Having described briefly the bearing of both Ethics<\/a> and Consciousness<\/a> on the nature of the fundamental reality, let’s ask whether the source of these things would really be the same thing as a god, to whom one could have a religious and\/or personal relationship.\u00a0 There are various half-way houses for people who see defects in the conventional materialistic narrative, but aren’t willing to go \u201call the way\u201d.<\/p>\n I’ve had people tell me that they believe there is \u201cSomething\u201d out there, but not God.\u00a0 This is about as vague of a worldview as can be conceived, but I assume from context that they are not merely<\/em> asserting that there exists at least one object (such as a rock or a tree)\u2014no, their \u201cSomething\u201d is more transcendental than that, and is intended to fill a quasi-religious niche.\u00a0 Whether through mystical experience, philosophical argument, or just wishful thinking, they feel that there is something numinous<\/a> or spiritual about existence, but organized religion turns them off and they feel it must be something quite different from conventional religious concepts of God.<\/p>\n My Ph.D. advisor, Ted Jacobson, who considers himself an atheist, nevertheless tells me he thinks there is some type of \u201ccosmic consciousness\u201d in which we participate.\u00a0 I guess the Universe is observing itself through us, or something like that.\u00a0 But I feel that this view is getting dangerously close to Theism.<\/p>\n One of the recurring themes in this exploration is this: even if the existence of God cannot be proven conclusively by pure Reason, there are plenty of things which nonreligious people are motivated to believe in, which turn out on inspection to be dangerously close<\/em> to Theism.\u00a0 Universal laws, objective ethics, cosmic consciousness: all of them smell in certain respects like a certain Somebody.<\/p>\n And if the Something really is a Somebody<\/em>, then even when you are most alone, your life is a dialogue rather than a monologue.\u00a0 One day, that seemingly impersonal brightness that hovers over existence, may suddenly manifest as a voice speaking to you, that knows your name.<\/p>\n Of course you cannot force God to reveal himself to you.\u00a0 Any approach must be on his side.\u00a0 In retrospect, it is clear to those chosen by God that nothing they did beforehand caused them to deserve or merit the experience of God.\u00a0 It is gratis<\/em>, an undeserved gift, which comes in spite of human resistance and even deliberate ignorance.<\/p>\n And yet that does not mean that preparation is unimportant.\u00a0 The freedom of God is not an excuse for human laziness.\u00a0 Even at the level of human experience, you cannot force somebody to fall in love with you, nor force yourself to fall in love with somebody else.\u00a0 But you can be the sort of person to whom it happens more easily\u2014fortune favors the prepared.\u00a0 “Ask, and you will receive.\u00a0 Seek, and you will find.\u00a0 Knock, and the door will be opened to you.”\u00a0 It matters if you have a heart which is receptive to truth, and beauty, and ethical goodness.\u00a0 Those who practice certain disciplines are more likely to find God, or rather more likely to be found by him.\u00a0 These disciplines can include:<\/p>\n From the outside, it may appear that religious believers trick themselves into having religious experiences by a sort of self-hypnosis: that the preparation is what causes us to believe.\u00a0 Presumably that is true for some.\u00a0 Yet many of us on the inside know that the most earnest preparation can lead to seeming dryness and absence, and then at other times God breaks in on us in a completely unexpected, surprising, and perhaps even unwelcome way.<\/p>\n Perhaps Ted will have an unpleasant surprise at some point in the future, as St. Lewis did. The following excerpt is from Lewis’ autobiography, Surprised by Joy<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 We pick him up after he has already been led out of a materialistic form of Atheism into philosophical Idealism (a position similar to Pantheism) which he arrived at partly by means of Owen Barfield<\/a>‘s \u201cArgument from Reason<\/a>\u201d (which I do not myself accept as valid, by the way).\u00a0 St. Lewis describes his conversion to Theism (not to Christianity, that came later) as follows:<\/p>\n I was now teaching philosophy (I suspect very badly) as well as English.\u00a0 And my watered Hegelianism<\/a> wouldn’t serve for tutorial purposes.\u00a0 A tutor must make things clear.\u00a0 Now the Absolute cannot be made clear.