Book: Sceptical Spirituality
Does God exist?
Let’s take a look
--
It shouldn’t be beyond the wit of human beings to come up with a few clear thoughts on this topic. If nothing else, we can treat this as a basic exercise in sceptical spiritual exploration.
But how exactly do we ‘take a look’? What ‘capacity’ do we use to do this? In other words, and to put it more crudely, which of our organs do we deploy in this (presumably important) quest for (presumably important) facts and answers? Do we use our hearts, or our minds, or some other capacity? If not our hearts, or our minds, then which ‘bit’ of ourselves? Maybe something we haven’t yet thought of?
Invariably, in a discussion like this, there are going to be a number of twists, turns, dead-ends and open-ended question marks along the way, but as far as can be intuited right now, they’re all going to have ‘good value’.
The ‘heart’ as a spiritual compass
Let’s start with ‘the heart’, meaning we’re going to let our ‘hearts’ tell us where God is. And when we say ‘heart’, we mean something like the experience of an intimate ‘sense of a something’, which we can — more or less — call up at will, at least at certain stages of life. So if I look within myself for God, I instinctively and intuitively know what kind of ‘inner sense’ is going to be my confirmatory experience of ‘yes there is a God, because I’m distantly feeling/sensing something like a ‘God sense’ right now’. And this ‘God-sense’ is, of course, deeply personal and innermost and almost too private and intimate to put into words.
Now if we take a closer look at our supposedly intimate sense of (the supposed presence within us of) God, we can — if we’re that way inclined, meaning ‘analytically predisposed’ — notice some interesting things. First of all, when we look for God, we always look for positivity, never negativity; and secondly, the sensation we identify needs to be ‘intimate and subjective’ as opposed to ‘external and objective’. And…
