Finding G-d - Part One
An Atheist Hearing G-d’s Echo
Part 1: A Crack in the Foundation
I find it incredibly difficult to fully admit my newfound theism; my practical reasoning led me to embrace a godless reality. I still find Dawkins to be an incredibly clear thinker with logic and reason behind his every breath–I admire and appreciate his contributions. I hold in great regard all of “the four horsemen:” Dawkins, Harris, Dennet, and the late Hitchens. Thus, despite the many familial and institutional pressures on the side of religiosity, it feels much more difficult to shake off my atheism than initially embracing it. A journey to faith lacks the materialistic rationality, deterministic thought patterns, and objective models that atheistic life can ostensibly boast of. The inherent contradictions between worldly evil and that of an omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient G-d are unsolvable. A G-d that is everywhere, all-knowing, all-good, and all-powerful, cannot allow for child cancer, the brutality of war, rape, and all the appalling evils of this world. Whether Epicurus' trilemma or a simple reductio argument based on the preceding assumptions, the rational case against G-d seems open-and-shut. Yet, cracks started to appear in my perfectly rational model of the world–no, not fallacies in atheistic logic nor misassumptions about the nature of G-d, but experiential and revelatory cracks. These cracks then exposed the shaky foundations on which I based my materialistic rationality.
I won’t dive into Metaxas and his Aristotelian-rational case for G-d because, while thought-provoking, it misses the point. At best, he makes a strong case for Spinoza’s G-d but a weak case for a personal, Christian G-d. Even Dawkins could embrace Spinoza’s understanding of G-d–that we can find Him in nature and all the beautiful complexity of our material world and its inner interactions. Effectively that is G-d–in some sense. Spinoza’s G-d is not antithetical to an Abrahamic deity but constitutes a subset. In other words, the Christian G-d is Spinoza’s G-d and more. The “and more” is the reason for religion and worship. The “and more” is my newly re-acquired faith. I will attempt to explain my journey and appreciation of that “and more.”
I think it’s impossible to break free of atheism's secular, materialistic rationality without some personal spiritual or revelatory experience to contradict it. We don’t need a powerful mystical encounter such as a vision or divine revelation; the personal experience only needs to be beautiful and break the rational foundation of our model of the world. It could be a song or symphony that stirs our inner core without a satisfactory cogent explanation. We could still find a rational explanation for the emotion: the release of dopamine or other hormones; however, the inner experience drives us beyond the mechanical and forces us to ponder on the question of “why?” Why did we evolve this innate ability to experience such a profound inner experience? Even if we come up with evolutionary benefits to explain the trait, the deep experience continues to compel us to continue prodding at a deeper question. We may ask, “Why does the evolutionary system necessitate or even allow for such personal experiences?” Perhaps we may ponder if we could imagine alternate evolutionary paths that do not require such experiences. A reductio ad absurdum argument gets us to the point of irrationality that ultimately crumbles the rationalistic fundamentals of our secular worldview. At this point, Dan Dennet might point out that there are stupid questions that we shouldn’t ask. I disagree.
In fact, this experience (and our questioning of it) might be analogous to Godel’s incompleteness theorem, which also highlights the limits of formal, logical systems. The theorem postulates that in any logical system, we encounter true statements within it that cannot be proven within the system. In Godel’s second “Incompleteness Theorem,” he mathematically proves that if a formal system does not allow for internal contradictions, then it cannot prove its own consistency.
Mathematics and logic are the ultimate, pure abstraction of our material reality. It’s a beautiful echo of G-d’s creation that itself shows that no matter how much we try to rationalize every atom in our cosmos, our efforts will remain futile–we are inside the system. Similarly, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle confirms this idea. That said, we should still try, as much as possible, to parse as many of these mysteries. I would argue, in fact, that it's our responsibility; science, mathematics, and rational thought bring us closer to G-d since it’s all a microcosm of His will. In a way, isn’t that a beautiful conception–that we will always enjoy material enigmas to unravel? Only G-d’s infinite nature and His will can allow for an infinite cosmos, an infinite science, an infinite mathematics…
Meeting and falling in love with my wife represented this experiential crack in the rational foundation of my atheism. I could explain the raw emotion through some mechanistic process: neurochemicals, endorphins, etc. However, the deepness of spirit and the connection I felt in the divine through her weakened the bedrock on which my atheism rested. At this point, I felt prepared to question my disbelief in the divine but not yet fully embrace a G-d, let alone the personal Abrahamic G-d of the Bible or Torah. At this point in my journey, I became a thoughtful Agnostic.
