On one level I can feel that this is absolutely safe. A parent’s safe hold is nothing compared to this. I’m being carried on the universe’s shoulder. But on another level, it’s terrifying. Being screened off by my separateness is all I know in my dealings with somebodies who look at me. This is utterly exposed. And while it may be safe, it is not kind in one of the primary ways in which human beings set about being kind to each other. It takes no account, at all, of my illusions about myself. It lays me out, roofless, wall-less, worse than naked. It knows where my kindness comes chequered with secret cruelties or mockeries. It knows where my love comes with reservations. It knows where I hate, and fear, and despise. It knows what I indulge in. It knows what parasitic colonies of habit I have allowed to form in me. It knows the best of me, which may well be not what I am proud of, and the worst of me, which is not what it has occurred to me to be ashamed of. It knows what I have forgotten. It knows all this, and it shines at me. In fact it never stops shining. It is continuous, this attention it pays. I cannot make it turn away. But I can turn away from it, easily; all I have to do is to stop listening to the gentle, unendingly patient call it stitches through the fabric of everything there is. It compels nothing, so all I have to do is stop paying attention. And I do, after not very long. I can’t bear, for very long at once, to be seen like that. To be seen like that is judgement in itself. As a long-ago letter writer put it, someone who clearly went where I’ve just been, it is terrible to fall into the hands of the living God. Only, to be seen like that is forgiveness too – or at any rate, the essential beginning of forgiveness; and when I come back from the place where the metaphors end, and the light behind light shines, and I open my eyes in the quiet church, for a little while everything I see glows as if it were lamplit from inside, and every flowing particle of the whole gleams in its separate grains; gleams as if it were treasured.
Do I feel better? It depends what you mean by ‘better’. As my godfather asked suspiciously when a nurse said it to him, ‘Better than what?’ I don’t feel cuddled, soothed, flattered; I don’t feel distracted or entertained. My fancy has not been tickled. I have not been shown cool huge stuff by a very big version of Jerry Bruckheimer. I have not been meddled with, or reprogrammed, or had my settings tweaked. I have not been administered a cosmic antidepressant. I have not had my HPtFtU removed by magic. I have not been told to take it easy because I’m OK and you’re OK. Instead I have been shown the authentic bad news about myself, in a perspective which is so different from the tight focus of my desperation that it is good news in itself; I have been shown that though I may see myself in the grim optics of sorrow and self-dislike, I am being seen all the while, if I can bring myself to believe it, with a generosity wider than oceans. I’ve been gently and implacably reminded of how little I know a whole truth about myself. I’ve been made unfamiliar to myself, and therefore hopeful; I’ve had the grip of desperation loosened. Desperation may well come back. In fact it may only feel as if desperation has slackened by one infinitesimal notch, but it has slackened, it has eased, because just for now I have been enabled to feel beyond it, or rather to participate a little bit in the freedom of a feeling that flows beyond, behind, beneath, around it.* This is comfort, but it is not comfortable. It is awkward, undignified, exposed, risky-feeling. It is like finding that there is something in the thin air to lean on, something in the void – something about the void – which will hold you up, but only if you tip yourself madly forward onto it and ask it to take your weight.
* Yes, I’m talking about essentially the same experience that I had with the Mozart in Chapter One. In some ways, God is a bit of a one-trick pony.
Now, I can assemble as easily as anyone an account of what just happened to me in the church which is purely, unmysteriously physical. Yes, the mild sensory deprivation I subjected myself to by sitting for half an hour or so with my eyes shut will have prompted the bits of my brain that handle visual imagery to start working up pictures from whatever inputs they could get, from memory and association and imagination. Yes, the deliberate breathing probably made me hyperventilate slightly, and flushed me through with exciting oxygen. Yes, the emotional state I was in will have made me suggestible. Yes, the feeling that another person is present is a common feature of mental states more relaxed than ordinary consciousness: it happens quite a lot on the verge of sleep, for example. Yes, I know that we all have an evolved tendency to detect personhood or agency in environments, whether or not it is actually there. Since we find faces in wallpaper and puddles of spilled cappuccino, my discovery of consciousness beneath the skin of the universe will not have been much of a stretch, cognitively speaking. Yes, I imagine that my pupils dilated while my eyes were shut, and then when I opened them again the photons flooded in through an unusually wide aperture. Yes, I’m sure that I would have felt very similar things if you had crept up on me while I sat and applied a powerful magnetic field to the appropriate area of my head. Or if I’d just swallowed an E. Result: one ‘religious experience’ delivered to order, complete with lightshow. In fact, in terms of sensation I’m sure the magnetic field and pill would have been far more reliable, because I wouldn’t have been dependent on my own paltry, stop-and-go brain chemistry.
