Perceiving God
June 17, 2007 | Filed Under Small Talk
I’m not trying to make an argument here. I’m not trying to say why other people should believe that God exists. But as of late, many people on the internet have been accusing people of faith of being irrational, delusional, and many other derogatory descriptions.
What I want to make clear is that many people who believe in God do so because they perceive the world as being a God-world. Just like many people perceive a red book as being red, many people perceive this world as being a world that has a God. And just as many “people of reason” will insist that the book *really* isn’t red, many “people of reason” will insist that the world *really* isn’t a God-world. That’s fine. But it’s not delusional to believe the contrary in either case.
That’s not an argument for why *you* should believe in God. But if you are genuinely interested in why *I* believe in God, it is because the predicate in the following sentence is apparent to me: This world has a God. In other words, when I perceive this world, I perceive it as having a God. And this despite my encountering pain, suffering, disappointment, the imperfection of the body and my reading so many of the very good arguments for not believing in the existence of God.
Why do you believe the book is red? Because I perceive it as red. Why do you believe the universe has a god? Because I perceive it as having a god. Again, not an argument. Just a reason for my belief.
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2 Responses to “Perceiving God”
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Hi, Micah! Congrats on launching your blog. And with such a stumper!
The book is red because it is perceived as red, “red” being the label we were all taught to apply to red-ness back when we were just learning to perceive the world. If you speak English. But the word is not the perception, is it? It’s just the label we apply to it.
Perception is kind of a strange thing. We experience it, and accept as ‘given’ that others experience things much as we do. So we can name it - it’s experientially real. “God” is a bit generic, which if you think about it is probably appropos - the Names of God being traditionally un-utterable and all. I often think of it as “More.” There’s more going on, more depth to the picture, more causes than we can see, more reason than we can apprehend. Cultures tend to formalize this into the somewhat silly systems of belief those arguers against God like to poke fun of, but underneath it all I suspect it’s the same perception. I often wonder how come those anti-God folks can’t perceive it. Perhaps, I think in the end, they’re blind.
I am a synesthete. Had to learn to live with the fact that I perceive ‘more’ than others do from a very young age. Had to put brakes on my descriptions, not wax poetic about what’s out there to be perceived. If you think anti-God arguers are hard-cases, try perceiving in a demonstrably different way from others. They get positively scared to death - you could knock ‘em over with a “Boo!”
I know, because I’ve done it…
I, too, have found it a little unnerving to read some of the anti-religion remarks that seem to be building in popularity lately. I’ve actually recently built a small library of books to try to get a feel for both sides of the argument from a contemporary standpoint, and included in this collection is the book The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins - a book that came highly recommended from various critics.
I find the approach of the whole book to be quite harsh, and I find it actually has served to distance me from his view, rather than gaining my favor. I’ve noticed that this tone has become a rather popular way to present athiestic arguments, and I find that it instantly turns me off to any argument presented because it ends up sounding quite ignorant.
I like how you’ve broken down the argument of God’s existence into a tautology, so that the world by definition cannot be without God. This view also serves as a good solution to my usual criticisms of religious arguments, which is that they lack scientific evidence. In this case, there is no missing scientific proof to support your claims. Perhaps then the argument of religion comes down to how each side defines the terms.