh grew up a non-Christian in Canada where he knew no one who was a Christian. And yet he reasoned that a god who would create us, must have left a message for us, and so surely one of the holy books of the world should reveal this god. And so he went about studying the various holy books to see if there was anything that showed erroneous views of science. Most religions have clear scientific errors. And then he set aside an entire year to study the bible. Instead of finding errors, his secular mind found things the bible got right time after time. It so stunned him, that he calculated the probability which is astronomical and convinced himself that the bible truly had to be from the God who created the universe.
But then consider all the prophecies from the old testament that accurately predicted Jesus and what he would do. We know for a fact that these were written prior to the time of Jesus because we have the Dead Sea scrolls.
And then you have the Shroud of Turin. It confirms many of the things written about the crucifixion in the gospels and yet even more, it shows an image that science can't duplicate. The scientists who went to study in the 70's, went after they heard that the Shroud contains 3D height information in the image. This is like a scientist hearing you have an artifact from a UFO that that has a property that you know is impossible. You drop everything to study this artifact.
And then you have the symbolism from old testament scriptures that for no apparent reason perfectly demonstrates the gospel story. Think of Abraham, the father of faith, who God asked to sacrifice his son. Or consider Joseph who interpreted the dreams of both the baker and the cup bearer. Why two? He only needed one to tell pharaoh. But the two match the two thieves on the cross with Jesus. One lived, the other died on a tree with the birds eating his eyes out. Or read the story of Jonah, where it describes him sinking to the very bottom of the sea, and sounding very dead. Hmm, dead for three days in the belly of a fish only to be raised back to life causing the city of Nineveh to repent. And Jesus said the only sign the Jews would get was the sign of Jonah. It all fits.
Archeology keeps uncovering more evidence that backs up things written in the bible. But just look at the story of Lot in Sodom. More recent digs at a tel in the Jordan river delta show it was destroyed by an air-burst meteorite that hit around the time that fits the bible. Read the story again and you'll see the angels telling Lot he has to hurry and then dragging him to get moving. They knew a meteorite was headed their way and time was of the essence. And then look at Lot's wife who looked back on the city just as it was hit. That 2000 degree shock wave sent out molten salt and sand that could well have instantly encrusted over her body if she was at the right distance.
Or just pick up a leaf and ask yourself how did it get here? What did it take for that leaf to exist at this time on this planet? Most people have no clue what was needed to happen to get that leaf. Nor do they know how absolutely impossible it is to get the first cell through random chemical reactions. Watch some of Dr. James Tour's videos on YouTube for details on the impossibility of abiogenesis.
Or just look at our perfect moon. It's size alone saved Earth from becoming tidally locked to the sun which would have destroyed all life. And only over the last few million years has it been in the correct position to give us perfect solar eclipses. This is so rare in itself that there are likely few other planet moon systems that have perfect solar eclipses anywhere else in the entire universe. Talk about a sign in the heavens!
Our planet is perfect. Our moon is perfect. Our sun is perfect. Our solar system is perfect. Our galaxy is perfect. Our local galactic group is perfect. Everything is just right and shows beyond any doubt that we were put here on purpose, by a God who has spoken to us through scriptures, and who came in person to teach us and die for us.
And now we can see it. Which means we're here at the climatic last part of the entire story God has been writing. It used to take faith to believe in Him. Now, given the evidence, it simply takes the will.
If I were searching as you are for the True Faith, I'd not only consider the other major faiths of the world, but also read the lives of the great saints of Christianity. And there are non-Roman Catholic saints. (See Orthodoxy.) Start with Padre Pio and St. Francis of Assissi, for example. Those are the only two priests that have had the stigmata of Christ to my knowledge. They are both super-novas. Then, read "Light of the Faith" which is a streamlined summary of St. Thomas Aquinas thought. One cannot prove the divinity of Jesus Christ. That is not how faith works. Why doesn't Jesus just come forth and reveal Himself? He does, but when He does, it's a calling, and to whom much is given, much is required. St. Paul saw Christ. So did Padre Pio. Padre Pio was beaten regularly in his cell in the evenings by furious demons--because he was converting millions. St. Paul was stoned to death (snatched up into the Third Heaven and told things he could not repeat). St. Paul was regularly beaten up by the Romans. He was imprisoned, in chains. No indoor plumbing. Rats runing around across his chest as he tried to sleep. All for us. St. Peter was crucified upside down. All for us.
