“I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Even many people who have never read the Bhagavad Gita recognize this quotation with a shudder. It was spoken by J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project, when the first atomic bomb was exploded in the New Mexico desert. He might as well have said, “I am Man, the destroyer of God.” The date, July 16, 1945, marks the zero point of faith. A loving, protective God lost all credibility before the unleashed fury of atomic destruction. Very few except the most fervent believers thought that God would—or could—do anything to stop our slide into self-annihilation.
To get beyond the zero point, the nadir of belief, takes focus and effort. Faith must be rebuilt from the ground up. Inertia would simply let it slip away, and then one of the most powerful forces in human existence would be forgotten. What makes the power of faith so remarkable is that it runs contrary to everything we think we know about evolution based on survival. Survival is the ultimate need of every living thing. But human beings answer to multiple needs that are blended into a confusing, shadowy mass. In some cases, we struggle for food, shelter, and family. In other cases, those things are taken care of, and we don’t give them a second thought. What makes faith so extraordinary is that sometimes we live for invisible things so intangible that they cannot be put into words. (Can you dissect the difference between “He shows a lot of heart” and “He shows a lot of soul”?) Yet matters of faith sometimes override every other drive in our lives, even the drive to survive.
In the same year that the atom bomb changed the world, the Allies liberated the concentration camps that had carried out the Final Solution. Scenes of unspeakable suffering were revealed, but so were stories of prisoners who volunteered to die in place of others.
One of the most inspiring examples was a Polish Franciscan friar named Father Maximilian Kolbe, who died at Auschwitz in 1941. The Gestapo had arrested him for harboring Jews in the monastery that he had founded in Niepokalanów; it was a center for publishing Catholic devotional materials in Poland. Photos of him show a resolute man with black-rimmed spectacles and close-cropped hair. He had been a fervent proselyte for the faith and a missionary to Japan. While there, he had built a mountain mission near Nagasaki. Later when the atom bomb destroyed most of the city, the mission was untouched. Kolbe’s devotees hinted at divine inspiration because he had chosen to locate it on the side of the mountain that would be shielded from the blast.
Soon after he was transported to Auschwitz in May 1941, some prisoners had successfully escaped, and authorities decided to retaliate. They chose ten inmates to be held in subterranean cells and starved to death. When one of the chosen cried out in anguish, Kolbe stepped forward and volunteered to take his place. He spent the next two weeks praying and leading the other condemned in song and prayer, always facing his tormentors resolutely. The other nine died, but Kolbe still survived. He was summarily executed with an injection of carbolic acid. His body was cremated in the Auschwitz ovens that became synonymous with the worst crimes against humanity.
Father Kolbe’s death has always moved me, but it is entangled in the complex fate of modern faith and in the Catholic teaching about martyrs who die for God. His road to sainthood unfolded quickly. By 1950, two miraculous healings were attributed to him. He was beatified in 1971 and canonized in 1982 by Pope John Paul II, a fellow Pole and sufferer at the hands of the Nazis. I’ve read devotional accounts that Saint Maximilian, as he now is, emitted light when he prayed, and that Jews in Auschwitz stuck small notes into the floorboards of their bunkhouses before they went to their own death, attesting to his supernatural faith.
This sketch of a remarkable believer raises all the paradoxes of faith. Someone who showed the greatest faith was not protected by God but was allowed to die. Instead of his life, it was his death that became the greatest thanks that Kolbe could give to God. Should we have faith in that kind of deity? Children are taught that it is natural to worship God, yet miracle stories make ultimate faith seem supernatural. The enormous divide between the rational and the magical seems unbridgeable here. But the miraculous aspect of saints—as opposed to their saintly behavior—is what appeals most to believers and is most scorned by skeptics.
Kolbe’s story demonstrates that the seeds of both unbelief and belief exist in all of us. I have met few people whose faith made God a mighty fortress, as Martin Luther would have it. And I’ve met few who realized how tender faith can be, as when Tagore says, “Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.” If your heart is touched by those words, you’ve arrived at one of the deepest spiritual secrets: What is most tender can also be immortal. As long as the heart survives, so will faith.
