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(Marriage of the Lamb continued)
I am writing because
God has shown me a better way, a way that is far more powerful and far more effective than fire from the sky. If I can know
him well in the world as it is, and find such pleasure in him that I have no desire to depart to a better place, then violence
and destruction are not necessary. God can mold the world as it is into a suitable vessel for himself, and we ourselves can
be made suitable vessels. I cannot do the molding, but I can see from where I am that it is possible for God to do the molding
without getting violent.
In fact, violence would be counterproductive. Just as Jesus’ first coming radically transformed
the world and for a time caused it to witness properly of God, so his second coming will complete the transformation, his
presence in gentleness will compel transformations from within. Those of his who are living will change from within, and
those raised from the dead will change from within, until the evil is driven out and God fills us all. This is the meaning
of the Marriage of the Lamb.
Yet there appears to be a problem with the logic. When Jesus returns, won’t his return
itself be the most dramatic of all miracles? And how about when he starts raising the dead? So how can we expect these dramatic
miracles to be beneficial when the ones Jesus did two thousand years ago were of almost no immediate, positive spiritual value
for those witnessing them?
The problem disappears when we realize that those who accept him at his second coming
have already known and accepted him before he arrives. His second coming will not be a time for winning new followers but
a time for purifying the world and consummating the marriage. Those who have not accepted him before he arrives will continue
to doubt and reject and continue to suspect him of trickery and deception until they are forced out.
No marriage
lasts forever, because marriage is a process, not the fulfillment itself. The commitment of the Lamb to his wife, and of
the wife to the Lamb, will remain, but at some point the process itself will be complete and will terminate.
•
What
will heaven be like? It will be like the “kingdom of God” that Jesus was trying to impose on the earth the last time he came.
Jesus was from above, and his moral teachings were from above. That is why they were so impractical and irrelevant.
We
all know what the moral principles of the world have been down through the ages; they are based on survival of the fittest.
Nature glorifies those who are up and tramples on those who are down. This is the morality that works: Help those who can
help you, and step on those who cannot.
Jesus’ moral teaching was not quite the opposite, but it was not far from
it. He said we must help the sick and the needy, visit the imprisoned and stand up for the oppressed. Help those who are
unable to pay back the favor. If heaven is to work, it must work on principles from above. If people are to be filled with
God and take his identity, there must be no stragglers. If one is sick or needy, all will be unable to live with God in perfection
until the deficiency for that one is corrected. In heaven people will help others be healthy and satisfied enough to live
in continuous knowledge of God.
•
Many Christians have held the childish view that people are not necessary
or even very important for God either in the world to come or the present world. Rather, God for some inexplicable reason
just “loved” us even before he made us and so decided to preserve us in complete happiness with him in heaven. It is as if
humans are God’s special toys or pets, God’s distractions perhaps to relieve his boredom, distractions that, if need be, he
could do without at the drop of a hat. So we should all feel very lucky that he has rather arbitrarily promised not to do
without us.
This view contrasts sharply with my own perception of God’s motives. Nevertheless I acknowledge that
numerous statements in the Bible can be gathered in support of it. Certainly among the most outrageous of such statements
is one attributed to John the Baptist: “God can raise up children of Abraham from...stones” (Matthew 3:9).
John’s
message was legitimate. He was telling Jews that lineage or heredity provided no basis for confidence before God. But to
take John’s statement as a commentary on God’s abilities or intentions as creator is to trivialize God’s actual creative activity.
The concept that God could create descendants of Abraham from stones, of course, is not so outrageous to those who believe
the world is only a few thousand years old; but that belief is untenable.
The message God sends continuously is that
his creation and we ourselves are not just important but essential to him. We are not just God’s diversion but his principal
undertaking. It is as if he is staking his very existence on bringing us to fulfillment in him, because our fulfillment in
him is his fulfillment in us. This concept also has powerful support in the Bible: “God so loved the world that he gave
his only son.” Not only did God give his son, but he continues to give himself to us.