So how do I reconcile myself to not bieng a fully faithful Catholic, knowing and believing what I think I know and believe? That's my fault. I'm flawed. And I'm also lazy and a pragmatist and somewhat immature in the faith. I don't yearn to be tortured to death for Christ. If I said so, I'd be lying. I think I'd die for Him, but endure the Spanish Inquistion at the hands of Torquemada? Not unless I got some incredible graces while being put to the test.
Seek and you will find. You have to pray habitually and sincerely and then trust God hears you and will answer in His time and way. That was how I encountered Him (I encountered the Holy Spirit, you know the story and I'm not repeating it here). I encountered Him in a RCC confessional (what a surprise that was, and I think for the priest, too, who was, I later realized, a "high priest" (he had a charisma). Anyway, changed my life, forever and always. That was about 34 years ago. So how did I know it was the Holy Spirit (5 or 7 second, drenched in the spirit, it was ecstasy, almost levitated). I had to re-read the entire gospels (took 6 months) to figure out what happened to me. I reached the passage in John where Jesus tells Nicodemus one must be "born again" in the Spirit to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. So I'm a born-again Catholic Christian Third Order Carmelite now, forever and always. Why me? (God has no favorite people.) To those to whom much is given, much is required. It was a calling to serve and witness.
Happy journeys, happy search, I am hopeful for you and yours and keep praying for everyone, doubters, believers, those in prison, the hostages, those in war zones, the aborted babies. God is listening and He loves you all,always and forever!
Always and forever song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7iZs8LZ9Gs
Steve,
I can't begin to add to or subtract from what you have written. Any effort on my part to pretend I can intelligently write words which might seem like I am on your level would be embarrassing.
Allow me to write a brief story.
One upon a time, in a land filled with people who seemed to believe that there are such things as absolutes, life for a little girl named Debby was good. Her Mommy was very careful to impress upon her throughout her childhood that things called absolutes were unchangeable, and that there were many entities, not necessarily having at heart the best interests of others, who sought to corrupt and ultimately change them.
And so, little Debby lived accordingly, only to encounter hostility and cruelty for believing absolutes were as her Mommy taught her. Truth, she told me, is all that matters and should be fought for at any cost, even if you must die trying.Truth IS the absolute, she said.
It seemed simple enough. How hard could it be? Well, little Debby had a rude awakening.
Walking down a path one day, she came to an intersection of countless paths, each one with a sign pointing to "The Truth". She walked each one..It took her decades.
If all those paths lead to absolutes, then there is no such thing, she concluded. A little bit of truth does not a whole truth make. She remembered a childhood game, where one child whispered words into another's ear and thirty ears later, we all laughed because by the time those words reached the last child, the original words were unrecognizable.
The moral of the story? Little Debby remembered het Mommy's advice and never wandered again.
We all wear two faces.
The one we hide,
and the one we let the world believe.
We call that faith,
but really it’s just a crack running through belief.
Hypocrisy?
It’s nothing more than being seen.
We bend people’s sight
to fit the picture in our heads.
We tell them their wounds don’t matter,
that bleeding is weakness,
that pain is a story they made up.
That trick—
gaslighting—
it isn’t rare.
We’ve all done it,
whether we admit it or not.
Every heart distorts the truth,
about itself, about others.
Most of the time we don’t even notice.
The real mercy
isn’t in pretending we’re whole—
it’s in saying,
“Yes. I’m flawed. That’s me.”
“If I weren’t so compelled by its authority structure to offer religious obsequience to these things I might still be able to be Catholic.” That’s exactly how I felt, but of course, it’s possible to be Christian without being Catholic. Read Kierkegaard, Simone Weil, or Eric Voegelin. The world needs people who have faith in the Good.
Wonderfully written, as always! Have you read Hart's "Experiencing God; Being, Consciousness, and Bliss" ? He touches on what you bring up here, and much more.
No but it’s in my library and in queue. I’d forgotten I bought it until someone else mentioned it today.