Losing faith happens one person at a time, and so does regaining faith. I’m approaching faith as the middle stage of renewing God. It isn’t the end stage because faith is belief, and belief falls short of knowledge. For some things a middle stage isn’t necessary. When you order chocolate mousse in a restaurant, you don’t need to test your faith that it will come. But we can all feel the terror of concentration camp victims waiting for God to rescue them. Faith weakens when God doesn’t perform to our expectations; it weakens fatally when God seems to pay no attention at all.
By whatever path, when you arrive at the zero point, much the same pattern of disappointment holds true.
He ignored your prayers.
He allowed you to fall into danger and didn’t protect you.
You don’t feel divine love.
No mercy was shown to you.
You got sick, and no healing came.
You saw bad people prosper while goodness went unrewarded.
There was abuse and violence in your life, and no one stopped it.
An innocent child died.
Accidents and trauma happened to you without reason.
You suffered mentally through grief, anxiety, or depression, and God offered no comfort.
Every life has had at least a few of these occurrences and sometimes more. History is a graveyard of unanswered prayers by the millions of people who have needlessly suffered and died. Theology has come up with various excuses: the Deus otiosus, or “idle God,” whose role ended after the creation; and the Deus absconditus, or “hidden God,” who is there and not there at the same time. But theology is cold comfort when God does not respond to us under desperate circumstances. Most people believe—understandably so—that God should show his love, mercy, and protection when the going gets tough. We can mostly handle the lesser crises ourselves.
Once you have settled on the zero point, why leave it? If God doesn’t exist, it’s the most realistic place to be. I don’t want to replow the field of atheism, but it does seem rational to take the world as it presents itself. This is the position taken by religious skeptics. God becomes another phenomenon, like the northern lights or cold fusion: Show me, and I’ll believe it. Skepticism demands visible proof; therefore it’s the opposite of faith. A believer doesn’t require God to knock at the front door with a government-issued ID.
In our time, the most adamant skepticism has linked itself to science: Before they believe anything, hard-core skeptics want measurable data, experiments with results that can be replicated, and impartial peer review—the whole apparatus associated with the scientific method. If these are lacking, one’s belief is likely to be discredited, if not maligned. Skepticism sees itself a realistic, a hardheaded rebuttal of all the superstition, gullibility, and fantasy that holds the world in bondage.
Michael Shermer, the editor of Skeptic magazine, quotes with approval a fellow skeptic who deems “the God question—atheist, agnostic, theist, whatever”—to be altogether the wrong question to ask. What makes it wrong? “Gods that live only in people’s heads are far more powerful than those that live somewhere ‘out there,’ for the simple reason that (1) there aren’t any of the latter variety around, and (2) the ones in our heads actually affect our lives.”
On the list of disappointments that cause people to turn away from God, each item is positive to a skeptic, a wake-up call to face life as it is, not as we wish it to be.
Did God ignore your prayer?
Answer: Prayers are never answered at all. What you think inside your head has no effect on outside events.
Did God allow you to fall into danger? Did he fail to protect you?
Answer: The risks you run are your own responsibility. Blaming a higher power signals a failure of self-reliance, if not childish weakness. Nobody who is mature needs a supernatural parent in the sky.
Do you not feel divine love?
Answer: Love is the product of chemical reactions in the brain. It has no existence outside its physical manifestation. The scientific truth is that romantic love may be as much a fantasy as divine love.
Was God’s mercy not shown to you?
Answer: Mercy is wish-fulfillment, born of a futile desire to escape the laws of nature. Every cause has its effect. The whole setup is mechanical. There is no free pass from determinism.
Did you get sick and no healing came?
Answer: Disease is a complex process that medical science continues to understand better. One day, as research continues, we will know precisely why certain illnesses befall certain people. At that point, new drugs will solve the whole issue of healing.
Have you seen bad people prosper while goodness went unrewarded?
Answer: What we call good and bad are evolutionary traits that were developed for survival. Once we understand natural selection more fully, we will know the optimal behavior that holds societies together.
