The Miracle Experiment
I discuss my inability to believe in a loving God often and openly with my students. Many suggestions have been made over the years to remedy the condition. Last year I was teaching a peculiar group of students who I am happy now to call my friends. I trusted them enough to try an experiment.
In our conversations, we got on to the topic of miracles. Would a miracle convince me to believe in God? I told them the story of the time my son was hit by a car in a traffic circle and left the accident unscathed. It seemed to me at the time, and still does, a quirk of physics, not a divine dispensation. I had on many occasions challenged God, “If you really care about me and the students I teach each day give me a sign right now in proof of your existence!” Needless to say, I was not given any such sign, nor have I been struck by lightning, turned into salt or smote with hellfire.
So we devised an experiment. I would genuinely pray for God to heal my son. I would then, in the prayer ask for a determinate sign. I would write down the anticipated sign and give the paper to one of my students. We would then see if the sign occurred. If it did, I would convert to Christianity with a sincere effort to become a practicing Christian, and evangelize my conversion with the depth of rhetorical power at my behest. If no sign occurred this would add inductive proof to my belief that there was no God.
My son had been home with a bad flu. I had posted as much on my Facebook. I had a student who regularly checked my Facebook, and commented on the content. She was friendly enough with me to ask if my wife was feeling better about her arthritis, or if my depression had passed. So I devised a sign that was easily possible. “Syma will ask me if my son is feeling better.” I had class with her that day, a class with a good ten minutes of chat before it got started in the classroom and one that Syma regularly attended (the real miracle would be for her to attend class on time!).
Now that morning I went out to my car to pray. I was determined to make a sincere effort, and it was for a cause that was both moral (the health of my child) and had Biblical precedent for being answered by God. As I was walking to my car I devised all sorts of interesting and intricate signs….but then one just ‘popped’ into my head. There are all sorts of reasons NOT to use the sign I did (it could happen without miraculous intervention, for example, by chance), but in keeping with the effort to be like a Christian, I went with the epiphany. Perhaps God sent me that idea, so I should go with it. And pray I did. There were false starts. There was some mocking caricatures, some feigned reverence. But then I reflected upon my son, and the importance this issue had for my students, and buckled down. I opened my heart in the best way I knew how, and prayed. I talked, shared, mused and mumbled for about ten minutes. Then I respectfully explained my experiment and asked for the sign.
I admit to thinking it just might happen. I admit to being excited and happy at the thought. But, nothing happened. Not only did Syma not ask about my son, she didn’t really even strike up conversation with me, despite some light coaxing. At the end of class I gathered the students involved and got Romaniuk to open the written sign. Failure. No sign. No sign of a sign. We even asked Syma if it occurred to her to ask me about my son’s health and she said, “not really.”
Now, if there was a God, why wouldn’t he make this small effort? I am a good teacher with a very persuasive rhetoric and a robust understanding of the history of Christian thought. I would be a very positive influence for Christianity if I believed in God. Why wouldn’t God send this small insignificant sign?
I write this experiment so that you can tell me where my reasoning, experimental method or derivation of conclusion went wrong. Does this prove there is no God? Or just that if there is one that He doesn’t care about us? Or that He just doesn’t care about me? What went wrong?
By the way, my son was really sick for the next three days.
It is in my experience that the only reason your experiment failed was because you felt a need to make an experiment at all.
ReplyDeleteFirst off "God": and I put god in quotations because in my truth god is not what traditional religion explains it to be. The modern interpretation of God to me is a personification of DIVINITY for means of an analogy used explain the following concept to under-educated peasants. (for what purpose is up for interpretation but it is happening nonetheless)
Divinity: In my opinion the definition of divinity is NOT "something that is of god", but more so a state of mind; a process of thought or pattern of thinking that we as a human BE-ING are capable of FEELING. To me it is that feeling of completeness, an understand that I am PART of the biggest "some"THING in the universe, the universe itself. In that mind state it is impossible to feel left out, it is impossible to feel empty. This is because it goes hand in hand with the realization that everything I see, everything and everyone I experience is/are part of who I am, part of who we are.
Therefore with that understanding Divinity is a direct emotional connection to the idea that is Unconditional Love. (In a sense your marriage is a Divine relationship).