But so what? These are explanations of how my feelings might have arisen, physically, but they don’t explain my feelings away. They don’t prove that my feelings were not really my feelings. They certainly don’t prove that there was nobody there for me to be feeling them about. If God does exist, then from my point of view it’s hard to see how a physical creature like myself could ever register His presence except through some series or other of physically-determined bodily states. I’m not an abstract being. Everything I feel, I feel by way of hormones and neurotransmitters and nerve fibres. Starting to believe in God is a lot like falling in love, and there is certainly a biochemical basis for that. Cocktails of happy hormones make you gooey and trusting; floods of neurotransmitters make your thoughts skip elatedly along. Does this prove that the person you love is imaginary? It does not. The most the physical accounts demonstrate, where God is concerned, is that He isn’t necessary as an explanation. Which I feel does not really amount to news. I kind of knew that anyway, my philosophical starting-point for all this being that we don’t need God to explain any material aspect of the universe, including our mental states; while conversely, no material fact about the universe is ever going to decide for us whether He exists. God’s non-necessity in explanations is a given, for me. For me, it means that I’m only ever going to get to faith by some process quite separate from proof and disproof; that I’m only going to arrive at it because, in some way that it is not in the power of evidence to rebut, it feels right.
For you, on the other hand, it may seem amazingly obvious, blatantly and overwhelmingly obvious, that I cannot really have been feeling the presence of God. Because, even if final degrees of proof or disproof remain out of reach, such a thing would be vanishingly, microscopically unlikely compared to the probability that one, several, or all of the physical factors above were deluding me into giving houseroom to hocus-pocus. If this is so, I would respectfully ask you to examine your conviction, and in particular to have a look at the relative roles played in it by argument and by an emotional position of your own. There are arguments to be made about God based on probability* but for a lot of people they function as a rationalisation after the event for a deep and emotional conviction that the universe is just not the kind of place in which such things can happen. An experience of the presence of God is just not compatible with an instinctual sense of what the world is like. For a lot of people, the world is constituted by stable, dependable, familiar sense-experiences among which it is self-evident that there’s no room for radical strangeness, for breaches of context. ‘I don’t believe in any gods,’ some New Atheists like to say, ingeniously lower-casing a quite large proposition about the universe into a zoological category which it’s easy to show is empty.
* Thou
gh the good ones do not include the steaming heap of ‘evolutionary’ manure raked together by Richard Dawkins, or Bertrand Russell’s teapot. Oh dear, must I really engage with these, given that I’m not trying to play the game of proof and disproof? I suppose I must. I may not be interested in proof – you can’t disprove the existence of a feeling – but I am interested in the feeling’s philosophical dignity. I do want to assert that it doesn’t have the status of reality-denial, that it doesn’t exist in blatant defiance of some obvious demonstration of its groundlessness. So, then, at speed: Richard Dawkins claims that God’s existence is improbable because the creator of the universe would have to be really complicated. The only way we know of to get complicated creatures is via natural selection, and natural selection can’t have operated before the universe began. QED? Nah. When people who believe in God talk about God, we don’t mean that a being exists who is an animal like ourselves, only bigger and cleverer and more complex. We don’t think He lives in the universe. In fact we don’t think that He exists in any environment; we don’t imagine that He had to grow, or evolve, or appear, or emerge, thanks to some process or other. It’s the other way up. We think that all processes exist thanks to Him; we think that He is the universe’s environment. We may well be wrong, crazed, doolally, travelling first-class on the delusion express, but showing that God-the-evolved-organism is unlikely says nothing about the probability of the different thing we do in fact believe. Arguing with people imposes an unfortunate necessity to find out what they think before you open your big mouth to contradict it. Next, the teapot. Russell said that those who staked the intellectual integrity of belief on the impossibility of disproving God’s existence were like people suggesting that there was an undetectable teapot in orbit between the earth and Mars. No one sensible would regard the claim as anything but vanishingly unlikely. Just because you couldn’t definitely show the pot was absent, its spout not slowly tracing out circles as the solar wind blew on it, its glaze not gleaming faintly in the reflected starlight, it didn’t mean you had to take it seriously. You could be sure enough the teapot wasn’t there to leave it at that; likewise God. QED? Again, nope, because the Russellian teapot argument commits the fallacy of assuming the state of the universe it seeks to demonstrate. Russell would like claims about God to be as obviously trivial and inconsequential as the teapot. But the appropriateness of the comparison rests on a prior judgement: and if it really matters as little as all that whether there’s a God or not, you have to wonder why it’s worth writing whole books trying to dispel him. It’s not as if anyone has bothered to publish The Teapot Delusion. May I recommend instead, for anyone who wants to explore better probability-based arguments against God, the website www.lesswrong.com? In particular, the post titled ‘Absence of evidence is evidence of absence’.