We are the wife of God, and
the Church is the bride of Christ. To say that God does not need us is to trivialize the marriage and the role of the wife.
To say that God could make another wife out of rocks is to trivialize his creative activity since the beginning of time.
A wife created in that manner could never be a true wife but would always be a toy. The wife’s role is to reveal to God who
he really is, to show him who he is and to proclaim his worthiness from a perspective different from his own. That is why
she needs to come to him as an independent person from a place he himself has never been.
In teaching these things
I become a spiritual descendent of Joachim of Flora. I say that what we are and what we do are important after all. God
cannot throw us out and substitute beings arbitrarily crafted from rocks without violating his own purposes.
Extrapolating
to heaven, we infer that what we achieve in the present age will not be totally irrelevant in the age to come. Scientific
discoveries have become very important for a correct and complete understanding of God, and people no doubt will continue
to use and enjoy what humans have learned long after Jesus comes again. God will not satisfy our physical needs with continuous
successions of dramatic miracles, because then our own bodies and minds would become irrelevant. Of what good are hands and
arms if they have nothing useful to do? We can hope that we will not need to work unless we want to work, but many of us
could not imagine being content without having something useful to do.
To say that people are important, however,
sets alarms ringing in the minds of scientists knowledgeable about the almost unimaginable vastness of the universe, so we
need to return to that point. Now that we are just developing realistic ideas of the size and complexity of the universe—for
the first time in human history(!), how can we be so presumptuous as to say that people are important? The longer and more
carefully we look into the night sky, the more clearly we understand how many galaxies lie out there, each one like a universe
unto itself. Surely in all those galaxies there must be uncountable solar systems like our own, some with planets that can
and probably do support life similar to what we know on Earth. God is not one to paint himself into a corner: If one avenue
towards personal fulfillment becomes impassable, he can take an alternate route.
Nevertheless we know for sure that
he has chosen our kind, because he has sent himself to us in the form of a man, Jesus the Christ. And we ourselves know him
intimately and know that he will fulfill himself in us. As for what he is doing in other galaxies, we have no meaningful
knowledge. It is relevant to acknowledge that there may be living beings on distant planets, but it is not useful to speculate
at this point about what God may be doing with them.
•
What will happen to those who at Jesus’ second coming
do not belong to him? Is there really a hell? The reality of hell is prominent in Jesus’ teaching. I have often thought
that it would be best if Jesus were to raise from the dead only his own people and leave the others in oblivion or wherever,
but the New Testament insists that all will be raised, and many will go to hell.
But where might hell be? If those
who reject Jesus are raised with physical bodies, where will they go? It would appear that no one accessible to us today
has a reasonable or believable answer. So I persist in entertaining notions that maybe the New Testament doesn’t have the
picture quite right, and that there is a hell all right but that its occupants will not have physical bodies. Given our current
understanding of the universe and our knowledge of God, the idea that there should be a physical place set aside for the physical
bodies of those who have rejected Jesus does not seem to fit. Such a place would be a blemish on the creation.
Hell
is necessary to prevent rebellion among those who live with Jesus after his second coming. It must serve as a continual though
distant reminder that rebellion is not an acceptable option for those who love God. If all people were saved to live with
Jesus, some would eventually rebel and refuse God, just as the evil spirits did. There is something in the nature of persons
with egos that will cause some to reject the status quo no matter how heavenly just because everyone else accepts it.
When
one as a spirit knows the Spirit of God as a person, one either loves him or rejects him. There is no middle ground. To
reject the Spirit to his face is unforgivable, because God has nothing of greater value, nothing that can please or satisfy
more deeply, than his Spirit. God has no means to win back the one who, while in the embrace of his Spirit, rejects him.