So... if divinity is a direct connection with the Mind-state that is god your experiment is bound to fail.
If one has an imMEDIATE experience with the divine (getting kicked off a donky), in the very nature of its definition, the experience cannot come from outside oneself. By asking a "god" who is viewed as separate from yourself to intervene and become/create a Mediary between "himself" and you intrinsically disempower that divine thought, thus making the experiment futile.
Furthermore, if divinity and the "god-Mind" are part of yourself then they cannot be found by actively looking for evidence of it outside oneself. With you being a part of it and it being a part of you it can only be found by not looking for it. By entering a state of complete personal refection one begins to feel that connection to all things as part of ones INTERNAL BE-ing. Just like when you close your eyes and think about your foot you can feel and experience it even tho you are not directly looking at it. It is the dot under your shoe its always there but its not anywhere you can see (until after the "ahh-ha" moment, then its everywhere you see... but anyway)... you can only feel it. A feeling which does not come from outside experience but from a personal comfort and confidence that everything you do is right for you, a consciousness that I already see in you.
Also i see the object of your experiment was the final gratification that you would convert to Traditional Cristian ideals. WHY IN GOD GREAT INTERNALS WOULD YOU WANT TO DO THAT!? You of all people would never be able to submit to the ideals of the church because in your deepest of thoughts you know it to be wrong... or more specifically INCOMPLETE. To you in a divine state of mind organized religion would in fact be a step backward. Probably why your (coffee spilling) MIND put up a firewall on Syma from thinking about how your son is doing in order to protect your wisdom from having to submit to (honestly) a Lower level state of understanding. (Christianity)
But that just my opinion, I may be full of shit... but hey, maybe I'm on to something.
Good luck, and even if you never even get on a Donkey know that in my experience you are already doing exactly what you need to be doing and so long as you continue to be optimistic of your life you will die a happy man, whether you find what seek or not.
Peace, love, hippies ;), and happiness
Bald Mike
P.S. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWGnbI7QjQQ
ReplyDeleteBald Mike
Asking for a sign is something I've never understood. I get why it appeals to people, it's a sort of quick and easy downloadable version of God that we would all like to be true. Myself included. As a married guy though I can picture the look on my wife's face if I suddenly said after years of silence and apathy, “Ok honey, lay it on me, I'm finally ready for you to show me the joys of an organized laundry room! Oh, also, I'm going to need it today and now so I can make sure it's right for me.” It's the kind of thing we would expect anyone else in our daily lives, especially a loved one to sneer at. So why do we expect it of God? I mean that 'we' sincerely, because I am by no means exempt. There are many times in my life when I adopted the same tactic and attitude.
ReplyDeleteMost people feel like the concept of God owes them proof. It's something people have adopted over a long history of greasy used car salesmen types exploiting our goodwill. “If you expect my money/time/interest I'm going to need to see the goods first and you're going to have to convince me it's worth it.” It's no surprise we are that way, it's learned behaviour and plenty people are deserving of that attitude. I think it's one of the reasons people in antiquity had an easier time with the concept of divinity. It's not because they were stupid, or so much less advanced, or lacked the guiding hand of science, they were just completely unentitled. No one owed them anything at all, so most especially, neither did God.
I can't answer this one. I've never believed in a God of magic. I believe in a God who, except in the rarest of circumstances works via the natural world that He created. I see Him as the reason humans developed an epiglottis to cover their windpipe when they swallow. That doesn't seem random to me. I think about the very first single-celled organism. I think, what did it eat? Wait, how did it even have a digestive system. Wait, even if there was stuff for it to eat, why was it not poison to its particular type of digestive system. How was it automatically attuned to the environment. It had a means of locomotion to find food. How was that means perfectly adjusted to the environment it found itself in when it poofed into existence. With random mutation being responsible, (even though, without a base to start from what the hell was mutating?), why did it not wind up with flagella akin to cement boots? How did it have a system to process the energy it took in. There are a million seemingly impossible perfect coincidences that took place once upon a time and its in those details that I see God. Not because I attribute the word God to what I don't understand, but because I see order in what by right should be chaos.
