by Kolbitar » December 4th, 2005, 1:11 pm
::Surely this would prove the existence of God, which is a pretty big thing, as everyone seems to accept that there IS no proof that God exists.
Hi Linda. Not everyone accepts that there is no proof that God exists. Many scientists may accept this, but perhaps they do so on the basis that science cannot prove God's existence. I would agree with this -- science cannot prove God's existence. Many people, however, do accept that God's existence can be proven philosophically using the same method scientists use to posit the existence of things like black holes -- which are postulated in order to account for observable phenomena.
That aside, I think it might be interesting to bring to the fore and examine the impulse or drive which rightly inclines you to think that unusual things -- that Catholics would call miracles -- evidence the existence of God. I realize you don't like the word -- and I can't say I can blame you considering all the junk which falls within it's field -- but it is indeed a person's philosophy, or, if you prefer, worldview, by which one interprets scientific data. For you can examine a fact all you wish, but it still remains a fact. A cancer is a cancer, and a cancer which, normally, cannot be cured but is suddenly gone is just one more fact – a vanished cancer. Yet something within us – I include you, Linda – evokes a sort of wonder, a wonder in which we cannot help but find a golden chain whose links disappear into a blinding sky; a wonder which spontaneously drives us to look beyond physical facts for a “more”; a wonder which sets upon our lips the word “God,” as it did Moses who, after ascending wonder’s chain into the very heart of creation, came down uttering “I AM,” He is the “I AM.” For indeed, Chesterton says just as we have senses through which we experience the physical, so do we have a mystical sense through which we apprehend the spiritual. We have touch, taste, sight, smell and hearing; and we have wonder.
But why should this wonder be evoked solely by the unusual? Well, familiarity indeed breeds contempt, and this may be because, as Traherne says, we are “made to learn the dirty devices of the world.” But none the less, we can still discover (re-discover?) the fact that reality itself (or physical reality) is one contingent miracle.
Perhaps we can learn this intellectually, as when we are struck by facts like that of water, which remains the same element (substance) while having three different faces (liquid, solid and gas) to our perception; or when we dig deeper and find the very substance “water” can never appear to our senses – as no substance can – and we are led to conclude a deeper reality exists in the very heart of things.
Perhaps we can learn this imaginatively, as our desire to “survey the depths of space and time” takes us to Middle Earth, Narnia, and the Hundred Acre Wood leaving us temporarily in “joyful hope” – which should be either picked up, or left to despair by the eschatology of one’s worldview.
Maybe we can learn this aesthetically, when our senses and imagination fuse and, at it’s most intense degree, we stand in the naked existence of Eden. When, for instance, as Traherne writes, we see “(t)he corn (as) orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown…it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. . . . The city seemed to stand in Eden, or be built in heaven. . . . Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of (this) world." Or, as in Martin Buber’s experience: “I walked on the road one dim morning, saw a piece of mica lying there, picked it up, and looked at it for a long time. The day was no longer dim: so much light was caught by the stone. And suddenly, as I looked away, I realized that I had known nothing of object and subject; as I looked the piece of mica and I had been one; as I looked I had tasted unity. I looked at it again but unity did not return. Then something flamed up inside me as if I were about to create. I closed my eyes, I concentrated my strength, I entered into an association with my object, I raised the piece of mica into the realm of that which has being. And then…only then did I feel: I; only then was I. He that had looked had not yet been I; only this, this being in association bore the name like a crown.” –Martin Buber
Maybe this lesson comes when we see these three things emerging, when we find the intellectual precedent for the imaginative longing which some people have experienced at the extreme end of aesthetic perception. Lewis wrote this: "We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words — to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. *That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves — that, though we cannot, yet these projections can, enjoy in themselves that beauty, grace, and power of which Nature is the image.* That is why the poets tell us such lovely falsehoods. They talk as if the west wind could really sweep into a human soul; but it can't. They tell us that "beauty born of murmuring sound" will pass into human face; but it won't. Or not yet.” This is the miracle I’ve found, the common, everyday fact which haunts us, which drives someone like Edgar Allan Poe to observe “(t)he origin of poetry lies in a thirst for a wilder beauty than earth supplies.”
Sometimes it takes miracles to wake us from our “familiarity,” and recall us to the ever present miracle, the bridge between us and the deeper reality which begs, at every moment, to be crossed -- which in fact needs a cross in order to bridge, for the yawning gap is a consequence which we can do nothing about, and the familiarity, as well, tends to need the miracle of a crucifix.
::If scientific evidence exists that proves God's existence, why is this kept so quiet?
If everyday existence is evidence that proves God’s existence, why is our sense of wonder kept so quiet?
Sincerely,
Jesse
