Calling God to the Witness Stand
I have had two strange conversations lately.
Without revealing any personal or embarrassing details about when they took place or with whom, let me say that one was with a theoretical physicist convinced that he could prove God existed by means of empirical observation, using a God-proving machine. He did not describe details of the machine’s operation, so do not ask me.
The other conversation was with a skeptic who held that if God were real, He would make His existence too obvious for doubt; and since He has not, He is not.
Both these positions run afoul of the Catholic teaching that God, as the First Cause and Last End of all things, can, from created things, be known with certainty by the natural light of human reason, even if other details of His divine nature cannot be.
On the one hand, First Causes and Last Ends are not open to empirical senses, even if created things are; on the other, what human reason can know, it can know, not must know. Reason cannot be forced.
The first conversation was neither interesting nor rewarding, since when I asked the physicist how empirical proof can prove a non-empirical reality, or how physics can prove a metaphysical proposition, I was brusquely informed that metaphysics was a null-set, matter without content, and that philosophy was merely abortive and lazy form of physics. I asked politely for his empirical proof that all philosophy was physics, and was belittled for asking, but not answered. Instead the man waved his credentials at me, and boasted many a boastful boast about himself.
I suppose if, like a stage-magician yanking a white hare out of a tophat, he can yank God Almighty out of the mouth of a cyclotronic supercollider or radiotelescopic dish, complete with roaring throne and blazing coronet and living creatures many-winged and filled with blazing eyes, surrounded by fiery rainbows, emerald and amber and jasper, and wheels within wheels and thunders and quakes and voices like the rushing of mighty waters, so that all the skeptics fall groveling on their faces and beg the mountains to fall on them, in such as case as this, our bold scientiferrifick pioneer of empirical theology will have a good and proper right to boast.
How can one not help but wish such a windbaggish crackpot good luck? We all laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said that man could fly.
The second conversation was more interesting, because at least it gives one pause. Is there something God could do to make Himself too obvious for doubt? I suggest that depends on one’s standard for doubt.
I invite the reader to play a simple game.
Dear reader, imagine you are an omnipotent and omniscient and benevolent creator. Imagine that you have made man in your own image, so that he, like you, is a creative and sovereign being, and sovereign means he rules himself. He cannot be robbed of his free will by anything or anyone, not even you. His decisions are his own.
Now, in this game, imagine what you can do to prove your existence to someone who has decided to stop believing in you.
Try it.
First, you decide to create the universe.
The cosmos surrounds the man, it is infinite, yet it shows such clear and undeniable evidence of rationality, order, benevolence, each part fitted to each, that it could not possibly be a product of chaos or accident. Creation testifies to a Creator.
In reply, the man says the universe created itself by itself out of nothing, fell into following laws of nature by itself, and that all perception of rationality and order is mere a defect of human perception, useful for survival, perhaps, but not true.
In so saying, the man has to impeach his own ability to think and to perceive in order to avoid seeing the testimony of heaven and earth. Once his ability to think and perceive is impeached, no evidence is permissible.
Second, you decide to create the nature of man, of which man cannot be unaware, even if he no longer trusts his own ability to think.
Men make decisions, and can call upon the faculty of reason to do so. Men are creative, craving decoration and music even though these things have no survival value.
Moreover, men are aware of right and wrong. Even in the act of inventing exceptions to their ideas of right and wrong proves that those ideas exist. A cursory examination of the writings of other nations and generations shows all men support the same basic moral code, and try to carve out exceptions for themselves to quell their conscience using the same few tricks, exceptions, and justifications. Seeing the Image of God, as creator and sovereign, in Man, testifies that the God in whose images Man is made, made Man.
In reply, the man says his conscience is the arbitrary by-product of some natural cause, such as social conditioning or bio-genetic evolution favoring fertility and group survival. In so doing, he impeaches any testimony of right and wrong, vice or virtue, good or evil, and refuses to recognize his own ability to distinguish and decide between them. Man impeaches himself as man. Instead he is a bald ape, a meat robot, a puppet and unintentional by-product of social forces or evolutionary statistics.
Third, you instill in each heart at birth a craving for God which has no natural explanation and which nothing in nature can satisfy.
Hunger does not prove that you have food at hand, but hunger proves you live in a universe where food is exists. A colony of amnesiac men dropped on a foreign planet would not know women existed, by they would continue to try to copulate with anything that seemed likely. This behavior could not exist in a universe where women are impossible: nature would not allow it. Even if one or two eunuchs found among them felt none of this impulse, the general nature of the impulse would be obvious.