I felt the twinge of temptation to reject God soon after I first saw him. The temptation did not last long enough
to amount to anything, but the feeling of deep horror as I pulled myself back from that brink is locked in my memory. The
horror came partly from the realization that I was not completely in control of my impulses, and that under somewhat different
circumstances I truly would have gone the other way. Specifically, if I had been in an environment where the world testified
very effectively of God, and everyone appeared to love him, I would have gone the other way just to be different. Some years
ago upon recalling my initial vision of God and this temptation to rebel I captured my thoughts in the following words:
It is curious my love
That I owe my place in you
Partly to the world’s godlessness
I could not have existed
If
the Church
Had been strong, influential
Powerful in the world
Had you come to me as you did
Under those circumstances
I’d
have rebelled
Cursed you to your face
And joined the opposition
. . .
When you first touched me
I could
tell you were preeminent
Your world should have given you your due
I thought
But instead it ignored you
You had
become a fictional hero
Of some distant past
Or worse
You came to me as one in need
And I sympathized with your
cause
I perceived I had a place with you
And I said I wanted to help
You were in need and worthy
I loved you
and said
Send me
. . .
So if the world had testified properly of God, it is true that I would not have had
to fast. But I would not have been God’s, either. I would have rejected him to his face.
What about the possibility
that those who reject Jesus simply pass out of existence? No one has proved that humans have souls that continue on after
the body dies, and just the fact that some people permanently cease to exist might be a sufficient deterrent to keep God’s
chosen ones from rebelling, might it not?
I could have lived with this concept indefinitely had not a personal experience
clearly indicated the concept was wrong. Our literature and lore are replete with stories of people returning from the dead
as spirits, as ghosts, but the experiential base for such stories is in question. Typically people who believe they have
contacted the dead in some form accept that it is possible, and others disbelieve.
The experiences of such contact
are not in themselves a suitable topic for scientific research, although the recollections afterward, as psychological phenomena,
may be, as they have become also for those “experiencing” UFO abduction. Nevertheless, science cannot tell us whether people
have souls that live on after their bodies die or not: There is nothing that scientific instruments can measure. That is
one reason, the morning after my own contact with the soul of a dead person, I put down in writing the details of the experience
as clearly as I could.
As a kind of entity the soul of the dead person was almost identical to God or an evil spirit;
that is, the psychological processes involved in experiencing the soul were indistinguishable from those involved in perceiving
God or evil spirits. The big difference was in the level of sub-verbal communication. With spirits I have experienced very
little communication that is even remotely verbal. One learns from a spirit by extended exposure, as it were by testing various
thoughts and actions to see what the spirit reinforces or discourages. Reinforcement comes in the form of increasing the
strength of the bond and the associated level of pleasure.
With the human soul there was, in contrast, an almost
continuous flow of “conversation”. There were no audible words, but clear thoughts that my mind converted to words flowed
between us. The soul was not a masquerading evil spirit, and it definitely was not God. In either of those cases I would
have recognized it for what it was.
The incident took place perhaps around ten or eleven o’clock at night after I
had left the cosmic ray laboratory at the University of Leeds in Leeds, England. I was doing high-energy cosmic ray research
for my Ph.D. thesis at the time and typically put in very long days. I reproduce here word-for-word what I wrote the following
morning:
The morning after the crash
Linger still the vivid images
(Perceived first under the
Deep yellow
light of sodium arc lamps
Between the black-spired church
And a row of banks
On grimy Woodhouse Lane)
One, conscious,
lay
Wrapped in red
On the sidewalk
Mid pellets of shattered glass
(Was there another in the ambulance
Already?)
The
car badly bashed
Deeply indented with the impression
Of the steel lamppost unmistakable
(It hit from the side!)
Then
after minutes they
Pulled out another crushed body
Unconscious but
Apparently alive
A final red blanket
For
the final victim
One could see the long auburn hair
Then emerged first, as they pulled on her
Feet shod in red high
heels
They lay the body down
Something different about this one
I moved over to get a closer look
Yes, I thought,
I ought to observe
Death also
They punched the body
Rhythmically in the chest
Hoping to start the pump again
They
inserted a tube into the mouth
They blew in
Hoping to start the lungs again
To no avail
The thing lay lifeless
Still
with the color and bloom
Of youth
But limp
Totally unresponsive
So they pulled the blanket
To cover the face
I
felt weak though
Soon recovered but was
Uncomfortable
So I walked
To find quiet for contemplation
On
the moor
The soul of the dead one
Came to me as I walked
“To think that you were
Living in my hometown!
