![\"LA](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2015\/12\/800px-LA_Skyline_Mountains2.jpg\")
<\/a>(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
This column of mine, which I originally published in the Deseret News<\/em> for 4 July 2013, seems to me relevant also to our celebration of Labor Day, which is today: \u00a0\u201cA day for celebration and remembrance\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Driving over to Depoe Bay from Portland, we passed very near McMinnville, and I couldn\u2019t help thinking of the famous 1950 McMinnville UFO sighting. \u00a0So, as we drove along, my wife read to me from \u201cThe History of the 1950 Trent UFO Sighting in McMinnville, Oregon.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 And, coincidentally, we drove right by the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum<\/a> \u2014 the home of Howard Hughes\u2019s famous \u201cSpruce Goose\u201d \u2014 within about sixty seconds of her reading the article\u2019s mention of \u201cthe area where Evergreen Aviation stands today,\u201d which figures in the story.<\/p>\n We hadn\u2019t been in our condo fully five minutes yesterday before we noticed the spout of a gray whale just off shore, perhaps two hundred yards away. \u00a0While the day remained light, it was virtually impossible to go more than a minute or two without seeing a whale. \u00a0And they\u2019re still at it out there today. \u00a0Grazing and slowly moving back and forth close in by the shore. \u00a0(There is a resident pod of gray whales here, along with migrating groups of humpback whales, orcas or killer whales, and, rarely, blue whales.) \u00a0And, of course, there are the Canada geese. \u00a0Lots of them. \u00a0Right now, a group of six or eight are savoring the grass right outside our door.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve sometimes wondered what it would be like to be<\/em> a whale. \u00a0Or, more often, what it would be like to be a dolphin. \u00a0How do they see the world around them? \u00a0Then I think of Ludwig Wittgenstein\u2019s famous (and typically oracular) statement that, \u201cIf a lion could speak, we could not understand him\u201d (Philosophical Investigations<\/em>, 223). \u00a0We wonder about alien life in other worlds, but we\u2019re surrounded by alien life here upon our own \u2014 some forms of which, at least, may have \u201cminds,\u201d albeit minds very foreign to our own.<\/p>\n There have been some limited but apparently successful attempts to communicate via actual language with great apes. \u00a0We know that whales have \u201csongs\u201d and that they exhibit certain behaviors that appear to be communicative. \u00a0Beyond that, though, we understand remarkably little. \u00a0What pectoral-fin slapping and whale songs signify, we don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. (Psalm 42:1, KJV)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Is the yearning that many \u2014 perhaps most, although not all \u2014 humans seem to feel for something transcendent, the divine, or \u201ccosmic meaningfulness\u201d itself evidence for the existence of what might broadly be called God? \u00a0Some have argued that, indeed, it is.<\/p>\n You made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless till they rest in you. \u00a0(Augustine, Confessions<\/em>)<\/p>\n There is a god-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man, and only God can fill it. . . . \u00a0Man tries unsuccessfully to fill this void with everything that surrounds him, seeking in absent things the help he cannot find in those that are present, but all are incapable of it. \u00a0The infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite . . . object . . . God himself. \u00a0(Blaise Pascal, Pens\u00e9es<\/em>)<\/p>\n Christian optimism is based on the fact that we do not fit in to the world. \u00a0(G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy<\/em> [London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996], 114)<\/p>\n Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. \u00a0A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. . . . \u00a0If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. \u00a0(C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity<\/em>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The fact that a man is hungry doesn\u2019t prove that he will actually obtain food. \u00a0He may well starve to death, as many men have. \u00a0But hunger surely proves that a hungry man comes from a species that needs to eat and that he lives in the kind of world in which edible substances exist.<\/p>\n In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will. \u00a0(C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity<\/em>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And what about religious experience? \u00a0Can it provide any actual evidence for the existence of God or of a transcendent reality? \u00a0It seems fairly obvious that a religious experience in the first person is more likely to persuade than in the third person, when it is reported by someone else. \u00a0This is reasonable. \u00a0But the religious experience of others can, still, count as evidence to those who hear of it.<\/p>\n The theist may argue that throughout human history a host of individuals have claimed to have known and had a personal relationship with God. \u00a0This claim has been made across cultural and geographic boundaries as well as over time. \u00a0For the atheist\u2019s claim that there is no God to be true, every single one of these individuals must be wrong about the matter that they themselves would characterize as the most important human concern. (Paul D. Feinberg in Cowan, ed., Five Views on Apologetics<\/em>, 161)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Here enters in what the Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne calls \u201cthe principle of credulity\u201d<\/a>:<\/p>\n It is a basic principle of knowledge . . . that we ought to believe that things are as they seem to be, until we have evidence that we are mistaken. . . . \u00a0If you say the contrary \u2014 never trust appearances until it is proved that they were reliable \u2014 you will never have any beliefs at all. \u00a0For what would show that appearances were reliable, except more appearances? \u00a0(Richard Swinburne, \u201cEvidence for God,\u201d in Gillian Ryland, ed., Beyond Reasonable Doubt<\/em> [Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1991]).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Of course, religious experiences can be rejected. \u00a0(Think of Laman and Lemuel, as two obvious examples of this.) \u00a0Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance \u2014 an existentialist and a vocal atheist who loomed much larger in the twentieth century, I sense, than he does now in the twenty-first \u2014 recounts an autobiographical experience from his childhood that, he says, led to his rejection of God:<\/p>\n I had been playing with matches and burned a small rug. \u00a0I was in the process of covering up my crime when suddenly God saw me. \u00a0I felt His gaze inside my head and on my hands. . . . \u00a0I flew into a rage against so crude an indiscretion, I blasphemed. . . . \u00a0He never looked at me again. \u00a0(Jean-Paul Sartre, Words [London: Penguin, 2000], 102)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The material immediately above represents notes that I took for my future use from Peter S. Williams, The Case for Angels<\/em> (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2002), 50-52. \u00a0I make no claim of originality for them.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>