Why I believe in God: Objections and responses

To close out this topic, I'd like to respond to further objections to the existence of God.  I've discussed a couple already (the lack of evidence and the existence of scientific counterexamples of creationist teachings), and there's one more that I'd like to address.  In doing this, I hope that it doesn't appear that I'm simply setting up a strawman argument and beating it to pieces.  Atheists and agnostics have real and legitimate concerns about God's existence and what has been taught concerning Him.  The religious community often does not have complete or even partial answers to these questions.  For example, the problem of evil is something both religious and non-religious people struggle with (although I won't address that topic here).  I'd like to be as complete as possible, so if any readers feel that other relevant questions are important to address, leave a comment and I'll do my best to answer it.

What if you weren't raised religious?

Since this is hypothetical, there's no way for me to be fully accurate in my response.  Also, this seems like more of a statement than a question to me, the statement being "the only reason you believe in God is because that's how you were raised".  But I'll do my best.  The short answer is that, all other things being equal, I don't know if I would have found God if religion wasn't in my upbringing.  Now for the longer answer.

Let's assume that as many other things as possible about my life, my experiences, and my personality are preserved.  Perhaps I am raised in a family of atheists who encourage me to excel academically and follow my dreams, whatever those may be.  They are good, moral people who help others and volunteer in the community.  They do not believe in God, but have no problem with people who do.  I have friends who are religious, and thus I am familiar with the idea of God and with mainstream Christianity.  I devote much of my time to doing well in school, since that is what I am good at and I want to get into a good college.

Somewhere along the way, during my teen years, several of my religious friends notice that I am not involved in religion and, with varying degrees of persistence, seek to help me see the reality of God's existence.  At this point I have not thought about whether their "god" really exists or not.  After some time, I decide to read some of their religious texts, mainly out of curiosity.  Much of it I find boring and devoid of meaning, but every now and then I find a story that teaches good principles.  I resist invitations to church services to all except the most persistent, since I don't want to appear as if I am planning on being a member of their church.  I resist invitations to pray for a long time, since it feels weird talking to nothing.  The first few times I try, I begin speaking briefly and then withdraw due to awkwardness.  During times of great happiness or distress, I sometimes reach out in my mind to see if anything is there to respond.

My impression of their doctrine and theology evolves along with my cognitive skills.  At first, I am likely to reject a belief or teaching if it seems too "weird".  Such teachings include stories of miracles, prophets receiving revelation, angels, and the atonement of Christ.  Later on, as I become more familiar with religious teachings, my interest might be hindered by discovery of intellectual discrepancies in their doctrine.  I bring these discrepancies up to my friends, and they try their hardest to answer them.  Some answers satisfy me, some don't.  The more my personality becomes analytical and intellectually based, the less likely I am to entertain much of their teachings.

I tried to mentally construct a hypothetical sketch of how I might feel during such a situation.  I don't think I know enough to make it conceivably accurate, and I think that depends a lot on whether God exists.  Surely God has to make Himself known somehow, and in my experience, much of that has been through thoughts and feelings (as I explained in the last post).  But I think the important thing to mention here is that God's existence is not dependent upon our acceptance of theism.  If God is real, it is completely possible for many people to disregard, disbelieve, or supposedly disprove His existence, but it is equally plausible that a belief in a nonexistent God can be widespread.

Why I believe in God: Evidence

Why I believe God is a reality, not just a plausibility

As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I believe in the Holy Ghost as a God along with Jesus Christ and God the Father.  To me, the Holy Ghost is a being who lacks physical form, and is able to communicate to each of us what God would have us know.  In addition, the Holy Ghost (commonly referred to as the spirit) can help us feel when something is true and motivate us to do good.  Mormon doctrine teaches that the influence of the spirit is subtle and usually can only be detected if one is looking for it.

Thus, I try to make my life and myself an environment in which the influence of the spirit can be most easily felt and received.  In the past, I have had a variety of what I call spiritual experiences, in which I believe the Holy Ghost was present to some degree or another.  The vast majority of these have been simple and at a low level of intensity, often small enough that I am unable to distinguish between the effects of the spirit and my own feelings or thoughts.  However, several experiences have occurred in my life which I consider to be much more conspicuous manifestations of the spirit, to the point that I can no longer accept that they were produced by my own mental or emotional processes.  I will describe three such experiences.