To
think that you were
Passing by as I died!
So this is what it is
Everything is sublime”
“There are incongruities
Imperfections”
I thought
But she was not deterred
“Shall I be able to stay
Here with you?” “Only for
A time, for there
are
Others
And while you are
Here, you occupy my
Full attention
Only for a short time”
I walked
on but
She persisted with me
At intervals
“Would you like to return?”
I asked. She hesitated
Then I felt she
tried
To return
For a moment I thought
She’d returned, but I soon realized
She hadn’t succeeded
“I can’t
get in” she said
Almost buoyantly
She had no desire
To return, but thought for a moment
To ease the burden on
her relatives
“It’s too far gone
It won’t take me” she said
As though it were of no consequence
“You really
can go back, you know”
I replied. But she said “Oh, that—
It’s not the proper time for such things
It’s not time
That’s
too much for now”
Then she left for a while
Several minutes later
I realized she’d started to panic
She’d
tried to go back
Had been frustrated
Became desperate
“I can’t go back!
I can’t make it!”
This time there was
an edge of terror in her tone
But she calmed as she returned
To me and said
“Let me stay here with you
Always”
But I replied
“That is impossible”
“Then I really have died
Then I really am dead”
“No it’s not as bad
as that
You can visit
And more:
We look to a time
When all willing souls
Will be able to express themselves
In
forms
Not threatened by death”
Jillian Smale (19)
Spencer Place
Chapeltown, Leeds
The experience
was one-of-a-kind for me, and it left an indelible impression. I have no reason to dismiss it as a hallucination. It also
left me feeling uncomfortable, not because it was particularly unpleasant, because it wasn’t. It was instead as if I had
improperly interfered with the girl’s dying. She looked to me for advice, but I was at a loss and could suggest only a return
to physical life. Since then I have made it a point to avoid scenes of traffic accidents and other disaster sites. But the
incident went far to convince me ever since that a soul lives on after a human body dies.
Where it goes only God
knows. If the soul lives on, and if the person had rejected Jesus, then the soul will suffer a real hell, even if it is not
a physical hell. That is the point.
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My Creed and my State of Mind
People who
love God need a creed, because feelings about God can change rapidly. Readers may have guessed by now that to a large degree
this book is my creed. It ties down my feelings about God as a hand holding the string anchors a kite. Over the years time
and again I have tried with pen and paper to capture the intense and beautiful feelings of God that otherwise too soon fly
away. The visions have been exhilarating and wonderful, but they do not last. This book is an attempt to preserve the concepts
behind them more or less systematically.
I sought a relationship with God that was so compelling and vivid that I
could never again doubt him. What kinds of experiences are compelling and vivid? Experiences that generate intense feelings
are certainly among them. But experiences of low intensity that come again and again can also become compelling and vivid.
Both kinds of experience over time combine to create our sense of reality; they give us confidence that we are real and that
we live in a real world. What I sought from God, then, was experiences that would make him an inescapable part of my reality.
God complied both in the area of intensity and in the area of duration. Spiritual experiences, ones arising from
interactions of my own spirit with spirits of other persons, have been among the most intense of my life. It has been this
high level of intensity along with the recognition that persons outside myself were partly in control of the feelings that
lies at the very foundation of my belief in God. Does God exist? Yes, because he and other spiritual persons have caused
feelings in me that were as intense and thus as real as any feelings from physical perceptions.
The ability to distinguish
one spiritual person from others—for example, God from demons—enhances one’s sense of the reality of spiritual persons. If
God were the only spiritual person accessible, I might be tempted to think that God was more a state of my mind than a separate
person. The fact that spiritual persons are clearly distinguishable from one another in the absence of any physical characteristics
becomes convincing evidence that they are real persons separate from the perceiving mind.
God has caused intense
feelings in me for short periods, from minutes to hours, and he has also caused low-intensity feelings that have persisted
on and off for periods of years, even decades. So the spiritual has indeed become an inescapable part of my personal reality.
