On the Hidden Face of God
Why God is hidden from Man? Why not, since all things are possible with God, paint the Ten Commandments on the Moon in letters from the language before the Tower of Babel, which, all men seeing each night and being unable to misread or misunderstand, would give sufficient evidence even to the skeptic that God was real, and that there was only one?
I was just listening to a lecture by the philosopher and theologian Peter Kreeft on this topic (Because good scholars always go to the primary sources, let me point you to where I found this lecture: http://www.peterkreeft.com/audio.htm) Dr. Kreeft proposes that there is only two ways possible for a God to make himself known to man.
Possible Way Number One is by direct evidence that will convince the brain. Intellectuals like myself (and any academics teaching our young in modern and secular institutions) claim and claim loudly that when evidence is presented, we shall, upon our honor, change our opinions and beliefs and ways of life to confirm to what the cold hard facts of reality command.
This claim is not to be believed. I read of case of a prominent atheist in England, A.J. Ayer, who in 1988 had a near-death experience, an experience as obvious and unusual as the vision encountered by St. Paul on the Road to Damascus. Dr. Jeremy George, his physician, reports that Ayer had confided to him: “I saw a Divine Being. I’m afraid I’m going to have to revise all my books and opinions.”
But then he publicly reaffirmed his atheism, steadfastly ignored the evidence, and talked himself into believing that his memory and his senses were faulty. He concluded that he had seen nothing, that his sense and his senses were faulty, on the premise that his speculations could not be faulty. He was also a leader of the Humanist movement, and a public reverse of his beliefs would have inconvenienced or embarrassed him.
If this tale is true, A.J. Ayer is a worm. Philosophers are supposed to face changes of fortune and the opinions of the world philosophically, hence the name.
On the other hand, how can we fail to pity weakness? This type of repellent intellectual cowardice is not unusual; it is the human condition.
If you, Dear Reader, believe the testimony of the Bible (and, if you are a Christian gentleman, it is your duty to do so, despite any personal inclinations otherwise) then you know that the Pharisees had no doubt of the miracles of the messiah. They saw the blind healed, and examined them; they saw Lazarus rise from the grave.
It was completely unambiguous and completely undeniable.
So the Pharisees denied it.
Like A.J. Ayer, the egotism of the Pharisees was involved, their self-interest and self-image. For them to believe that this trouble-maker was the messiah would have been a blow to their pride, their intellectual pride.
Indeed, the only unforgiveable sin listed in the Bible is the sin of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, which is, namely, the sin of seeing the healing miracles of the messiah with your own eyes and then saying that it was the work of Beelzebub. If that is the rule for how the universe works, and if I were Christ, I would take great pains to work my miracles when no one was looking, for fear that they, seeing and still maintaining disbelief, would call it the work of Beelzebub, and damn themselves unforgivably therefore irrevocably.
Therefore, human nature being what it is, Possible Way Number One is counterproductive. Skeptics would not be convinced by a public show of miracles, and the faithful do not need it.
You see, it is, despite the boasts of the intellectual, quite easy to disbelieve your sense and dismiss the evidence. Evidence is a weak way to convince anyone of anything. Modern science has convinced us that evidence is the strongest way, the only way, to be convinced of anything. Pfui. This is counterfactual. Consider any important decision you ever made in your life: the decision was probably not based on evidence, or not entirely, but on judgment.
Judgment is the faculty whereby a man decides who and what to trust. There is no point in looking at evidence until you trust it. As a matter of logic, no evidence can be proof of itself: no evidence in court testifies that the evidence was not tampered with. You need some other witness to take the stand to testify that the disputed evidence was kept safe and unadulterated, not a forgery.
God does not want us to believe He exists. The devils in hell believe God exists: they react to the fact with hatred and stubbornness rather than with love. But they know.
God wants us to love him. If you have ever fallen in love, you know that the beloved is a mystery. Usually, at the outset, you do not even really know the beloved before you love her. The evidence of her love, the thousand thoughtful sacrifices a beloved makes for her lover, all that comes later. Loves comes first.