I don’t believe in any gods, I think they’re saying, because I do believe in the felt completeness, the experienced adequacy, of a world of supermarket trolleys, hangovers, suburban Sundays, toothache, drum ’n’ bass, romantic love, diminishing marginal utility and the smell of fresh paint. This world is solid, stolid even. It makes no sudden moves. It incorporates an absolutely firm distinction between a prosaic, law-governed external reality and a private, internal domain of imagination which exerts no traction over prosaic reality except by prosaic means – by the publication of fantasy novels, for instance. This world believes that it has science on its side. Indeed, by an act of oblivious metaphorical digestion, it tends to believe that it is science; it thinks that what it sees around it is the bare, disenchanted, unmediated, uncoloured truth delivered by the scientific method. Look, no gods! Also, no fairies, no unicorns, no griffins, no leprechauns. A quick census of the local fauna confirms it: case solved. But this perceptual world isn’t science. It is a cultural artefact created by one version of the cultural influence of science, specific to the last two centuries in Europe and North America. It is not a direct, unmediated picture of reality; far from it. It is a drastically human-centred, human-scaled selection from the physical universe, comfortably restricted to the order of reality which is cooked rather than raw, which happens within the envelope of society. It scarcely touches on what the world is like apart from us. It doesn’t acknowledge the radical strangeness of quantum mechanics, down in reality’s basement; it doesn’t engage with the perturbing immensity of cosmology, up in the attic; it doesn’t admit the extraordinary temporariness of even the familiar things we think we possess securely on our middle floor of the universe. It treats us living creatures as the securely-tenured lords of all we survey, rather than as the brief ripples of information we actually amount to. In fact the stolid ‘science’ of this obviously godless world is rather eighteenth-century. Needless to say, none of the proven strangenesses of the physical universe make the existence of God any likelier (or less likely). They imply nothing about it at all. I am not one of those soft-brained purveyors of New Age woo who propose that if some weird things are true, any weird thing you think of can be true. All I’m pointing out is that if the basis for your conviction that there’s no room for God is the comfy familiarity of the universe, it’s a bit of a problem if it turns out not to be comfortable or familiar.