I could not reject it without rejecting my own existence.
What then do I lack? Why this need for a creed? Why
do I still from time to time entertain doubts?
I have no doubts about the everyday reality, about the location of
the kitchen table, for example. The everyday reality has generated feelings typically much less intense than those from God,
but it has two things in its favor: It stays put, and other people seem to see it in exactly the way I do. God is accessible,
but not in the same way as the kitchen table. The kitchen table is very predictable. I can look at it and touch it and bump
against it over and over again, and it always seems about the same. When I leave it I know exactly how to get back to it;
I can predict over and over where it will be, and my predictions are always correct. And other people seem to feel the same
way about it.
If God were a thing like a kitchen table, we would have no doubts about him. But knowledge of God
has little in common with knowledge of the everyday reality. Knowing him is much more like knowing another human than like
knowing a kitchen table, but it is even more challenging, because he has no physical presence. Knowledge of God for an individual
is necessarily personal and private. It is not terribly predictable, and other people do not often, or perhaps never, have
exactly the same knowledge or feel the same way about it. At the root of doubt, then, for those whose perceptions of God
are intense, is a suspicion that the perceptions could have been generated from within, that they could have been hallucinations.
One who knows God knows at the moments in which he knows him intimately and consciously that the knowledge is real
and that God is as real as the one who perceives him. But when the intensity of the perception fades, doubts can come.
When
I am not in God’s embrace but am prone to doubt, I can still believe that God is not my personal hallucination. There are
at least two reasons. Perhaps most important is that I am critical of all my perceptions and continually test them. I learn
from such testing that my perceptions of the everyday reality are not subject to hallucinations. If those perceptions have
proved reliable and not hallucinatory, why should my spiritual perceptions be hallucinatory?
I test spiritual perceptions
also, and over the years they have proved consistent with the existence of spiritual persons outside myself. If I were capable
of generating my spiritual perceptions from within, I suspect that, after so many decades, I should be in firm control of
them. I should by now be able to generate them to my specifications. In practice that is seldom or never the case. Several
such perceptions have been so unexpected as to be startling, although most of those occurred relatively early in my spiritual
life. But even when my own spiritual state seems identical to what it was at other times, the perceptions often vary. I
know that I do not control them completely; the persons I perceive exercise some control.
One might object that the
mentally ill who suffer hallucinations also do not control their perceptions, but their lack of control does not mean that
their perceptions are valid. Schizophrenics are commonly tormented by hostile voices that exist only in their own minds,
even though the persons to whom they attribute the voices are often real people. To the mentally ill, the hallucinations
are as real as can be, and they also cause very intense feelings. Those who suffer such hallucinations, however, become dysfunctional;
other aspects of their lives deteriorate, and their abilities diminish. More often than not, unless they can bring the symptoms
under control, their ability to lead productive lives vanishes completely.
It is relevant to point out that hallucinations
of psychotics involve specific senses: hearing, taste, smell or vision. My perceptions of spiritual persons, in contrast,
have been devoid of such sensory content.
Long ago I used to pray hard for some clear sign from God that would be
detectable by one or more of my five senses, but God never obliged me. Now I know that his failure to oblige me was for my
benefit, because anything perceptible by the five senses is at least one step removed from God himself. Had he done what
I asked, I may well have taken refuge in the sensory perceptions and may never have come to know him as truly and profoundly
as I eventually did. Because God is a spirit, anything of him that is perceptible by the five senses is not himself. Now
that I know better I insist on knowing him as he is and for what he is. No longer would I value a sign from him, because
it would be at least one step removed.
Although I cannot hope to provide airtight proof for the skeptical that my
visions of God are not hallucinatory, I can at least establish that I have maintained a fairly broad range of functionality
and emotional stability and hence do not fit a psychotic profile. While my personality traits are probably at least a standard
deviation from the mean for the general population, they are probably not far from the mean for academics and scientists.