That sampling will give you the gist of how skepticism views the zero point. Every complaint against God has a scientific answer. If current science falls short, there will eventually be a better answer in the future. Over the years I’ve found that the assumptions of the skeptics are far more pervasive than the arguments of the atheists. The skeptics feel that they occupy high ground because they are necessary to the progress of science. Without a handy skeptic around, we’d all still believe that Zeus throws thunderbolts.
The skeptical point of view earns wide popular acceptance, I think, when it attacks easy targets. Skeptic magazine devotes many pages to exposing charlatans, medical fraud, and pseudoscience. It gives almost no space to a serious consideration of speculative thinking about God, the soul, consciousness, and the nature of reality. It draws a fence around conventional, materialistic explanations (which are considered good and true); outside the fence lies the darkness of the deluded mind. Bringing down a medical quack serves a good purpose, no doubt. Exposing con men has marginal value, although it’s usually their victims who sound the alarm, not scientific skeptics. But when the skeptical crusade encroaches on genuinely sincere, far-seeing thinkers, it turns noxious. Anyone who champions mind-body medicine, for example, is liable to the same ridicule as quacks. In the 1980s faculty members from medical schools in Boston grew apoplectic whenever I—or any other M.D. interested in alternative treatments—proposed that the mind-body connection was real. The spontaneous remission of cancer was almost totally ignored. (A prominent oncologist told me that cancer was a numbers game; he had no interest in the rare case where a tumor vanished without medical treatment.) Skepticism does general harm by suppressing curiosity, hiding its intolerance behind the excuse that only official scientific guidelines are valid when exploring the unknown. One might call this institutionalized curiosity.
God is much harder to get past the skeptics. To them, belief destroys a person’s credibility as a rational thinker. And once you use the fatal word supernatural, the way is open for contemptuous dismissal. Francis Collins, as I have mentioned, is an eminent geneticist and the director of the National Institutes of Health; he is also a practicing, Bible-believing Christian. Uniquely placed as he is, he will serve as a prime test for faith as it stands next to reason.
Collins recounts the spiritual experience that changed his life in The Language of God:
On a beautiful fall day, as I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains, the majesty and beauty of God’s creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over. The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ.
There is nothing to be skeptical about in this description of a peak experience, when the everyday world of appearances suddenly changes. For Collins, the meaning of his peak experience was religious, as it would be for almost any seeker. But other minds work in other ways: the famous landscape photographer Ansel Adams had a similar thing happen to him while climbing in the Sierra Nevada, and his interpretation was an artistic epiphany. Both men experienced wonder and awe before nature’s grandeur. Collins dedicated his inner life to Christ; Adams dedicated his to photography. A common thread runs through peak experiences: In a sudden expansion of consciousness, the mask of the material world falls away, revealing hidden meaning.
Sam Harris compares Collins (whose scientific credentials exceed Harris’s by an order of magnitude) to a surgeon who has “attempted to operate using only his toes. His failure is predictable, spectacular and vile.” Leave aside the hostility. What Harris, and all like-minded skeptics, object to is the mind-set that finds messages in nature, coded communications written in the beauty and design of mountains, sunsets, rainbows, and so on. Scorning the fact that countless people have seen God’s hand at work, he comments sarcastically on Collins’s experience:
If this account of field research seems a little thin, don’t worry—a recent profile of Collins in Time magazine offers supplementary data. Here, we learn that the waterfall was frozen in three streams, which put the good doctor in mind of the Trinity.
At this point, Harris remarks, “Thoughts of suicide might occur to any reader who has placed undue trust in the intellectual integrity of his fellow human beings.” I don’t think so. Most readers would respect the experience as genuine. They might long for a peak experience of their own—I’ve never heard of anyone who even remotely reacted to one with “thoughts of suicide”—and common sense would tell them that Collins’s conversion has nothing to prove to science. As the noted mathematician and physicist Eugene Wigner remarked, “Where in Schrödinger’s equation is the joy of being alive?” If I say that I am in love with the most beautiful woman in the world, in what way is a skeptic proving anything when he points out the improbability of finding the one woman out of three billion who is the most beautiful?