Let us leave aside Possible Way Number One and look at Possible Way Number Two. Pretend you are God and you want your creatures, your children, to love you. You want a relationship so intimate that there is no parallel except, perhaps, for marriage. You want to dwell inside the beloved children and be dwelt-in, a mingling of souls, a sharing of life. Imagine a love more ferocious, more frightening, than even the most erotic love we humans know. You are the God who invented ecstasy, rapture, bliss, and peace that passeth understanding. Imagine you are something like a whirldwind of fire, a being of pure light, a creator larger than time and space and imagination. And you ache with love for the beloved—How then do you show yourself to man?
Well, as the Creator, you get to create not only how their senses work, but also how their souls work, how their brains work.
Now, in the academic world, we humans meet many people who seem to think that all knowledge arrives through the sense impressions, and that the brain merely records things like a tape machine, picking up impressions like wet clay. Such people have no idea how their minds work, because they do not admit human consciousness is really conscious.
But we humans know how our minds work. We have a conscience. It tells us right from wrong. We have a faculty called reason. It tells us the difference between valid and invalid chains of logic. We have an inner character that tells us when an act is honorable or dishonorable, and this character is different from the conscience, since the conscience is concerned with right and wrong. We have an imagination that tells you the difference between beautiful and ugly. And so on.
The Academicians all say that these things are some sort of programming, or bias, or learned behavior, or something of the sort. The Academicians say this because they do not believe in the soul, or in eternal things, or angels, or Platonic ideals, or pure logic, or inspirations.
Those humans who are writers and artists know full well that the human mind is from time to time in touch with something that inspires idea that we, on our own, could never think of. Foolish modern Academics, who do not know the soul, pretend these inspirations come from the subconscious mind, which is their word for The Unknown Thing. The ancients, being wiser, called the source of artistic inspiration the Muses, and they correctly called them goddesses, and divine.
Now, in comparing and contrasting the world view of the academics and the world view of the greater mass of humankind, including all the ancient writers and sages the academics allegedly study, one fact stands out. The Academic explanation, the model, does not fit the facts, does not explain the facts, and, indeed, is merely used as a bludgeon to explain away any inconvenient facts that do not fit their prejudices. Meanwhile, the greater mass of common men, being possessed of common sense, believe in things like ghosts and faith healing and answered prayer, for the very illogical and unscientific reason that they know people who have experiences all these things, people neither liars nor deranged nor fools.
The academic model is always surprised at human behavior, because it seems to think men are merely natural creatures that could and should be corrected and improved by natural means. Why, the optimistic academics say, if we merely educate the common man, and bind him by strict external laws, man will be good! And when man again and again cheats the expectations of the academics, they never stop to reconsider their theory. They never look at facts first and make theory to fit. They look at the theory and ignore the facts that don’t fit.
Compare the two models. The academic thinks man is naturally, and the common man is crazy for believing in ghosts and gods. The Christian thinks natural man is Fallen, and naturally acts both wickedly and self-destructively, and thinks the academics are crazy for being such snobs. Which is the more realistic model? The Christian model that all men are fallen, and small group of blind and pharisaical academics are crazy, because they don’t see the obvious truth that man is fallen; or the academic model that all men are good, but that all but a small group of elite and superior thinkers are crazy.
Evidence? Walk into any Christian Science reading room. One can read one hundred years of testimonies, each one confirmed by two witnesses, of miracle healings. One can study the commission at Lourdes, which has been collecting medically inexplicable cases of healings for longer than one hundred years. One can read honest scientists who, with the most careful controls, gathered evidence from people who died on the operating table and been revived, and spoken of similar or the same visions of the afterlife, which only the most strained ad hoc can call coincidence. So what do the academics do to analyze and refute this evidence? They do not analyze it at all. They debunk dousers and telephone psychics and other obvious mountebanks.
But back to the hypothetical. You are God. Fallen Man is a creature whose intellect is darkened, and evidence by definition is only persuasive AFTER the jury decides based on its wisdom to trust it, not before. How do you win that trust without evidence?
You cannot show man Your face. Remember how intimate the relationship of divine love craved by the divine must be. If you were God, you would not want people to see Your face, but Your heart and soul.
Besides, anyone who looks at the stars of heaven or the wonders of nature has seen the face of God. If God showed mankind His face, mankind either would not see it, or would recoil in fear and hatred.
God does not want philosophers who are convinced of the abstract proposition that God Exists. He wants lovers to become one with Him.
