LAST TIME I WROTE ABOUT a personal experience from the time when I was a serious believer.
I had become convinced—or nearly convinced—that an idea, and a compulsion to act on the idea, was a message from God: the same God I had learned about in church and seminary.
The experience itself was real, of course. I really did have the idea, and I really did have the compulsion to act.
But there was no evidence for the connection I made between that experience and the God of Christian theology.
Let me offer a more abstract example of what I'm getting at.
There are various arguments for the existence of God which run more or less along the lines of, "everything must have come from something, and that something is God."
The "everything" in the argument varies.
One time it's the order or structure in the universe, another time it's motion, another time it's the chain of cause and effect.
Each of these arguments have technical holes in them, which logicians and scientists have pointed out time and again, but I think those critics are missing a larger point.
Suppose for a moment that those holes didn't exist—that the arguments in question were perfectly sound, and that they proved beyond any doubt that there was a first cause, a source of structure, a prime mover, etc.
The second step in the argument is the real problem.
When the apologist, if he or she is a Christian, says that this prime mover, or first cause, is "God" she is not merely giving it a name.
She, or he, means that it is "the triune supernatural being with a more or less (depending on her theology) human-like personality who created the world, instructed Noah in boat construction, convinced Moses to lead the slaves out of Egypt, dictated the Ten Commandments, impregnated Mary with himself, got killed on a cross, etc. etc."
Now there is absolutely no reason or evidence to connect the idea of a prime mover or first cause to several thousand years of cultural traditions and folk stories.
(If you are a Christian reading this, please don't be offended by the previous sentence. Anyone who knows me will tell you what high regard I have for the wisdom, structure, and insight in cultural traditions and folk stories.)
There is, in fact, no reason to believe that the prime mover, if it exists, is identical to the first cause, or that either is identical to the source of structure or order. If we want to call these things "gods", then we are talking about polytheism.
And there is no reason to believe that these gods, these sources of the physical universe, have any direct connection with my experience that morning on my walk.
But, as was the case with my experience, that fact is not a reason to assume that some thing, or things, in the general area of a first cause, or prime mover, don't exist.
Next time, three different approaches
to the idea of god.