Human existence would be fatal without moments of inspiration. In exchange for such moments, when love, beauty, and the possibility of reaching higher reality become vividly true, we endure a great deal of tedium, routine, mundane work, and suffering. But skepticism denigrates inner illumination or tries to explain it away as some kind of brain anomaly. A 2007 article in Skeptic magazine reviewed a debate set up between Dawkins and Collins by Time magazine. Collins’s defense of God rested on a belief that science is powerless to refute: “God cannot be completely contained within nature.” As a skeptic views it, this position is a cop-out. It begs the question of whether God even exists and sidesteps the need to offer evidence.
And yet the skeptical position is equally tied to assumptions of its own. Here is how a timeless God looks from the viewpoint of an article in Skeptic magazine.
If there is no time, there is no change. If there is no change, there is no action. If there is no action, there is no creation. If God were to exist outside time, he would be impotent to do anything at all!
This argument assumes that the timeless is a place that we can refer to the way we refer to Pittsburgh or New Delhi. Thinking about anything that lies outside time is so difficult, if not impossible, that it baffles the most advanced physicists in the world. The whole point is that logic breaks down there, and so does the linear world of cause and effect. Collins’s belief in a transcendental God permeates every spiritual tradition for a very good reason—the source of nature cannot be found by looking around at nature.
However, the flaws of skepticism don’t make faith perfect. In his book Collins asserts that “of all the possible worldviews, atheism is the least rational.” This carries weight coming from a renowned scientist, but Collins’s exhortation to other fundamentalist Christians jangles against rationality, as most people understand the term: “As believers, you are right to hold fast to the concept of God as creator; you are right to hold fast to the truths of the Bible; you are right to hold fast to the conclusion that science offers no answers to the most pressing questions of human existence.” Sir Isaac Newton, a confirmed Christian, might have agreed with every word. Two great scientists could still be religious nuts—but it might not matter: Skepticism has taught everyone to be wary.
It’s not a question of twisting science to make it agree with the Bible. The harmony that Collins seeks between science and faith is extremely rational.
God, who is not limited to space and time, created the universe and established natural laws that govern it. Seeking to populate this otherwise sterile universe with living creatures, God chose the elegant mechanism of evolution to create microbes, plants, and animals of all sorts.
All he asks us to do is keep an open mind. Faith, as it has evolved in the age of science, is about possibilities, not about dogma. If you have an open mind, you will have no trouble with the possibility that something beyond space and time served as the source for the universe. The real issue—and this is where the controversy starts—is whether creation came out of “nothing,” that is, a nonphysical source. Is there room in that nothingness for higher organization, the kind of mind that could have perfectly fit the laws of nature together to such a finely tuned degree that the slightest change would have spelled doom for the early universe? After all, with an alteration of less than one billionth in the law of gravity, for example, the nascent universe would have collapsed in on itself after the Big Bang; an alteration in the opposite direction would have caused it to fly apart in uncontrollable winds of proto-gases, never to form atoms and molecules.
The fine-tuning of the universe is indisputable, and we are the direct beneficiaries. Somehow creation emerged in such perfect harmony that human DNA arrived on the scene thirteen billion years later. Because Collins applies religious significance to the problem, he is excluded from the minds of the arch-skeptics. Harris gives him no credit for even holding a rational position. Skeptics never give anyone who thinks differently from them the benefit of the doubt—their minds are closed. But the issue isn’t one of fair play. Every new discovery requires faith, including scientific discoveries. The list of things in our lives where we apply faith is impressive.
To believe in yourself.
To believe in progress.
To accept that reasoning solves problems.
To trust your emotions.
To reach moments of insight.
To see beyond surface appearances and trust what you see.
To let your body take care of itself.
To feel bonded with another person.