Well, since you are God, you can simply implant into anyone who seeks you, who asks you, who knocks on the door, a Holy Spirit which will open your inner eyes, and show the soul directly, without any deceitful eyes or ears involved, an clear and immediate intuition of Your existence and love. Then you can instruct your believers to tell the world, over and over and over again that this is how the inner faculty designed to detect God operates.
This faculty, since it does not operate through sense impressions, cannot be deceived by the things that deceive sense impressions, optical illusions, distortions caused by density of media.
Now, since you are God you also implant into mankind a restlessness that does not find satisfaction or comfort except in God. A created being can indeed have a God-seeking drive or instinct. A being evolved by undirected and blind chance not only would not have such a theistic drive, it could not, since such a drive is counterproductive to personal and tribal and racial survival and reproduction. Blind operations of undirected nature could not produce a species-wide proneness to hallucinatory insanity, having religious experience, seeing prayers answered when they are not, strengthening the conscience to commit acts of self-sacrifice and so on.
Now, since you are God you also implant into mankind a conscience, that is, a sense that there are rules not made by society nor by our own will that we ought to live up to. This conscience operates both with people who believe in God and people who do not: the category of Objective Right and Objective Wrong are innate metaphysical categories. Even people who deny them are forced to employ them. Ask a denier (let us say, a moral relativist, or someone who thinks the conscience was evolved by undirected natural processes) if I ought to have intellectual integrity or not? If he says I ought, then he appealing to an objective standard of right and wrong. If he says not, then, lacking intellectual integrity, I can continue to believe in objective moral standards without any intellectual justification, without being honest enough to listen to argument or look at evidence. So, no matter what his answer, both he and I will continue and must continue to use the categories of moral right and wrong. Even to ask the question whether it is wrong to believe in right and wrong is forced to employ a belief in right and wrong.
The advantage of God using Possible Way Number Two, putting knowledge of Himself directly into our hearts is several: First, it is undeniable. Second, it is open to everyone. If God painted His face on the moon, neither blind men, nor those who lived in cloudy environments, could see it, day or night, rain or shine. Third, it is more obvious, not less, than evidence presented to the senses. Fourth, it opens up the relationship God wants with us.
Fifth and most importantly, it is entirely voluntary. Jesus is, after all, a meek and humble soul. He will not open the door to one who does not knock. He is a physician. He not here to save the Pharisees who think themselves healthy and hale: he is here to save sinners like me, men who know they are sick, sick, sick.
If you are younger than I am, and have no sins, crimes, or enormities in your past, then you do not know how horrible the stain of sin feels, and how desperately a man can crave that mystical and magic water which washes sins away. A man conscious of his own sins, and of their horror, does not suffer as many doubts about God for the same reason a man dying of a loathsome disease does not bother mistrusting his doctor: he has no hope otherwise.
Here is one point even Christians seem to overlook. God is infinite. That means no created being, not the angels, not the archangels, can ever understand Him. He will always be cloaked in mystery. And when, in the eternity of heaven, we created beings come to know Him better, there will always be an additional ocean of mystery beyond, more glories and more mysteries and more we don’t know. That is what infinite means. We will never know him; we will always have to take him on faith. He will not be any more clear to our intellect in Heaven: but He will be perfectly clear, in Heaven, to our hearts.
The reason cannot encompass the infinite. A finite mind cannot grasp infinite truths. But, oddly enough, the heart can love infinitely. That is why God speaks to our loving hearts, not to our skeptical minds.
We believers should expect doubt. The Bible is full of injunctions to study the laws and the prophets daily, and to wear the words of God on our heart, and it is full of dire warnings about how many men will stray from the straight path, how many seeds will fall by the wayside and be choked by thorns. You should expect to be among few men if you are a Christian man. Narrow is the gate the leads to paradise.
If this religion were false, those warnings and dire promises would have no reason to be true.
I came to this religion, I was not born in it, so I am well aware of the warning labels I had to read before buying: Christ promises His followers persecution, loneliness, exile, stripes, scorn, and a cross to bear. Love makes all such burdens light — but, good heavens, we were promised a war with powers, principalities, archangels and dominions, a cosmic and invisible war to the death, fought in every man’s heart (including yours and mine, my dear fellow soldier) not a happy time of getting along with our neighbors and folks.
The Church is not just an Ark in a sea of death, she is a warship.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