\u00a0 Do you mean Nobody-knows-what, or do you mean a superhuman mind and therefore (we may as well admit) a Person?\u00a0 After all, did Hegel and Bradley<\/a> and all the rest of them ever do more than add mystifications to the simple, workable, theistic idealism of Berkeley<\/a>?\u00a0 I thought not.\u00a0 And didn’t Berkeley’s \u201cGod\u201d do all the same work as the Absolute, with the added advantage that we had at least some notion of what we meant by Him?\u00a0 I thought He did.\u00a0 So I was driven back into something like Berkeleyism, but Berkeley with a few top dressings of my own.\u00a0 I distinguished this philosophical \u201cGod\u201d very sharply (or so I said) from \u201cthe God of popular religion.\u201d\u00a0 There was, I thought, no possibility of being in a personal relation with Him.\u00a0 For I thought He projected us as a dramatist projects his characters, and I could no more \u201cmeet\u201d Him, than Hamlet could meet Shakespeare.\u00a0 I didn’t call him \u201cGod\u201d either; I called him \u201cSpirit\u201d.\u00a0 One fights for one’s remaining comforts.<\/p>\n Then I read Chesterton’s Everlasting Man<\/em> [online<\/a>] and for the first time saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense.\u00a0 Somehow I contrived not to be too badly shaken.\u00a0 You will remember that I already thought Chesterton the most sensible man alive \u201capart from his Christianity\u201d.\u00a0 Now I veritably believe, I thought\u2014I didn’t of course say<\/em>; words would have revealed the nonsense\u2014that Christianity itself was very sensible \u201capart from its Christianity.\u201d\u00a0 But I hardly remember, for I had not long finished The Everlasting Man<\/em> when something far more alarming happened to me.\u00a0 Early in 1926 the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good.\u00a0 \u201cRum thing\u201d, he went on, \u201cAll that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God.\u00a0 Rum thing.\u00a0 It almost looks as if it had really happened once.\u201d\u00a0 To understand the shattering impact of it, you would need to know the man (who has certainly never since showed any interest in Christianity).\u00a0 If he, the cynic of cynics, the toughest of the tough, were not\u2014as I would still have put it\u2014\u201csafe,\u201d where could I turn?\u00a0 Was there then no escape?<\/p>\n The odd thing was that, before God closed in on me, I was in fact offered what now appears as a moment of wholly free choice.\u00a0 In a sense.\u00a0 I was going up Headington Hill on the top of a bus.\u00a0 Without words and (I think) almost without images, a fact about myself was somehow presented to me.\u00a0 I became aware that I was holding something at bay, or shutting something out.\u00a0 Or, if you like, that I was wearing some stiff clothing, like corsets, or a suit of armor, as if I were a lobster.\u00a0 I felt myself being, there and then, given a free choice. I could open the door or keep it shut; I could unbuckle the armor or keep it on. Neither choice was presented as a duty; no threat or promise was attached to either, though I knew that to open the door or to take off the corslet meant the incalculable.\u00a0 The choice appeared to be momentous but it was also strangely unemotional. I was moved by no desires or fears.\u00a0 In a sense I was not moved by anything.\u00a0 I chose to open, to unbuckle, to loosen the rein.\u00a0 I say, \u201cI chose,\u201d yet it did not really seem possible to do the opposite.\u00a0 On the other hand, I was aware of no motives.\u00a0 You could argue that I was not really a free agent, but I am more inclined to think that this came nearer to being a perfectly free act than most that I have ever done.\u00a0 Necessity may not be the opposite of freedom, and perhaps a man is the most free when, instead of producing motives, he could only say, \u201cI am what I do\u201d.\u00a0 Then came the repercussion on the imaginative level. I felt as if I were a man of snow at long last beginning to melt.\u00a0 The melting was starting in my back\u2014drip-drip and presently trickle-trickle.\u00a0 I rather disliked the feeling.<\/p>\n The fox had been discharged from the Hegelian Wood and was now running in the open, \u201cwith all the woe in the world\u201d, bedraggled and weary, hounds barely a field behind.\u00a0 And nearly everyone was now (one way or another) in the pack: Plato, Dante, MacDonald, Herbert, Barfield, Tolkien, Dyson, Joy itself.\u00a0 Everyone and everything had joined the other side.\u00a0 Even my own pupil Griffiths\u2014now Dom Bede Griffiths\u2014though not himself yet a believer, did his share.