All these things are so basic that we take them for granted, as if having faith in God were altogether different and special, or supernatural and irrational. But the first science experiment in history required all these everyday acts of faith to be securely in place. It’s particularly strange that skeptics mock anyone who explores supernatural phenomena, since one item on the list—seeing beyond surface appearances and trusting what you see—is a hallmark of science. Ghost hunters are doing nothing more or less than physicists hunting for quarks.
Believing that the person next to you thinks the same way you do is a huge leap of faith. The brilliant early psychologist William James spoke of “the breach between one mind and another,” which cannot be bridged. Two brothers brought up in the same house with the same parenting have almost no chance of thinking the exact same way. One may love hunting and fishing, while the other loves to read Proust. We accept on faith that our minds are connected. But suppose you sneak up behind someone, clap your hands loudly, and get no response. Is the person deaf or simply ignoring you? Is he too absorbed in something else, or is he angry with you? Silence indicates immediately how far apart two minds actually are. Men like to complain that women want them to read their minds (He: “Why didn’t you tell me that you didn’t want to meet my old girlfriend?” She: “You should have known.”). In fact, we spend our whole lives reading everyone else’s mind as best we can.
Then look at what happens when you lose faith in your body. We take nothing on faith more than our hearts, which in a typical lifetime will beat without fail 40 million times a year, or 2.8 billion times in seventy years. The mechanism that sustains a heartbeat is so complex that modern medicine is only now beginning to grasp it. (For the average person, these mechanics, being microscopic, are as invisible and mysterious as God.) But let the heart begin to show signs of distress, as in the chest pains known as angina pectoris, and our faith is shattered. The result, for almost every heart patient, is high anxiety. We suddenly realize that a fist-sized bundle of twitching muscle tissue stands between life and death.
Reducing every aspect of life to facts and hard data is, frankly, preposterous. (We would laugh away anyone who said, “I don’t believe you love your children. Show me a brain scan.”) The demands of skepticism appeal mostly to the cadre of professional scientists who are bound to strict guidelines when they conduct research. They must examine new results skeptically until viable proof appears. Einstein had to wait for his theory of relativity to be proved by observation, which happened during a solar eclipse in 1919; measurements by the astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington bore out the theory’s prediction that light from distant stars would be bent in a curve by the sun’s gravitational field. But in that experiment, as in all experiments, the whole point is that science isn’t like real life. Its constraints are artificial and specialized.
The famous British philosopher Bertrand Russell was an avowed atheist; he made a splash with his 1927 essay, “Why I Am Not a Christian.” When Russell was asked how he would defend his nonbelief if he died and wound up in heaven facing his maker, he replied, “Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence!” Skeptics like to quote that story, but it entirely misses the point. The rules of evidence that apply to material things or events do not apply to God. He can’t fail a test he didn’t take. Let me explain.
Imagine that a car has run off the road, resulting in a fatal accident in which the driver was killed. The highway patrol show up and find several bystanders. They are asked what happened. The first one says, “See those skid marks? I’m a physicist, and this accident happened because the car’s momentum exceeded the force of friction.” A second bystander shakes his head. “Look at the position of the wheels. The driver suddenly turned, and the car veered off the road into this ditch. I’m an airline pilot. The accident was caused by veering off course.” A third bystander, detecting alcohol fumes from the corpse, announces that he’s a doctor, and the accident was caused by drunk driving.
Each bystander has taken a different perspective and offered evidence for it. But notice that there is no scientific way to settle their differences. The answer you get depends upon the question you ask. Perception defines reality. Now imagine that a car rushes up and a distraught woman jumps out, crying, “Fred! You said you would kill yourself, but I never thought you’d go through with it.” Her explanation is the right one, because she understands the meaning of the accident. It was caused by the driver’s warped emotional state. The lesson here is that descriptions never arrive at meaning. Skeptics, even ones as brilliant as Russell, set up false expectations. No matter what kind of external data you arrive at (skid marks, turned wheels, alcohol in the bloodstream), you can’t address the meaning of someone’s actions—or the motive for suicide.
Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a reasonable guideline for getting beyond skepticism. “Faith,” he said, “is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” Thinking about Collins’s conversion, I came away with some practical principles that are perfectly compatible with rationality yet do not fall under the heavy hand of skepticism:
Faith is personal. It doesn’t need to be justified to someone else.