Over the past two decades I have:
done creative geophysical research, presented scientific
papers
orally at many professional meetings and
published a number of written scientific papers;
organized
several workshops for fellow
geophysicists;
served a two-year term as chairman of the Research
Committee
of the Society of Exploration
Geophysicists;
raised two capable children, a son and a daughter, under
what were sometimes very trying domestic
circumstances;
avoided divorce and eventually
established a good
relationship with my wife despite sometimes
very trying circumstances;
pursued
hobbies, of which my long-standing favorite
has been growing fruits and vegetables.
•
Perhaps the hardest
thing to deal with in writing this book is the knowledge that some of my colleagues will attribute the whole thing to hallucination,
illusion or some other form of self-deception. For them as well as for myself I must be as convincing as I can be—inadequate
as that will be for some—that I have not generated my spiritual perceptions from within.
To try making the case more
explicitly, let me delve a bit deeper into the psychology of spiritual perceptions and the basis or lack thereof for trusting
them. I have been speaking as though, if my spiritual perceptions are not real, they must be hallucinations. By definition
a hallucination is a sensory impression that is not attributable to any external stimulus. Previously I referred to spiritual
perceptions as extrasensory, not sensory. Hence, if spiritual perceptions are not sensory but hallucinations are sensory,
it might seem inappropriate to call false spiritual perceptions hallucinations.
While it is true that spiritual perceptions
do not involve senses that scientists have identified and studied, spiritual perceptions really are sensory. Under certain
conditions people can sense God or demons or other people. Exactly how we sense persons, or exactly what kinds of information
can be transferred, we do not know, but we do know that the sense “organ” is something like the entire body functioning as
a unit.
Sometimes this spiritual sense seems to have a special locus within the body. That is, if we were to ask
ourselves where, subjectively, the sense of vision seems to be concentrated, we might identify some point inside the head.
So the ability to sense other persons sometimes seems to be concentrated in a particular location in the body. For example,
my ability to perceive God at times seems to be concentrated just above the heart. The whole body is always involved, but
focal points can emerge.
Skeptics who assume that there is no such thing as spiritual perception will be amused.
They will attribute my spiritual perceptions if not to hallucination then to illusion of some sort. They might believe that
I’m sensing something but that it’s not what I think. In response I can only say that, when spiritual perceptions are intense,
they are overwhelmingly perceptions of other persons. From instance to instance many superficial things such as environment
or time of day may differ, but the person persists. When the spiritual perception is not very intense the person is not always
identifiable as a person, but with help from memory one can extrapolate also from weak perception to the person.
People
experience hallucinations for many reasons other than mental illness. Among them are physical illness, psychological trauma,
sensory deprivation, drug use, fatigue or even “conditions of excitement, fear, ecstasy or intense anticipation” (Encyclopaedia
Britannica). It would be unreasonable for me (or anyone else) to deny having been in any of those states. I can say, however,
that none of my intense spiritual perceptions occurred when I was in any of those states, although sometimes the spiritual
perceptions themselves have induced one or more such states.
Let me partly take that back. A few times when I’ve
had the flu or other fever-inducing illness, I have indeed had intense spiritual perceptions. I remember drawing remarkable
conclusions from such perceptions and regarding them while ill as particularly valuable. However, upon recovery I recognized
these “valuable conclusions” to be products of distorted thinking and largely rejected them. Spiritual insights that may
be partly fever-inspired, I learned, are suspect.
A most important consideration is the recurrence and duration of
the intense spiritual perceptions. If I were talking about, say, just a few occurrences decades ago but never since, the
skeptical and analytical part of my mind possibly by now would have relegated them all to the scrap heap of internally generated
mental phenomena, of no more consequence than an old but vivid dream.
What I am talking about instead is very many
events, most by far of which occurred when I was physically healthy, well rested and in a tranquil but alert state of mind.
The perceptions of particular intensity, largely unlike any before or since, that occurred throughout the twenty months following
my fasting had a total duration that must easily have exceeded a thousand hours. Since then intense spiritual perceptions
mostly of a different nature have taken what must now be well over ten times that. And this is not counting spiritual perceptions
of low intensity, which have been even more common.
