How do we know God?

[Charlemagne_III]

Many people do not believe in God because they say they have no experience of knowing God.

There is a difference between thinking about God and experiencing God.

This is why Blaise Pascal said if we say we do not know about God, we should act as if we knew God. By acting in this way, in time we may come to experience God intuitively, and then the philosophical proofs will seem unnecessary.

Something like this happened with the Big Bang theory.

At first we knew something about the theory through the studies of Einstein as elaborated by Lemaitre. But this was not sufficient. Scientists want to experiment in areas where experiment is possible (but we cannot repeat the Big Bang). So, lacking experimental evidence, they relied upon experiential evidence. Over the decades following Lemaitre’s correction of Einstein’s math, astronomers acted as if Lemaitre was onto something, and at last information gradually was gathered (experienced) sufficient to demonstrate the plausibility of the Big Bang. The universal noise of the Big Bang was detected (experience). And, of course, there was the telescopic evidence that the universe is inexplicably expanding (experience). By extrapolating this expansion backward through contraction (deduction), scientists were able to roughly calculate the age of the universe, and to establish that at some point the universe as we know it was “created” from a tiny singularity

Why should we not get to know God by much the same process … the gradual unfolding of our experiences that reveal God to us to the degree that we are inclined to experience God? This experience must be calculated on many different fronts simultaneously … but especially through the virtues of faith, hope, and charity. People who have these virtues, and who have absorbed these virtues in wonderfully apparent ways … seem to be in possession of knowledge that others can only guess at. If God is a personal God, I think we approach Him in the way of knowing Him directly by experience, the only meaningful way of knowing Him, rather than reading books of philosophy about Him.

But I guess my question is this:

How do we communicate to unbelievers that the virtues of faith, hope, and charity are better experiential proofs of God than the cosmological or teleological arguments, which tend to confirm, rather than to initiate, true belief?

Do we accomplish that only by prayer and giving good example? Are there other ways?

 

[Amandil]

Many people do not believe in God because they say they have no experience of knowing God.

There is a difference between thinking about God and experiencing God.

This is why Blaise Pascal said if we say we do not know about God, we should act as if we knew God. By acting in this way, in time we may come to experience God intuitively, and then the philosophical proofs will seem unnecessary.

Something like this happened with the Big Bang theory.

At first we knew something about the theory through the studies of Einstein as elaborated by Lemaitre. But this was not sufficient. Scientists want to experiment in areas where experiment is possible (but we cannot repeat the Big Bang). So, lacking experimental evidence, they relied upon experiential evidence. Over the decades following Lemaitre’s correction of Einstein’s math, astronomers acted as if Lemaitre was onto something, and at last information gradually was gathered (experienced) sufficient to demonstrate the plausibility of the Big Bang. The universal noise of the Big Bang was detected (experience). And, of course, there was the telescopic evidence that the universe is inexplicably expanding (experience). By extrapolating this expansion backward through contraction (deduction), scientists were able to roughly calculate the age of the universe, and to establish that at some point the universe as we know it was “created” from a tiny singularity

Why should we not get to know God by much the same process … the gradual unfolding of our experiences that reveal God to us to the degree that we are inclined to experience God? This experience must be calculated on many different fronts simultaneously … but especially through the virtues of faith, hope, and charity. People who have these virtues, and who have absorbed these virtues in wonderfully apparent ways … seem to be in possession of knowledge that others can only guess at. If God is a personal God, I think we approach Him in the way of knowing Him directly by experience, the only meaningful way of knowing Him, rather than reading books of philosophy about Him.

But I guess my question is this:

How do we communicate to unbelievers that the virtues of faith, hope, and charity are better experiential proofs of God than the cosmological or teleological arguments, which tend to confirm, rather than to initiate, true belief?

Do we accomplish that only by prayer and giving good example? Are there other ways?

Prayer and good example are a good start. One of the biggest problems which I see which is often a psychological motivation for choosing atheism is other Christians, meaning rather those of us who sin rather shamelessly while professing Christ. It obviously puts forth a false image of Christ.

I think that the other way is to demonstrate that unbelievers practice faith, hope, and charity in their own lives even implicitly. And that those virtues are incongruent inside of a materialistic or relativistic framework. They must have come from somewhere apart from the closed system of material causes and effects.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

I think that the other way is to demonstrate that unbelievers practice faith, hope, and charity in their own lives even implicitly. And that those virtues are incongruent inside of a materialistic or relativistic framework. They must have come from somewhere apart from the closed system of material causes and effects.

I suppose the unbeliever would argue that faith, hope and charity came from human invention, and are devices by which to cope with a reality that otherwise would be grim if we are to judge our fate by the fate of other animals. Even so, such an argument would have to assume that invented concepts are more survival oriented than those more naturalistic concepts encouraging resignation to the ultimate perishing of both body and soul. That is to say, the ugly “truth” of our ultimate doom (which is never provable) is preferable to the more promising prospects of eternal life through the practice of faith, hope and charity. Even by the pragmatic standards of the skeptic, naturalism offers little by way of consolation for the struggle to survive, since there is no final survival at all.