To Lewis's trilemma, agnostic biblical scholar Bart Ehrman posited a fourth "L" - "legend." That Christ may have done some good things and taught some practical wisdom, but the supposedly divine stories of him were mere legends.
On some levels, he has a point. We know that dozens of apocryphal Gospels were written about him in the 2nd century and beyond. There was obviously lore surrounding Jesus of Nazareth, and many Greco-Roman Christians added to the Gospel narratives by creating their own fanfic storiez of Christ and the apostles.
But to me, the bigger question is why Him? Why Jesus? He was just a carpenter in some remote Jewish province. You don't see the amount of additional writings about other historical figures who were emperors and kings. So Ehrman would have to explain (maybe he does, I haven't read his books covering this subject) why of all people in the ancient world, so much focus was on Jesus? It would be like if in the Roaring Twenties, some country bumpkins from Arkansas went to New York City to spread the teachings of a rice farmer and the whole urban cultural scene became enamored with him. The most haunting line for me in all of Scripture is near the end of St. John's Gospel when Pilate asks Jesus, "where are you from?" Because he didn't actually mean to ask Jesus if He was from Nazareth or Jerusalem, or any other locale. It was a rhetorical question because as that moment Pilate realized that Christ was not from this earth. That line gives me chills every time I read it.
Fascinating observations. Thanks for sharing them. I've never thought of that line from Pilate that way.
Thank you. Sorry for the typos, I'm not sure why, but sometimes substack lets you edit a reply, and sometimes it doesn't.
Steve, this is an excellent post and a very important question.
If God does exist, then we really should be asking who He is and what does it all mean.
To me, it seems that humans are hardwired to believe in the existence of a supreme being. The question is, which of the many religions in the world is true, if any at all?
Also, does the hypocrisy of the adherents of that religion negate the Truth it professes?
Finally, if I am practicing a particular religion, do I really believe it or am I going along on autopilot because that is what I was raised in?
I guess the one thing that distinguishes Catholicism from all the other religions is that it could be proven wrong. If they find Jesus' skeleton, then that's pretty much the end. If the Catholic Church clearly and blatantly contradicts itself (and I'll admit that some of the "no salvation outside the Church" stuff is teetering near the edge), then I'll become a Buddhist or a Roman Stoic. But none of the other religions are falsifiable.
Thank you, Steve. Such an interesting frank post. I appreciated it much.
I myself feel very torn between these poles. I think that in some ways, temperamentally, I would be a materialist, and I see the world that way to a large degree; and yet it is too clearly incoherent. After that, I would be dispositionally drawn to some kind of all-religions-are-true perennialism as you outline here. The appeal of it is powerful, and I think it has to be more true than fully orthodox believers like to believe.
And yet..... that said. So many details get swept beneath the rug. Dogma turns out to be so important after all, and so I find myself fighting to preserve my grasp on it (sometimes by seeking out forgotten interpretations of the terms), for outside it, I find only chaos. So I find myself still a dogmatic Christian, and yet believing more than many of my brothers that some little parts of the truth are also elsewhere.
But not all of it, or even most of it. I think Chesterton is strong on Buddhism, for example. So much is the same, and yet -- at its heart, is there not a counsel of despair, of negation? Well, surely that is to over-simplify a huge religion; but I do think there is a real, substantive difference that must simply be brushed away by over-simplistic attempts to declare all the religions but different faces of the one. There is a reason missionaries went over the world, and a reason too why people converted. (Off topic, but have you read this review? If not, I highly recommend it. It's by an atheist. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-rise-of-christianity )
I often think, recently, that there are big clues in the *manner* of God's revelation -- clues that we sometimes ignore in our rush to the content of it. Jesus comes in a back corner of the world. The Jews had been prepared for it after a fashion, true -- but the rest of the world wasn't paying much attention to that. The holy texts are narrative and poetic and epistolary, not systematic. And if we're being honest, they don't answer most of the questions we would really, really like them to. His deeds and His message trickle out in human time, slowly (super fast by the standards of religion, but still on a scale of centuries). Why is it done like this?
"The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened."
Why did it take so long? After all, "God so loved THE WORLD," and yet how many lived and died in some other system? And still do? If we take seriously that He loved the world, *must* there not be glimmers of him in other places? Indeed, doesn't Paul say that there is in Acts 17:22-31?