Faith is something you must participate in—you can’t judge it from the outside.
Faith is a way of exploring reality, but it doesn’t have to pass scientific testing.
Faith looks beyond physical appearances.
Faith is about meaning.
I’ve gotten only one laugh out of skepticism. I was speaking on spiritual matters to an audience in England. A heckler kept interrupting, and finally he leaped to his feet. “No one should listen to this rubbish!” he shouted. “It’s all nonsense.”
Taken aback, I asked, “And who are you, sir?”
He straightened himself up. “The head of the British skeptics’ society.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said. The audience burst out laughing, and he stomped out of the hall.
When God fails you personally, it strikes home. A best seller from the 1980s summarizes loss of faith in its brilliant title, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Whether the bad things befall us at home or in Bosnia or Rwanda, the most basic trust that ties us to God—the promise that good will prevail over evil—frays and then snaps. There is only so much we can take on faith.
I’d suggest that God’s failure is not enough to show that he doesn’t exist. God can’t succeed if he is just a disguise for ourselves—we’ve already met this deity as God 1.0. Imagine that you’ve prayed that someone close to you will recover from lung cancer, but she dies anyway. God, like a super doctor whose medicine didn’t work, has failed you. He didn’t give you what you wanted. You have no way to figure out why. Let’s say that the sick person was a chain smoker all her life. Then perhaps God was only being rational. He let the laws of nature, as they operate in the human body, take their normal course.
Or perhaps God chose justice over mercy. It seems fair that someone who ignores every warning about cigarettes and lung cancer shouldn’t be miraculously saved. A miracle would be an act of mercy, but what about everyone else who heeded the warnings and then went on to be afflicted with cancer? Should a good shepherd save only the black sheep? We can be sure that a fickle God modeled on human nature can’t be real; we constantly judge and blame him when the only thing we’re relating to is an extension of ourselves.
The reality of God is hidden behind a fiction of God. Buddha was asked to reassure his followers about the existence of God—who would know the answer better than the Enlightened One? But he took pains not to oblige, because the only viable answer requires a personal journey. It’s not easy to get past our imaginary ideas of spirituality, but we have to. It’s fascinating to Google the question “Where is heaven located?” One answer, taken from Genesis, is that heaven is the atmospheric envelope surrounding the earth, because God said, “Let the waters abound with an abundance of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the face of the firmament of the heavens” (Genesis 1:20). But there is also Biblical authority for the celestial heavens, where the stars are, and a heaven beyond that, the paradise that is “the abode of God.” We are firmly in the realm of God as a person who needs a home somewhere.
The Catholic Encyclopedia makes the issue even more complicated. First, there is the omnipresent heaven, which “is everywhere, as God is everywhere. According to this view the blessed can move about freely in every part of the universe, and still remain with God and see everywhere.” This answer gets past the image of a humanized God who lives in one place. But is “place” even necessary? The Encyclopedia recognizes a more abstract state, “the happy state of the just in the next life.” After theological twists and turns, we arrive at the notion that heaven is a condition of the soul, while some theologians still hold out for the image taught in Sunday school—God, they argue, “should have a special and glorious abode, in which the blessed have their peculiar home and where they usually abide, even though they be free to go about in this world.”
These answers all depend on a depressing assumption: that ordinary people will have no direct experience of God. A psychologist was asked why ordinary people who aren’t addicted to gambling keep going to casinos, even though they know the odds are stacked against them. “Because every time the slot machine hits,” he replied, “they’ve proved that God loves them.” Theology works out its tortuous answers based on the word of great spiritual teachers. The rest of us are left out in the cold. I’d suggest that the whole framework is wrong. In every life God has a chance to succeed when you make a connection with higher reality, the higher self, or higher consciousness—choose any terminology you want. God becomes more secure the stronger your connection becomes.