Contrariwise, a race of intelligent amoeba, or some space creatures that reproduced asexually, if robbed of memory and dropped elsewhere on the same planet, would not try to copulate with anything, because of lack of either organs or instincts of copulation.
Likewise here, the lack of atheism among any race of men at any point in history or prehistory, indeed, even in Communist nations where monotheism was illegal, merely shows that atheists are eunuchs. In them, the impulse is either deflected into a different expression (such as Communism, which acts like an ersatz religion) or is crippled.
In reply, the man says that these impulses, like all human impulses, arise from an incomprehensible mental darkness called the sub-conscious mind. The sub-conscious mind is a mischievous spirit or ghost that dwells secretly within our thoughts, twisted, tempting, and driving them into odd corners, in order to achieve a false sense of self-worth, and in order to hide, each man from himself, his dark desires to murder his father and rape his mother.
In so doing, the man impeaches human nature. He no longer regards himself as worthy of life, and he can make no account of his impulses, or say where they come from, or why. Indeed, he becomes the helpless pawn on his impulses, because one he says they exist for no rational reason, no rational reason can be given to resist or to prioritize them.
Fourth, you decide to organize history.
You choose Abraham and bless his tribe to increase; you choose Moses to instruct that tribe in your laws; you promise and send a messiah, who institutes a Church that, despite unimaginable opposition and internal treachery, spreads to worldwide scope. You entrust this Church to tell men of your existence and your will for man.
In reply, man points at the public rituals and poetic myths of heathens and heretics, and says that the monotheistic God is no different than the various polytheistic gods, and that the claim that the universe is the rational creation of a rational Creator is no different from the claim that all things, including the gods, sprang out of chaos for no reason, and will return to chaos with no hope.
In so doing, the man impeaches the testimony of history. History, to him, is merely one random event after another, taking place for any reason or no reason. It is not a story composed by a Creator, full of deep meaning and leading to a conclusion, but a tale told by an idiot, of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Fifth, you decide to send signs and wonders into the world, including your own son.
These things clearly can have neither a natural cause, for they happen at such times and conditions as to be fraught with meaning, nor can they be manmade, for they are beyond human power.
Moreover, you produce such miracles on a daily and hourly basis, putting them in such places as anyone with eyes to see can go and look and see: the miracle cures at Lourdes, the Shroud of Turin, the Tilma of Guadalupe, the Miracle of the Dancing Sun at Fatima.
You send saints to resurrect the dead, as in the case of St. Francis of Paola, Venerable John Baptist Tholomei, St. Bernardine of Siena, St. John Capistrano, St. Francis of Paola, St. Joseph of Cupertino, St. Peter of Alcantara, St. Dominic, St. Ignatius Loyola, St. Philip Neri, St. Paul of the Cross, St. John Bosco, Blessed James Salomoni, St. Agnes of Montepulciano, Blessed Constantius of Fabrino, Blessed Sadoc and Companions, Blessed Mark of Modena, Blessed Ceslas, Blessed Augustine of Bugela, Colomb a of Rieti, St. Rose of Lima, St. Martin de Porres, St. Francis Solanus, Marianne de Jesus of Quito, Blessed Sebastian of Apparizio, St. Bernard of Abbeville, St. Stanislaus of Cracow, St. James of Tarentaise, St. Cyril of Constantinople, St. Peregrine, St. Philip Benizi, Bl. Peter Armengol, Blessed Eustachio, St. Gerard Majella, St. Charbel Makhlouf, St. Padre Pio, St. Margaret of Cortona, St. Felix of Cantalice, St. Rose of Viterbo, St. Pacific of San Severino, St. Hyacinth, St. Louis Bertrand, St. Francis Xavier, St. John Francis Regis, St. Andrew Bobola; St. Francis Jerome, Brother Antony Pereyra, and St. Patrick, the Apostle of Ireland, to name just a few.
(This partial list comes from here: https://www.miraclesofthesaints.com/2010/10/saints-who-raised-dead-people-brought.html)
You can send a miracle to confirmed atheist and avowed enemy of the church John C Wright, and man of sterling honesty, whose reputation is without blemish or spot. He will happily testify to what he saw.
In reply, the man says none of these reports or witnesses is reliable.
Please note the man has not investigated, found any evidence proving (or even implying) any fraud was perpetrated. He simply has not looked into it, and simply refuses to believe anything he hears.
