No, there is too much room for error and abuse inherent in the idea of second-hand revelation. Furthermore, if revelation was indeed the best way for human beings to know God, why wouldn't God reveal him/her/itself to people today? Why rely on ancient revelations made under highly suspicious circumstances? If God is a conscious being, he/she/it could appreciate that anyone born today may not want to rely on centuries-old pieces of hearsay of dubious authenticity that originated among semiliterate people in the desert. Plenty of well-meaning seekers of the truth would be thrilled to hear God's voice and change their agnostic or atheist ways if they only had even a shred of direct evidence. Today, humanity has more capacity than ever to record, communicate, and verify information. If God really has something to say, now would be a good time to say it.
Anyone with a brain should question why would God choose to reveal him/her/itself only to one individual in remote historical times, expecting everyone else to follow this person's guidelines forever afterward? It would seem that a divine intelligence could come up with a better communication strategy.
Now that we know where
not
to look, let's figure out an alternative. Thomas Paine, one of the most brilliant writers of the 1700s, offered this advice, “Do we want to know what God is? Search not the book called the scripture, which any human hand might make, but the scripture called the Creation.”
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As a result of a Christian smear campaign against Paine, many people today mistakenly label him an atheist, but Paine was a Deist. Deists—unlike atheists—believe in the existence of God, but they reject the idea of “revealed” religions. They view sacred books as collections of human hopes and dreams, fears and paranoia projected onto God. According to the Deists, then, organized religions give us nothing but human opinions, conjectures, and wild guesses about God. The reality of God is to be found elsewhere.
Like Taoist thinkers before him, Paine argued that true religion begins with the study of nature. Whereas language can be manipulated by human beings, nature is what it is: an unadulterated, living testimony of whatever power is behind the creation of everything that exists. If you want to learn about the character of a creator, look no further than his creation. Discover the principles of nature and you discover the secrets upon which the universe is founded. In Paine's mind, science and religion can happily go hand in hand. This is precisely what Einstein meant when he wrote, “I do not believe in a personal god . . . If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”
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In some ways, studying nature can turn out to be anything but an uplifting experience. Nature can often be cruel and indifferent to humans and animals alike. Natural selection knows no mercy. The alliterative trio of disease, death, and decay feast on everything that
lives. When we stop to consider that about 98 percent of all species that ever roamed the earth have gone extinct, our fuzzy notions of a benevolent Mother Nature and a loving creator fly out the window.
On the other hand, any time I see tomatoes growing in the garden, a glorious sunset, or perfectly natural boobs (if given a choice, I'd take the latter over any tomato or sunset in the world . . . ), I feel there must be a good and just God who is responsible for all this sublime beauty. Whatever power created a universe in which I can dip a spoon into a jar of Nutella and partake of this sacrament is worthy of the deepest admiration. If this sounds superficial and frivolous, it's probably because I am. And yet, whether you can relate to my specific examples or not, everyone can see that at times the design of the world seems to point to a higher intelligence. Often, nature seems just too beautiful and amazing to be the product of some random chance. The structure of any living being is too complex to have happened by accident. If nothing else, contemplating nature induces a sense of wonder. We can't help but stand in awe in front of the immensity of the universe. The powers of nature remind us that forces much greater than we can comprehend rule over our lives, and all of our scientific and religious ideas are primitive attempts to come to terms with the mystery beneath it all.
While studying the principles of nature can offer great insights, it certainly doesn't provide the clearest answers as to the existence and nature of God. If we crave more than what the observation of nature can give us, I can't think of a better place to continue our search than our own personal experience.
The clergy in most organized religion will be shaking their fists at anyone emphasizing personal experience as a road to God. The clergy loves second-hand revelation because it gives them a primary role as the interpreters and custodians of God's word. Personal
experience, on the other hand, robs them of their power and diminishes their authority. But ultimately, our own experience is the only honest guide we have. Anything else is just hearsay.
So what does my life tell me about God? Everyone else seems to be having such precise ideas about what God is. Their God is clear, accessible, and free of contradictions. But what I hear has nothing to do with what I know. My life, in fact, tells a very different story. I have experienced such diametrically opposite feelings that trying to reduce them to a simple, coherent idea would require some heavy editing of the truth. Either most people have had experiences completely unlike mine, or they are very good at lying to themselves.
In some ways, God is nowhere to be found. I have sent out multiple rescue missions, but my search parties have come back empty-handed. The first problem is shared by millions of people who find themselves falling down a cynical slope. Look in any direction, in any country, at any point in history and you'll find yourself staring into the eyes of forces that will send chills down your spine. Human life is filled with more pain than you could ever wish to see. Horrific suffering is not an anomaly, or an occasional unfortunate event. It is as much a part of existence as oxygen and water. Sooner or later, it visits everything that lives and tries to rip their hearts out. If you want a happy story, where evil is defeated, goodness always triumphs, and compassion and love abound, go rent a Disney movie. The screenwriter who put together Life's script is too mean for that. If there is a God, he/she/it is not in the business of keeping good people from being hurt. Any notion of a moral God who rewards goodness and punishes evil finds no support whatsoever in the experience of life on earth. Only by conjuring up otherworldly rewards and punishments (e.g., karma or heaven and hell) can we still cling to the image of a moral God watching over the universe.
In this world—the only one we know exists for sure—fortune and misfortune indifferently visit the sweetest, most loving human beings on earth just as often as the most evil.