Then and only then will heaven become real, too. Nor does it have to be the one and only heaven. When people report having a near-death experience, some say that they have seen heaven. The most common description is childlike. Heaven is a green rolling meadow with flowers and frisky baby animals under a clear blue sky. To a skeptic, such an image is too close to pictures seen in children’s books to be real. No doubt. But if we place heaven in consciousness—as a “state of the soul”—there is no need for a fixed image or one for adults only. Leave all images aside, and you have the blank slate where any depiction of heaven is viable; the blank slate is consciousness itself.
Your faith won’t be fully restored until God starts to perform again. His performance must be consistent and reliable. It can’t be a game of chance, wish fulfillment, or an imaginary act that proves he loves you. Faith has to get you beyond failed expectations and reopen the possibility that you can rely on God. This places a demand on God, and naturally many people are reluctant to do that. If demand is too strong a word, let’s rephrase it. When you ask God to perform, you are saying, “I believe you can do it.” In that way, faith becomes functional, a working connection.
For centuries anyone who blamed God, even slightly, for a negative event was branded a heretic. Countless innocents suffered torture and death when their only crime was asking questions. The holdover from that horrible era is the guilty thought What’s wrong with me? that comes to mind when you question the religion of your fathers. When Daniel Dennett says that most religious people are conformists, the point isn’t wrong. People display more “belief in belief”—showing allegiance to their religion in order to fit in—than true belief itself.
To be valid, belief must have a basis in reality. The only basis that makes sense to me is to believe in a God who does what he promises to do. Take the elements of the Zero Point of Faith list (on this page) and reverse them. Faith is justified when
Your prayers are answered.
Goodness prevails over evil.
You feel God’s love.
God protects you.
Providence provides for you.
My position is that all these elements are real aspects of God; therefore we have a right as believers to experience them. We aren’t like petulant children stamping our feet until we get what we want; we are asking God to act in his natural capacity. The bond between God and humankind is a living one. If that is true, higher reality isn’t far away. There’s no set number of miles you have to travel, no fixed length of time on the road, to arrive there. Higher reality is here and now once you are connected to it. It shapes the everyday reality we experience with all its constant demands and challenges. Faith alone will not suffice to bring it into your life. But without faith, you cannot envision what higher reality is. You can’t test it or discover where it touches your existence.
I am delighted by poets who transform their inner world into a meeting with the divine. Hafiz (1325–89), a medieval Persian poet in the Sufi tradition, taught the Koran and held court posts. His subject matter was often worldly, reflecting lives of hunting, drinking, and other pleasures. He and other Persian poets came up with wonderful epigrams, such as this one:
Your soul long ago drowned in the middle of a vast sea
While you pretend to be thirsty.
Or this one about the purpose of life:
Time is a factory where everyone slaves away,
Earning enough love to break their own chains.
Even more strikingly, Hafiz transforms everyday life, conveying the glowing essence that lies behind it. This gives rise to quite startling imagery.
To really lose yourself is like holding a gun to your head
And pulling the trigger—it takes guts.
Facing the truth means tying a bag over your head
Until you suffocate—it takes faith.
You have to be brave to follow God’s tracks into the unknown
Where so many things can overwhelm and panic you.
This is the journey of faith rubbed down to raw psychology. Hafiz puts into words the passion and insecurity that fill human existence, and we turn to him because he feels them so urgently. He describes a state where heart and mind join forces to find out the truth of life, down to its very roots. There is no easy projection of a loving father.
Trust me and plunge the jeweled dagger into your heart.
This is what it takes to lose yourself.
There is no other path back to God.
I feel an instinctive truth in such poetry, but how do we turn inspiration into practicality? Hafiz’s dagger thrust into the heart evokes the thrill of courage. But the real point is to turn your inner world into a place where you can meet God. Poets feel free to do that. We can, too, once the zero point is loosened up.
Return again to the Zero Point of Faith list (on this page). For every item on the list, there are several possibilities that can loosen up a stuck notion. Take the first item: God ignored my prayers. The skeptical position is that prayers aren’t answered at all. Faith doesn’t have to promise that your next prayer will be answered. Instead, it offers some new possibilities that open a window to God. Here are some:
At least one of my prayers was answered. I will see if that really happened.