And why does the parable of the Sheep and the Goats not mention faith, and why do the sheep sound so surprised?
As I say, I think there are clues in the shape of the story; but fewer in the text itself. We want answers, but the only answer we get is what *we* must do, and the message *we* must share. I suppose that is all we need.
Sorry to ramble.
I will close with another CS Lewis quote. The last paragraph resonated quite a bit with something you said, I think.
------------
As a Christian, I am very much aware that our divisions grieve the Holy Spirit and hold back the work of Christ; as a logician I realize that when two churches affirm opposing positions, these cannot be reconciled.
But because I was an unbeliever for a long time, I perceived something which perhaps those brought up in the Church do not see. Even when I feared and detested Christianity, I was struck by its essential unity, which, in spite of its divisions, it has never lost. I trembled on recognizing the same unmistakable aroma coming from the writings of Dante and Bunyan, Thomas Aquinas and William Law.
Since my conversion, it has seemed my particular task to tell the outside world what all Christians believe. Controversy I leave to others: that is the business of theologians. I think that you and I, the laity, simple soldiers of the Faith, will best serve the cause of reconciliation not so much by contributing to such debates, but by our prayers, and by sharing all that can already be shared of Christian life.
If the unity of charity and intention between us were strong enough, perhaps our doctrinal differences would be resolved sooner; without that spiritual unity, a doctrinal agreement between our religious leaders would be sterile.
In the meantime, it will be apparent that the man who is most faithful in living the Christian life in his own church is spiritually the closest to the faithful believers in other confessions: because the geography of the spiritual world is very different from that of the physical world. In the latter, countries touch each other at their borders, in the former, at their center. It is the lukewarm and indifferent in each country who are furthest from all other countries.
------------
Ok, but we have to learn how to ask the kind of questions that will get us answers. If God is real, what is He like? What are His attributes? What is *necessarily* true about God if God is really real, and is actually God? It's legitimate and useful to look at what other cultures and times in history have said about God or the gods, but understanding how to sift through that data to get to useful, meaningful conclusions takes some intellectual work, for which we Modernians are perhaps uniquely disadvantaged. (if you'll forgive my turning a noun into a verb for a moment.)
Perhaps a simpler approach is possible.
1. Discard the modern/Protestant mindset that values individual conscience and belief above all else
2. Find a religious tradition that is culturally congruent with your background (preferably one that is very old -see Lindy’s law) and most importantly demands obedience
3. Be obedient to the tradition - even if the leaders are hypocrites. Matthew 23:1-3
[1] Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, [2] “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat, [3] so do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do. For they preach, but do not practice.
Faithfulness is not primarily a matter of belief but of obedience - Christ gave us the Church for this reason.
I found this line of yours interesting:
"If God is real, there’s a better than average chance that he cares what human beings believe about him."
The thing is, if God is real, why would this be the obvious conclusion? If God is real and is omnipotent and omniscient, why would such a creature:
1.) Care about individual pieces of his creation and even if he did, how would we know what his "care" even constitutes? Our understandings of "care" are completely tied up in the human intuitive experience. It goes without saying that the intuitive experience of an omniscient and omnipotent being (that created the universe) would be vastly alien compared to our own. So we cannot guess what he cares about by imposing our own understanding of "care" on him.
2.) Even if he did care about us, why would he be jealous of our affections? This too is imposing human intuition (of how a human monarch would react - care about me or else) on a being that is not human at all.
Personally I find the idea of a God very convincing, but what I find less convincing is our instrumentalizing of God into a kind of "service provider" for human interests. If he is real and real in the form I described (omnipotent, omniscient, created existence), he would be far beyond such notions. Because of this, I find human attempts to grasp at God interesting and sympathetic but not authoritative.
As context, I am coming at this from the opposite end of yours. I started out an atheist in an atheist context and with a very atheist personality type. For a variety of reasons, I have spent a decade or two gravitating more and more closer to theism. I have tried to get into Catholicism several times, but it has never worked, because it seems to be a mostly human invention (but with a spark of divine inspiration) tied to a very human managerial hierarchy. The human parts put me off, so for now, I am some kind of deist.