I see God in these tiny spots, the cracks in between. So, to me personally, when it comes to the bigger picture, the hand of God is all the more obvious in the grander things. When you think of the trillions upon trillions of seeming impossibilities, the split second timing, what time the driver of the car woke up that day, when they picked up their keys, left the house, you can go all the way back to when his great-great grandfather spotted a twinkle in his great-great grandmother's eye... everything aligned to put your son and that driver exactly where they were for that quirk of physics that kept your son safe, which began with a big bang billions and billions of years ago. Compare that to you sitting in your car and asking for God to hijack your student's brain and make them ask you a question for proof of His existence. I think He answered you long before you were even born.
Beach,
ReplyDeleteI’ve been meaning to reply to this for some time and I keep putting it off--usually with legitimate arguments, because life tends to be conveniently busy that way, but often out of sheer, overwhelming laziness. It’s also a matter that needs some chewing and that takes time; chew too fast and you’ll choke.
But I’ve been chewing for a while now and I still owe you a comment. After all, even if I can’t remember a specific instance of suggesting some sort of ‘ask God to show Himself to you’ prayer I probably did because the normal ending to that line is something like ‘…and He will answer that prayer.’ So the question for me becomes: if you asked God to show Himself to you, why didn’t He?
The cop-out answer that I could give is “well, maybe you just weren’t sincere” and while that would neatly resolve God (and me) of any wrongdoing, it’s just a cop-out. In the end, I can’t judge the disposition of your heart (or soul or mind) but insofar as I know you at all, I have no reason to think that you’re insincere--especially not when I’ve been your apologist to various junior seminarians over the years.
Another spot I could use to knock over the whole experiment is Syma. After all, you can’t use a fallible human being as an intermediary to prove God’s existence to yourself, especially not when the God you are trying to prove is a God who has given men free will. This is a spurious, half-hearted objection too though, if only because God’s respect for free will does not remove the possibility of Him prompting human action, especially in a willing subject. It’s a pitfall, but not the crux.
The problem with both the foregoing suggestions is that they don’t address whether such an experiment is tenable in the first place. It would seem that I would accept as given that it is possible from what I’ve written in the first couple paragraphs, but I feel the need now to qualify this. In much the same vein as the other commenters here, the problem with your experiment is that it is telling God to reveal Himself on your terms, in the way you want. This need not be done in bad faith but that’s beside the point. The point is that there is a difference between “asking God to reveal Himself to you” and “asking God to reveal Himself to you in a very specific way that you have picked out for Him.” Now, I realise that the specificity of the revelation was done with the idea in mind of making it objective for you, so that you couldn’t give yourself an easy reason to back out of any such revelation… but it still won’t fly.
Alright, Joosten, you say, what should I have done then? Should I have just asked God to reveal Himself to me? What if I’ve done that before and He’s given no sign? Or, perhaps worse, what if I’ve done that before and I simply don’t know if He gave me a sign? What do I have to do to get the experiment right?
Part II...
DeleteWell, I don’t even really know if asking God to reveal Himself to you is the right way to go about things. I DO believe that He will reveal Himself when sincerely asked, but I also believe that He doesn’t answer most prayers the way we expect Him to, and that applies here as it does anywhere else.
To bring in something that bounces off another comment here, God is utterly transcendent and would be utterly separate from us (and thus completely unlikely to reveal Himself to us) if He had not bridged His transcendence with the immanence of Jesus, God the Son made the Son of Man and He is where your starting point needs to be.
On reflection, it does not make a whole lot of sense for me, as a Christian, to suggest that you can or should come to faith in the God of Jesus Christ except through Jesus Christ. Once you have that relationship with Him it might make sense to challenge Him in prayers like that, but not before. Jesus is God and Jesus is Man, the mediator between God and man precisely to bridge the gap that this experiment is attempting to bridge.
Nor is this a simple matter of praying “Jesus, reveal yourself to me” rather than praying “God, reveal yourself to me.” If it were that simple, then God would never have needed to take on human flesh to bring us back to Him. Thus, the way to faith in the triune God of Jesus is to come to know Jesus as a man, as His first disciples did. As far as faith goes, this is why we have the Gospels and why we have the Church: so that we can come to know God as a man, in human ways.
Recognising that this probably doesn’t resolve the question for you, but hoping it answers something, I remain,
Joosten