Within You or Without You?

I have begun to search for the way to best formulate a certain assumption that seems to run through much of the theist/atheist debate. (For convenience, let us construe "atheism" widely here. Atheists are those who believe theists irrational.) I've landed on a name. I call it "The Teapot Model". Bertrand Russell argued that the God-hypothesis was much like the hypothesis that a teapot orbits the sun. It is possibly true, he said. But he insisted that, though possibly true, it could not be known true, for no evidence could be given in its favor. Thus, he concluded, the God-hypothesis was deeply irrational.

One might respond to Russell in many ways. One might say that we do have good evidence of God's existence. One might say that God, if real, is so radically unlike a teapot that to assume we must come to know them in the same way is deeply mistaken. I have some sympathy for both responses. (Of the two, the second seems closer to the heart of the matter.) But to me they've always seemed to fall short of the mark.

The issue is this: the God-hypothesis would have us assume that God is an object that stands outside us and whose existence can be known only by inference from what is clear either to sense or to intellect. I reject this assumption.

I am not alone in this. Much Christian theology rejects it. God, we are told, is He in whom we have our being. We are with Him, but not as two who stand side by side. We are through Him, and Him through us. Thus we are not ours alone. God is in us, and at every moment He sustains us. Every iota of what is good in us - and all that truly is is good - is Him. When conscience speaks, it is the voice of God. When we love, the love we share is God.

God is not over and above. (Perhaps we should say that God is not over and above only, for though in us He is no exhausted by his presence in us. We are finite, He infinite.) Rather He is within, and thus is to be found within.

Thus God is not to be discovered as the teapot would be discovered if in fact it were there. The believers relation to God is not that of knower to an external object known. This is why I find atheism a bit ridiculous. I've had a number of moments in my life where the presence of God within me has become quite clear. Even now as I sit with the noise of traffic around me, cold and alone, and still feel that presence. It is a hint, a whisper. It is as motion caught in the corner of the eye. Attention is mostly elsewhere, but a fraction is upon it, and I know that He is there.

When someone tells me there is no God, it seems to as if I have been told that there is no sun or moon. Perhaps I do not see them now, or see them only faintly. But I know they are there.

Perhaps it would be better to say that it seems to me as if I have been told that I have never felt love, or regret. Of course I have, I would reply. I feel them now. They are here before me, with me. I cannot doubt them. S0 too I cannot doubt that God exists. He is here with me now.

So I say to the atheist: God is within you (and without you too in all creation). Do you feel the tug of conscience? That is God. Do you love someone? That is God.

Do not ask me then to marshal evidence in favor of God as He were some variety of exotic particle that could be made to show itself were conditions just so. Do no demand miracles. Do not demand proofs. Search yourself. There is within you a power upon which you depend, a power upon which all depend. Do not close your eyes to it.

Like Lock and Key

Gregory E. Ganssle argues that God, if conceived in the traditional way, likely would wish to communicate with humanity, and that the most likely form of communication would be the written word. (What is the traditional conception? God is the all-good, all-powerful, all-wise creator and sustainer of the world who so loves his creation that he acts within it to insure its redemption. Orthodox Muslims, Jews and Christians all assent to this.)

I accept the claim but think that the view stands in need of extension.

1. God's message to us would be of value only if we believed that it was from God.
2. But in all matters to do with belief about such things, we ought carefully to weigh the reasons to believe that the message really does come from God.
3. To weigh the reasons, we must have already have in our possession some knowledge of the characteristics that must be possessed by divine communication.
4. These characteristics, presumably, would derive from God's perfect nature - the divine message would reflect God's goodness, God's love for us, God's justice, God's knowledge, God's power, etc.
5. So, then, for God's message to find its mark, we must already possess (even if only implicitly) knowledge to do with God's nature.
6. This seems a kind of knowledge that cannot be derived empirically. Rather it must be, in some sense, innate.

The most obvious of the lacunae in the argument is found in 6. Why think that our knowledge of God's nature cannot be of empirical origin? That is a difficult question to answer, and let me here say only this. (I will limit myself to the attribute of goodness.) There is nothing that we observe by means of the senses that possesses the perfection of omnibenevolence. Indeed it seems that by the senses we do not so observe even imperfect goodness. We do of course observe things that are imperfectly good. But though the thing is observed, its goodness is not. Thus if we have some notion of goodness (and we do), it cannot be derived empirically; and if it is not

The upshot is that God must have made us such that we have within ourselves the means to verify that God's message does truly originate in God. An analogy: if God's message is the key, within us there must be a lock that precisely fits that key.

(A hat-tip to Jeremy at the Parableman. His discussion of Ganssle is quite good.)

Do We Feel God?

Today when I put his bowl of Cheerios down in front of him, Gabriel - my youngest - asked me a curious question. "My heart is medium-sized, and God is huge. How can God be in my heart?"

I attempted to explain that, when we say God is in our hearts, we mean that we don't see, hear, or taste him but rather feel him.

How good an answer is this? Do we really feel God?

Well, what are the sorts of things we feel? Love, hate, disgust, elation, etc. It seems a strange thing to add God to this list. Take the example of love. It seems to be something purely relational - it concerns how a person feels about a thing. Love, as it were, reaches out beyond the lover and finds its object in a second thing. The same seems true of the other things we feel.

Is God, then, something purely relational? This seems wrong. Relations depend for their existence upon the things related - if one or the other were to cease to exist, the relation would cease as well. Thus if God were relational, he would be a dependent being. But he is not.

What, then, is the source of our experiential knowledge of God? If we cannot perceive him via the senses and cannot feel him, what is the matter of our contact with him?

God Within

I have often encountered the claim that God reveals Himself too all but only some choose to heed His call. This of course justifies condemnation of even those who have never heard the name of the God of the Jews (who is also the God of the Christians and the God of the Muslims). They too were presented with a choice, it is said; and by the manner in which they live their lives, they reveal the choice they have made. If they chose to follow the inner voice, the voice of God that is in all, they will be good, and if not they will be evil.

Is this true. Does God reveal Himself to all?

I find it impossible to answer. Perhaps it is true, perhaps it is not. When I look inward and try to find God within, I find nothing that I know I should call 'God'. But this does not imply that I have not found God. (One might meet someone whom one believes is a stranger but in fact is an old, dear friend, and if the friend choose not to speak her name you might never know who it was.) I find that I have deep moral convinctions, moral convictions that do not seem to me to have their source in any choice I have made. Rather they seem to bind me whether I wish them to or not. They are bits of granite within my mind. I cannot be rid of them, I cannot change them. Are they God in me? Perhaps, but they do not say that they are. They do not speak His name. At the moment, I am enough of a Kantian to doubt that the moral law could have its source outside of ourselves. But I am enough of a philosopher to know that my judgment in these matters is fallible.