In so doing the man impeaches all testimony, all witnesses, all evidence, or anything else leading to a conclusion he does not want to reach.
Conclusion: presenting evidence is a waste of time.
What do you do instead?
You are an omnipotent and omniscient God. You know what will work and what will not.
You send miracles to those who need a miracle to be convinced, and you do not send a miracle to someone who will be convinced by some other way.
If, dear reader, you are a skeptic who has seen no miracles, please contemplate the possibility that you yourself are just such a someone.
Perhaps you have not seen any miracles because you will be brought to find God without such shows and folderol and fireworks.
To be frank, I am embarrassed to have seen visions and miracles: it means I was an idiot who could not be reached any other way.
Speaking for no one but myself, I now avow and attest that my doubts when I was an atheist were not reasonable doubts. They were not rational doubts. They were stretched like baloney to invent any excuse to explain away any case for which a reason to excuse disbelief, no matter how farfetched, could be invented, likely or unlikely.
And, as I can attest from experience, such evidence did not and does not prove anything. I can still, upon command, doubt my senses, doubt my reason, doubt my memory, doubt my sanity. I could talk myself back into being atheist merely deciding to do it.
Decision means everything. Evidence means nothing.
If you are omnipotent and omniscient, and you know men cannot be convinced with evidence, what do you do instead?
As God, you make a simpler system that trying to find unimpeachable evidence to convince the unconvincible: you send the Holy Spirit to any man who asks.
You promise that if the man knocks, the door will open. If the man seeks, he will find.
Anyone at any time can avail himself of this. If at first it does not work, with persistence it will.
Unlike seeing a solar eclipse or seeing the Red Sea part, anyone anywhere, on a train or a plane or resting in bed at home can fold his hands in prayer, and ask for a visit.
The proof and the new life will come directly into his heart and soul. The man may have to be baptized first, however – but, from time to time, there are exceptions even to this (see St. Dismas, for example).
Speaking again for myself, let me say that the Holy Spirit convinced me by entering me, by becoming part of my soul, my mind, my life. I am aware of Him inside me, closer than the sound of my own heartbeat. There is no eyesight involved, nothing to see, so I cannot object that my eyes are deceiving me.
There is only my own mind involved, and if I doubt my own sanity, well, that would be insane, wouldn’t it?
So, first, the reason God is invisible is because He is all around and inside you already. He made the world and made your soul, your free will, your reason, your conscience. He peopled the world with people all of whom have the natural instinct to seek Him. He arranged history to point to Himself. He established a Church to spread the good news. He unleashed the Holy Spirit to visit any man willing to be baptized.
Is this not enough? If it is not, what would be? To come in the flesh, physically walk the earth, healing the sick and raising the dead and saying words such as both sound strange to the point of insanity but oddly familiar as if we already all knew them?
He tried that. We killed Him.
We mocked and tortured and stripped and whipped Him and nailed Him on a tree to die a most slow and agonizing death.
How many times does He need to do it again? Would a dozen be enough for you? A thousand? Ten thousand?
The problem is this: there is no evidence so obvious and so overwhelming that a man cannot close his eyes to it. That is the blessing and the curse of free will.
The second reason is that God is invisible is that this is a mercy to us. Even the pagans know that if you look upon Zeus in his undisguised glory, you burn to ash like Semele. How much worse it would be for you to behold a supreme god.
Let me quote from those who know. No man has seen God:
1 Timothy 6:15–16
… the blessed and only Potentate, the King of kings, and Lord of lords; Who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto; whom no man hath seen, nor can see.
Deuteronomy 4:12
And the Lord spake unto you out of the midst of the fire: ye heard the voice of the words, but saw no similitude; only ye heard a voice.
John 1:18
No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.
Let me quote further from those who know. Men fear to see God, because, or so it seems, such a sight carries a death sentence:
Exodus 33:20
And he said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.
Genesis 32:30
And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my life is spared.
Judges 13:20
For it came to pass, when the flame went up toward heaven from off the altar, that the angel of the Lord ascended in the flame of the altar… And Manoah said unto his wife, We shall surely die, because we have seen God.
And, for the record, let those who opine that the Old Testament is unfair to women, or shows them in a bad light, please explain why so often in old tales, as in life these days, the woman is more sensible than her mate. For the passage continues:
But his wife said unto him, If the Lord were pleased to kill us, he would not have received a burnt offering and a meat offering at our hands, neither would he have shewed us all these things, nor would as at this time have told us such things as these.
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.