What I do find troubling, though, is the uncertainty of the experience I’m talking about: the way it is, tremblingly, only just there, the way it slips out of definite reach, the way it eludes definition. Even the description of it I’ve given here has firmed it up considerably. I’ve put it into words when it didn’t happen in words, and thereby taken a decision-making editorial grip on something which, at the time, I couldn’t grip or make decisions about at all. Reading over what I’ve written, I fear I’ve turned it into an effect, a special effect in prose, controlled by me. It wasn’t one, and it wasn’t controlled by me. It was a shimmer of sensation. One of those seems a flimsy foundation to rest anything on, let alone a huge and ponderous thing like an organised religion: two thousand years of Christian ideas and stories and practices making a vast stone pyramid, all balanced upside down on its point, on a fulcrum of mere feeling. It doesn’t seem much on which to build an institution. It doesn’t seem much to rest a way of living on. But that’s the way it is. The whole thing is – has to be – uncertain right down to the root. The whole thing has to remain as flimsy as you judge the experience of God’s presence to be. When I’m only trying to remember the feeling of it – right now, for example – I myself am often as sure as makes no difference that it’s all moonshine and muscle cramps. That there’s nothing there at all. That he doesn’t exist, the bastard. Yet what it has felt like when I have felt it cannot be pushed aside. It goes on working in me, this experience, whatever my changing opinion about it happens to be; it has altered my conviction of what the universe is like, way down deep, too deep for he-doesn’t-exist-the-bastard to erase it. It has had consequences in me. That’s what I need to convey and probably can’t: that this is something so elusive that you can’t securely put your finger on it, and yet at the same time is so strongly felt, when it is felt, that it illuminates the world and reorganises a life. It’s elusive and it’s a foundation. It’s a wisp of presence, as deniable as vapour, which you feel is holding the house up. It’s a presence which may well not be there, but which can draw out of you, when you feel it, a trust that it is the thing which precedes all things, us included; that it is first, and last, and largest, and lowest; that it exists without terms and conditions. That you can come to it in need and know that you’re forgiven.* That it shines.
* I’ve left out an extremely important aspect of how this works, which I’ll come to in Chapter Five. Good grief, I’m editing God for the sake of explanatory effectiveness.
And what comes next, if you’ve felt this? Well, as I’ve said, it won’t bother you if you don’t bother it. It is as easy to ignore as the air. But if you find your way to it again, it will be there again. You can’t stay there for long, but it stays there for ever. It is tireless, it is permanent. And (mostly) the more often you find
your way to it, the easier the way becomes, until your private signposts to the path there become part of the texture of things you expect, on the inside of your head. You get used to the faint whisper of presence, in the direction that is no-direction. You start to try to feel out the dimensions of the experience, to work out what follows from this alarming thing: what you can know about it, what (if anything) you should do about it. What it implies. This, for the first time, is where the organised material of religion can come into the picture, because what you’ve experienced is an absolutely bog-standard piece of transcendence, common to all cultures, from which many different structures of meaning have been unfolded in different times and different places. The light-without-light, the sense of being understood – it’s what Hindus feel, and Buddhists, and Zoroastrians, and Jains, and Shinto believers, as well as those of us in the three sibling religions that name the presence as God. Which is what you’d expect, if the whole thing were being generated by a common feature of Homo sapiens brain chemistry; but which is also what you’d expect if the species were making a common response to an aspect of reality. The process by which the universal experience takes on the contours of a particular religion is partly passive, just a matter of colour leaking in from the surrounding culture, just a matter of adopting the interpretation that dominates in your local environment. But it’s also a process of co-operation, a conversation between the experience and a tradition in which the test is always recognition. Do you recognise in the experience what the tradition is talking about? Is there an overlap which encourages you to give some cautious, provisional credence to the stuff the tradition is telling you which you yourself have not experienced yet? If you’re a free adult, you do not assent to doctrine because authority tells you to. In terms of commanding blind obedience, I’m glad to say, we are now in the valuable position of being able to tell authority to sod off. No: you begin to think you might be willing to go along with an idea because it seems to you to translate into a statement something that has passed the test of feeling. You begin to think there is something worth possessing in a scripture because (as well as all the other things it may be) it is also palpably a report (or set of reports) from a place you have been to on your own account. I myself am a Christian and not a Muslim or a Buddhist for a mixture of the two different kinds of reason; as an outcome of both kinds of process. On the passive side, Christianity was the religion of my childhood. It’s the ancient religion, for something like forty generations, of the place I come from. It’s the matrix of my culture. But it’s also something I came back to, freely, as an adult, after twenty-odd years of atheism, because piece by piece I have found that it answers my need, and corresponds to emotional reality for me. I also find that the elaborated structure of meaning it builds, the story it tells, explains that reality more justly, more profoundly, more scrupulously and plausibly than any of the alternatives. (Am I sure I’m right? Of course not. Don’t you get bored with asking that question?)
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