This is the most classic stumbling block to the religious idea that God is a merciful, morally inclined, omnipotent being, with full awareness of everything that happens. It would seem that a merciful, omnipotent God would break the fangs of evil and soften its bite. A conscious, all-powerful being who allows all the horror that exists in the world must not be omnipotent after all. Alternatively, an omnipotent God who allows tragedy to tear apart the lives of millions is a monster.
Throughout human history, many different religions have tried to find an answer to this universal objection. Some simply throw up their arms and argue that there must be a reason for suffering even when we can't see it, and that “God works in mysterious ways.” This argument is hardly better than no argument at all, since it asks us to ignore all the evidence and rely on blind faith.
Another very common answer blames the existence of so much pain and evil on the inherent sinfulness of human beings and their misuse of free will. But this “answer” does equally little to solve the problem. An omniscient, benevolent God should know ahead of time that some people will use their free will to cause horrific suffering to innocent individuals. And if God is the creator of everything that exists, he/she/it also created the weakness and stupidity that lead humans to abuse their free will. Which brings us back to where we started. No amount of intellectual contortions and complicated rationalizations can change that.
Poking another hole in this theory is the fact that terrible things often happen naturally, without any help from the supposedly flawed human free will. Try telling the parents of a baby born with
a painful, lethal disease that suffering is the result of the misuse of free will. Natural disasters and random accidents are just as likely to open the floodgates of pain. Only someone with an overblown sense of self-importance could think that human beings have a monopoly on the ability to unleash horror.
Let's be clear: this is not an academic debate or an exercise in abstract speculation. This is as real and concrete as it gets. My own experience forces me to face it again and again. A friend of mine—one of the happiest, kindest, most positive individuals I have ever met—literally drowned in her own blood as a result of a freak accident. Another person very close to me—someone who never hurt a fly in her life—has been thrown into the living hell of nearly complete paralysis because of a brain hemorrhage. A wonderful woman I know had her seemingly healthy four-year-old daughter die in her arms because of an undiagnosed genetic defect. Yet another friend had his throat cut by some racist prick who was not too fond of Vietnamese people. And the list goes on. Every one of these experiences left me with a sense of randomness and complete chaos. I felt like a tiny pawn in a game that's unaffected by moral considerations. In my mind, I can't reconcile any of these events with the notion of a moral, benevolent God who oversees human life. This is why any time someone tells me that everything happens for a reason, I have to work really hard to avoid punching them in the face.
In contrast, some religions don't even bother trying to defend the existence of a moral God in a seemingly amoral universe. Buddhism—and to a much greater extent Taoism—doesn't place a loving creator at the root of the world. The most important Taoist book, the Tao Te Ching, states,
Before the Heaven and Earth existed
There was something nebulous:
Silent, isolated,
Standing alone, changing not,
Eternally revolving without fail,
Worthy to be the Mother of All Things. I do not know its name
And address it as Tao. . . .
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According to the Taoists, the Tao is “the mysterious secret of the universe”
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and the “parent of the gods.”
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Unlike the God of Western religions, the Tao is not a personified being. Powerful spirits and gods are born out of it. But the Tao has no personality. Rather, it is a natural force that is entirely beyond good and evil, and, much like nature itself, it is indifferent to the desires of human beings. When we take into account the incredible amount of suffering that characterizes life on this planet, the idea of an unsentimental, morally neutral power seems much easier to swallow than that of a loving, caring God.
If what I described in the preceding few paragraphs was all I ever experienced, I would have every reason to find my home in the atheist camp, or among the gloomiest of the Taoists. And yet, I have experienced much, much more than this . . .
Many times I have felt an undefined “something” close to me. The best word I can use to describe it is a presence—an almost tangible presence that holds me close, if only for a second. For a moment, it fills the room and lets me now that there is so much more out there than my mind can comprehend. Just a few hours ago, as I was writing some of the harshest, most cynical paragraphs of this chapter, it stopped by for a quick visit and moved me to the core. This presence doesn't negate the sense of chaos and randomness I have felt on so many other occasions, but for a while, chaos and randomness are replaced by a sense of purpose and connectedness.
It whispers in my ear to trust life—despite everything. As much as I'm firmly opposed to any anthropomorphic concept of God, I feel, in some weird way, that I can communicate with this presence as if with a conscious being. I don't hear voices coming out of burning bushes or anything of that sort, but my mind is filled with knowledge I didn't previously have. Sometimes I know exactly what's going to happen before it happens. Sometimes I receive answers to problems I couldn't solve before.
Am I going nuts? Am I delusional? I don't rule it out. After all, I don't know what this is. I don't know how to define it. I don't know how to explain it. I don't know anything about it except that I feel it and it seems very real—or at least as real as anything I have ever known. But I don't experience it all the time. For that matter, I don't even experience it a fraction of the times that I call out to it. Most often, a cold silence is all that answers me. And yet, other times I do feel it's unmistakably there.
OK, so what? Clearly this kind of experience can't be used to build a nice, coherent theology. It doesn't supply any reassuring, deeply satisfying answer, but this is my experience—nothing more and nothing less. It's all I have to work with. I would very much love to have more precise ideas about the existence and nature of God. But the only way to do it would be to lie to myself and embrace some bullshit rationalization for experience that's beyond ordinary language. And yet, this vague, imprecise experience is what pushes me to skip the atheist camp and the simplest version of agnosticism (if by agnosticism we mean not knowing anything about God because
of lack of information). Unlike this type of agnosticism, I feel I do have some direct knowledge; it just happens to be extremely incomplete and very contradictory. This is why I consider myself an agnostic with an asterisk—not the agnostic that is sitting on the fence unsure which side to support, but one who can be simultaneously very atheist and very religious because his experience leads him down both paths at once.