Perhaps the answer to my prayer is not in my best interest right now, and I need to pay attention to other blessings in my life.
Not getting an answer made me realize that my prayer was too selfish and that what I really wanted was much bigger.
Maybe God didn’t answer my prayers, but he has answered someone else’s. I’ll look into it.
Unanswered prayers could be a good thing. Maybe God gave me something better than what I prayed for.
Faith is about new possibilities. Once you realize this, you are freed from extremes of both absolute belief and absolute skepticism. The issue of prayer has occasioned centuries of debate. Atheists claim that those centuries were wasted on a fiction; agnostics shrug and say that the answer is inconclusive. But nothing can be true until it’s tested. The possibilities opened by faith are liberating simply by being possible. In every case, a link is forged between the inner and outer worlds. God may be everywhere, as theology says, but he has to get there one step at a time.
Prayer: Open the possibility that your thoughts have an effect on the world “out there.” A prayer is just a special kind of thought. If it makes a connection with the outer world, it may come true.
Accidents: Open the possibility that all events have a meaning. Accidents are events we can’t find a reason for. If we expand our vision and a reason is revealed, there are no accidents.
Bad luck: Open the possibility that good and bad are two halves of a single unfolding process. If you can find out the higher purpose of your life, the two halves will make sense. Then luck, good or bad, will be irrelevant.
Suffering: Open the possibility that events are shaped to bring the least suffering. If divine mercy exists, perhaps it allows suffering only so that we can grow and evolve. Then we don’t have to wrestle with what caused our suffering. We only have to accept that there is a way out.
Loneliness: Open the possibility that you have never been alone. If there is a comforting presence that exists everywhere, perhaps it lives inside you, not outside. Loneliness is the natural result of feeling empty inside; the cure is inner fullness.
We don’t have to stop here—I’ve only offered a handful of new possibilities. For some people, they won’t be satisfactory. To say that suffering is a means to grow and evolve, for example, will make no sense to someone who doesn’t believe in the afterlife. Too many horrors remain inexplicable if all we’re given is this one life. But I’m not foisting the afterlife on you. When you think about suffering—which for millions of people is the deal breaker with God—find your own new possibility. It could even be skeptical: “Suffering is meaningless, but there’s a way to live without being destroyed by it.” Or “I fear suffering, but there’s a possibility that I could get over my fear.”
Just keep in mind that your aim is to free up fixed unbelief. You aren’t being asked to take a leap of faith. But you can’t simply wait for God to appear. Stuckness is real, and becoming unstuck requires the flow of awareness. Take each item on the Zero Point of Faith list that applies to you, and write down the new possibilities that branch out from it. Be as thorough as possible. For example, there is I don’t feel divine love. In the Christian West, where every little child knows the melody to “Jesus loves me, this I know,” not feeling God’s love is a serious reason to give up on him. Yet think of the other possibilities:
You could be more open to being loved by other people, which may open you to divine love.
You could find someone who has felt God’s love, either in a book or in real life. Perhaps there are lessons you can learn from their experience.
You might start with the beauty of nature as a connection to a loving God.
You might expand your definition of love. Maybe it’s not a warm feeling of affection but good health, well-being, and freedom from care and woe that show divine love.
These aren’t proofs of divine love and shouldn’t be mistaken for such. Far better to open your mind more and more as the path unfolds, because then you have a real chance for transformation. Hafiz holds out that possibility in another visionary verse:
When the mind becomes like a beautiful woman
It bestows all that you want of a lover.
Can you go that deep?
Instead of making love in the body
With other children of God,
Why not seek the true Lover
Who is always in front of you
With open arms?
Then you will be free of this world at last
Like me.
If you feel touched by these words, you’ve found the starting point of faith. Faith has been described as a candle in the window, the light that waits for God to see it. Perhaps a better image is one taken from the Indian spiritual tradition. Faith is like a lamp sitting in an open door. It shines out into the world and inside the house at the same time. When the world “out there” is as filled with God as the world “in here,” faith has fulfilled its role.