My Experience of God

What should we say or do when we are pressed for reasons to believe?

Orthodox apologetics is not about winning arguments, but saving our minds from deception. The battle is primarily spiritual, but does include an intellectual component. Arguments supporting the existence of God are rarely why we believe in God, but reassurance that our interpretation of our religious experience are not self-delusion or madness.

There are many reasons to reject atheism, but the best is the fact that almost every human encounters God. Watching a person grow in grace and kindness as they follow God is hard for an atheist to ignore. This fact, in the life of my own parents, is a primary reason that I could not reject Christianity at a point in my life when, for very bad reasons, I wished to do so with all my heart.

A profound sense of God’s reality is hard to dispute. We can reinterpret it, but we cannot deny this taste of the divine. We experience Him when we come to Church, at the altar, before the Holy Icons. We experience God when we pray and feel His presence. When we seek Him, God is found.

When Christians share this experience with other people, especially in our secular society, their witness is discounted. What about all the other religions who claim their religious experience supports their very different claims about God?

Any response to this question, and we should have a response, is the beginning of a Christian apologetic, begun by Paul on Mars Hill, sanctified by the witness to death of saints and apologists such as Justin Martyr. A Christian can note that the atheist is going too quickly or is misunderstanding what we are saying.

My experience of God points to something more or different from the material world. Other religions have explained that other world differently, but just as different theories about the physical world do not call that world’s existence into question, so different ideas about the metaphysical world do not prove the metaphysical is an illusion. An atheist can certainly explain God away, but then some philosophers, such as the idealists, have explained the material world away!

There will be a second step to my witness as to why Christianity and why Christian orthodoxy instead of the teachings of the confused, schismatic, or heretical. In different times, when people were (generally) exposed at most to one or two religious groups in their area, Christians took this step for granted. We could shorten our witness, because if a man became convinced of the supernatural, he would turn to God. In historically Orthodox countries, he would come first to the Church, find the answers he sought, and in that security begin asking deeper and different questions in his soul as he began a spiritual pilgrimage.

The street atheist usually has a naïve epistemology: a bad idea about how we know what we know.  If he can object to an idea about God, he thinks that the default position is doubt until God or believers answer his objection. His bad idea will trap him in the process that makes it easy to deny spiritual reality. The burden of proof, the endless burden of proof, is always on the believer. Instead, as I will try to show, the first step in combatting atheism is to learn that the default position is belief. A good epistemology, or theory of knowledge, will drive out the bad ideas that lead to unbelief.

Before moving forward, Christians have to answer the charge that “religious experience” is just “all in your head.” This is supposed to be opposed to our experiences of the “Real World” that are not just in our heads. In fact, all human experiences “are in our heads” which is why some philosophers have asserted, “life is but a dream.”

When I touch the keypad in front of me, the experience is “in my head.” When I pray, the sense of the Divine I get “is in my head.” Why doubt that either is connected to external reality? If I deny physical reality, bad things seem to happen to me (in my head!), but the same is true if I deny metaphysical reality!  In any case, we must all notice the obvious: my experiences are my experiences and they all are experienced internally!

My experience of God is so real that for me it is nearly indubitable. Reasons buttress that experience by showing that my experience is not just real (that is obvious given human history), but that in following Christianity I have interpreted my experience wisely.