Who’s counting? In any case, if this was all hallucination,
then a significant fraction of my life has been spent hallucinating. If illusion, then my ability to interpret what I sense
is extremely poor. But I am a successful experimental scientist by profession, and neither of these alternatives, hallucination
or illusion, seems remotely plausible. The ability to distinguish between what is inside and what is outside, or the ability
to interpret sensory information, could not suffer such complete breakdown over such an extended period unless there was severe
mental illness.
OK, so if my spiritual perceptions are neither hallucinations nor illusions, and if I am not mentally
ill, the spiritual “perceptions” still might simply be fantasies that I somehow cannot bring myself to acknowledge, might
they not? Some people not regarded as mentally ill still are on or a bit beyond the verge of being unable to distinguish
fantasy from reality. A widely known example is that of the child who has an imaginary playmate.
People who have
difficulty separating fantasy from reality are known as fantasy prone. Joe Nickell includes a long list of personality traits
of the fantasy prone in an article on alien abduction in the May/June 1996 issue of the Skeptical Inquirer. Among these traits
are such things as having a rich fantasy life, high susceptibility to hypnosis, and religious visions.
As a child
I certainly enjoyed daydreaming and did it a lot. I was also an avid reader of Grimms’ Fairy Tales. While I thus certainly
had a rich fantasy life, I never for a moment confused my daydreams with reality. In high school I witnessed students hypnotizing
others in the dormitory and was fascinated with the results, but at the same time I felt confident (and still do) that no
one would be able to hypnotize me. When it comes to religious visions, I’ve had a lot of them, as long as there’s no requirement
for actual visual or aural perceptions. But up until age 19, when God first touched me, I’d had nothing like a vision and
only a very weak indication of any ability for extrasensory perception. Those things followed, and I’ve always considered
them to be consequences of the encounters with God, they are gifts from God.
But why in university did I jump from
English to physics? It was for several reasons, but partly because I recognized in myself too much of a tendency towards
soft thinking, too much of the soft humanities side and too little of the hard, analytical scientist’s side. Art and intuition
came naturally, but careful, critical analysis was something I had to work at. So I went into physics partly to become a
different kind of personality.
While never completely abandoning the soft side I successfully acquired the hard side
and became a competent scientist. Although now I can be as analytical as anyone—as I hope scientists who read my published
papers will attest, I have never discovered a valid reason to reject my religious visions. Now I know more clearly than ever
that I am not, and never was, a sort of person who’s likely to mistake fantasy for reality.
First I challenged myself
with physics, now I challenge myself by reading the Skeptical Inquirer and scientific journals. The Skeptical Inquirer has
been particularly useful for getting me to ask myself tough questions and efficiently raise doubts. The questions and doubts
have shaken me, but never for long. The experiences of God have been too powerful for the doubts to last. That is the bottom
line.
•
From the human perspective the blame for the common problem of doubting God lies squarely with God
himself. He is quite unlike all the things in the everyday reality that we never doubt; he is a spirit. But the blame lies
also with the world, which asserts that it needs no God. From God’s perspective the blame is ours, because we could be spiritual
but are not.
God partially solved this problem, this incompatibility of the physical with the spiritual, by becoming
human in the man Jesus, but the man Jesus only told us that to know him we had to look past the physical to the spiritual.
Jesus gave us hope and encouragement, but he did not and could not change the reality: To know God we still and always must
know a spirit, not a thing made of matter.
As the apostle Paul wrote (2 Corinthians 5:16), “…From now on we regard
no one as merely human. Though we may have looked upon Christ as merely human, we now do so no longer.” The merely human
part of us is the vessel of clay. When we are filled with spiritual treasure, we transcend. Jesus as one from above was
filled with the Spirit of God. If we see him only as a man and fail to perceive the Spirit within, he has eluded us.
When
God becomes as accessible as the kitchen table, or even as accessible as another human, then we shall need no creeds. Until
then, because he is a spirit and we are not always spiritual, we need a creed.
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