\u00a0 Once, when he and Barfield were lunching in my room, I happened to refer to philosophy as \u201ca subject\u201d.\u00a0 \u201cIt wasn’t a subject<\/em> to Plato\u201d, said Barfield, \u201cit was a way.\u201d\u00a0 The quiet but fervent agreement of Griffiths, and the quick glance of understanding between these two, revealed to me my own frivolity.\u00a0 Enough had been thought, and said, and felt, and imagined.\u00a0 It was about time that something should be done.<\/p>\n For of course there had long been an ethic (theoretically) attached to my Idealism.\u00a0 I thought the business of us finite and half-unreal souls was to multiply the consciousness of Spirit by seeing the world from different positions while yet remaining qualitatively the same as Spirit; to be tied to a particular time and place and set of circumstances, yet there to will and think as Spirit itself does.\u00a0 This was hard; for the very act whereby Spirit projected souls and a world gave those souls different and competitive interests, so that there was a continual temptation to selfishness.\u00a0 But I thought each of us had it in his power to discount the emotional perspective produced by his own particular selfhood, just as we discount the optical perspective produced by our position in space.\u00a0 To prefer my own happiness to my neighbor’s was like thinking that the nearest telegraph post was really the largest.\u00a0 The way to recover, and act upon, this universal and objective distinction was daily and hourly to remember our true nature, to reascend or return to that Spirit which, in so far as we really were at all, we sill were.\u00a0 Yes; but now I felt I had better try to do it.\u00a0 I faced at last (in MacDonald’s words) \u201csome thing to be neither more nor less nor other than done<\/em>\u201d.\u00a0 An attempt at complete virtue must be made.<\/p>\n Really a young Atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully.\u00a0 Dangers lie in wait on every side.\u00a0 You must not do, you must not even try to do, the will of the Father unless you are prepared to \u201cknow of the doctrine\u201d.\u00a0 All my acts, desires, and thoughts were to be brought into harmony with universal Spirit.\u00a0 For the first time I examined myself with a seriously practical purpose.\u00a0 And what I found there appalled me; a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds.\u00a0 My name was legion.<\/p>\n Of course I could do nothing\u2014I could not last one hour\u2014without continual conscious recourse to what I called Spirit.\u00a0 But the fine, philosophical distinction between this and what ordinary people call \u201cprayer to God\u201d breaks down as soon as you start doing it in earnest.\u00a0 Idealism can be talked, and even felt; it cannot be lived.\u00a0 It became patently absurd to go on thinking of \u201cSpirit\u201d as either ignorant of, or passive to, my approaches.\u00a0 Even if my own philosophy were true, how could the initiative lie on my side?\u00a0 My own analogy, as I now perceived, suggested the opposite: if Shakespeare and Hamlet could ever meet, it must be Shakespeare’s doing.\u00a0 Hamlet could initiate nothing.\u00a0 Perhaps, even now, my Absolute Spirit still differed in some way from the God of religion.\u00a0 The real issue was not there, or not yet, there.\u00a0 The real terror was that if you seriously believed in even such a \u201cGod\u201d or \u201cSpirit\u201d as I admitted, a wholly new situation developed.\u00a0 As the dry bones shook and came together in that dreadful valley of Ezekiel’s, so now a philosophical theorem, cerebrally entertained, began to stir and heave and throw off its grave-clothes, and stood upright and became a living presence.\u00a0 I was to be allowed to play at philosophy no longer.\u00a0 It might, as I say, still be true that my \u201cSpirit\u201d differed at some point from \u201cthe God of popular religion\u201d.\u00a0 My Adversary waived the point.\u00a0 It sank into utter unimportance.\u00a0 He would not argue about it.\u00a0 He only said, \u201cI am the Lord\u201d; \u201cI am that I am\u201d; \u201cI am\u201d.<\/p>\n ….You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet.\u00a0 That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me.\u00a0 In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Next: Conclusion<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Having described briefly the bearing of both Ethics and Consciousness on the nature of the fundamental reality, let’s ask whether the source of these things would really be the same thing as a god, to whom one could have a … Continue reading \n
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