Evidence?

Sheila Semple considers experience and evidence

‘It is not true, as theism asserted, that there is a personal being above and beyond the world that literally created the world and intervenes in its affairs as an external agent. There is no evidence for such a being in experience or science.’

– God, words and us

The quotation above, by Rex Ambler and an Open Space working group, is from a section headed A distinctive Quaker approach to God in the book God, words and us: Quakers in conversation about religious difference, edited by Helen Rowlands. Seeing this statement has prompted this article.

The quote brought me up short and made me consider very deeply how to answer it. My first response was to think about the evidence that comes from the commitment to and experience of such a being, of thousands of millions of individuals, across a range of religious traditions. That cannot be discounted so easily. My second response was to feel that the statement should at least be qualified with ‘based on the evidence from the experience/views of this working group’. But my main thought, on reflection, is to consider, instead, the question of what constitutes evidence in such a context, and I feel compelled to speak openly of how I have answered that question in my own life.

My experience

Here is what my experience tells me. As a teenager, at a time of great need, I was overwhelmed by the love of God surrounding me and infusing me. I am clear that this came not from my own depths but from that ‘Other’ that I have been aware of since I was a child. In my late teens, I was greatly challenged by studying philosophy; unlike some of my friends, I was unable to treat it as an intellectual game but applied it to my life. None of the attempted proofs of God were convincing and I sadly accepted the inevitability of the loss of belief in God. But it went further. It became clear that there were actually no proofs of anything.

Did I believe that the world I perceived was real? Could I be dreaming, and how would I know the difference? Science told me that drugs, states of mind and brain injuries could easily manipulate my senses. But science itself was dependent on the truth of the observations of the senses, of the mind, and there was no evidence that this could be trusted. In fact, was there anything that I could securely call ‘I’? Was ‘I’ a mixture of the ideas I had been fed as a child? Did my body actually exist?

I took courage and pursued this to its extreme, dispensing with everything for which there was no evidence. I went back to search the Bible, but nothing was indisputably true; to say there was truth in a myth, no matter how lovely, was no good. I needed a point where truth and fact were one and the same. I read, again, the Gospel of John (sometimes called the Quaker gospel) and saw how often Jesus was speaking of how to recognise truth and to know who he was, what his purpose was and what God required.

In John 8:54-58 he said that if they (the Jews) were children of God they would know who he was… ‘Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day.’ When challenged that he was not old enough to have seen Abraham, he said: ‘Before Abraham was, I am.’

In saying such a thing he was using the name of God – I am – and claiming to be divine. As I read it, something in ‘me’ instantly perceived something ‘not me’, and I knew this to be both fact and truth. It was as if I was present as Jesus said this. I could translate this into the language of early Friends. I saw that there was none that could speak to my condition… there was one, Christ Jesus… I found a place in which to stand. And this I knew experimentally. I have described this experience briefly, but, in fact, it took place over a period of months. This is something I have largely kept private until now.

Assumptions

So, why does this matter to anyone else other than me? Only in so far as I am convinced that everything when tested proves to be an assumption, without incontrovertible evidence. The experience I have described above, too, is an assumption, but I have built my life upon it: truly God is the one in whom ‘ live and move and have [my] being’. But it is the same for anyone who assumes the world external to them can be proved to exist; who relies on scientific evidence, which itself relies on perception.

Using reason on its own is not sufficient; there is often an assumption that the opposite of rational is irrational, with all the negative connotations that go with this word, but in this context a more appropriate opposite of rational is intuitive. There are different ways of knowing, and we each have to choose which set of assumptions we will build our lives on. It could be said that the Open Space working group were speaking of a traditional view of God that creates and intervenes. But I would not dare to limit the mystery of God; my experience is so limited, I don’t rule out a creator/actor God. What I can say is that my experience has been of a transcendent God, not just an immanent one.

Still small voice

Now, I would describe my experience of God as coming through the still small voice that I am aware of, prompting me as I am still, or speaking to me through the lives and words of others – the Holy Spirit. I would love to have again my teenage experience of the overwhelming love of God, or that absolute clarity of knowing through Christ. But now I sense that God’s law of love is written on my heart, and on the hearts of others, and the Spirit is helping me to recognise and act on these promptings of love and truth.

Some speak of a loss of belief in, or experience of, a transcendent God as if it was the loss of something erroneous, wishful thinking, or a fallacy resulting from spiritual immaturity. This reminds me of my irritation as a teenager when, whatever I said or however I acted, was judged as a ‘phase’ that I would grow out of! Actually, I have grown ‘from’ and ‘through’ those earlier experiences, not ‘out of them’. They remain with me and are, for me, both truth and fact.

So, be of good cheer, Friends who have experienced or do still experience a transcendent God! The God within us, and the God ‘outwith us’, are both ways of knowing the Unknowable. This is my testimony.