The first occurred when I was around 12.  Like many Mormons raised in the church (especially in Utah), I had grown up learning church doctrine, history, and principles.  For the preceding couple of years, I had been giving a lot of thought to what I believed and realized that I didn't really know if it was the truth.  I worried about the possibility of entering the afterlife only to realize that I should have been a member of a different religion.  I had been taught at least a few times before this period that each person should strive to find the truth for themselves, and not have a certain belief system just because their friends, parents, or leaders professed the same.  This is often referred to as "getting your own testimony" in Mormon culture, and this was what I was trying to do for a couple years.  I remember feeling like my case was a minority, that there were not many Mormons who spent a significant amount of time wondering if their doctrine was true.  Because of this, I almost completely kept my doubts to myself.

I put plenty of time into prayer and study of the scriptures, seeking to have some sort of spiritual impression or manifestation that would confirm my faith.  There were times when it seemed as if my doubt was alleviated, but it would later return.  I felt much like Joseph Smith, the first prophet of the Mormon church who also spent much of his youth wondering and searching for the truth (further information about Joseph Smith is available here).  I had a friend at that time who seemed spiritually in tune and someone I could share my thoughts with, so I decided that I would talk with him about it.

I decided to do so at a boy scout campout some time later.  After everyone else had gone to bed, I explained my plight to him and asked if he had had any similar experiences.  I don't remember him giving a direct answer to my question, but I remember the experience he related to me.  He told me about a dream he had in which he was alive during the second coming of Christ (Mormons, and many other Christians, believe that Jesus Christ will return to the earth as a resurrected, immortal being).  In the dream, angels were singing a common Christian hymn, "God be with you 'til we meet again".  He continued relating the story, but at that point my mind focused on the lyrics of the hymn.  At that moment, I felt an incredibly strong wave of emotion come over me.  I cannot describe it as any particular emotion, just strong.  I felt reassurance about my doubts and the wordless communication that my beliefs were true.

The second occurred during my time as an LDS missionary in Alabama.  Since my previous experience years ago, I had never doubted the truth of the church.  I did my best as a missionary to do what I knew I was "supposed" to do, but there came a time when being a missionary out of a sense of obligation wasn't enough, even though I knew it was what God wanted me to do.  I wanted to be motivated by desire, not just duty.  I felt that the missionary I was serving with (Mormon missionaries always live and work in pairs) was an excellent example of who I wanted to be.  He gave me a copy of a talk (Mormon jargon for "speech") he had read earlier on his mission that was given to missionaries by a leader in the Mormon church (the talk is here).  The focus of this talk was the difference between desire and obligation as motivating factors for missionaries, and the speaker described how to gain the intrinsic motivation to serve.

Over a period of several weeks, I studied this talk, as well as scriptures from the Book of Mormon that I felt were related to the issue.  I prayed many times for the true desire to do what was right, and to be happy and content in doing missionary work.  Unlike the other two experiences I describe here, no part of this experience for me was instantaneous.  I cannot pinpoint a time when any monumental change occurred.  But I do know that before this period, I was motivated primarily by obligation.  After this period and ever since then, I have been motivated primarily by a desire to please God.  Something changed in me that I had tried and failed to change in myself before.  It has never permanently left.  I do not believe it came from myself, or from any other person.  It came from the purifying influence of the Holy Ghost.

The third experience was also as a missionary.  I was in a different area with a different missionary at this time, and we were teaching someone we had met quite recently.  I enjoyed teaching this person because he was close to our age and someone we could relate to.  He seemed open-minded and willing to explore and find out if what we were teaching was true.  He had been raised as a Christian, and on this particular visit he asked us what was different about our faith.  We had a good discussion about a few of our unique beliefs, and he was once again accepting and willing to ask questions and learn.  At the close of our visit we asked him if he would pray, and he complied.  We closed our eyes and waited for him to speak, but for a good while he said nothing.  Finally he looked up and said, "Wow.  That has never happened to me before."

My first assumption was that he had prayed silently and felt the Holy Ghost telling him that what we had taught was true.  But he then explained that he was trying to speak and no words were coming out of his mouth.  He wasn't distressed, but wondered why such a thing would happen.  The other missionary and I were surprised to hear him say this, because Joseph Smith's account of his praying to know which church was true includes a description of a similar experience.  My companion urged him to try again to pray.  I don't remember the words he said during the prayer.  I may not have even been paying attention at the time, because at the moment he began to pray, I had the most amazing and powerful feeling of joy that I had ever experienced before.  When he finished the prayer, I looked up at him and the other missionary, and their expression suggested that the same thing had happened for them.  Nobody said anything for a while.  We didn't really know what to say.  We all knew what we had felt, and we all knew it was from God.  We stayed for a couple more minutes.  Nobody wanted to leave and disrupt the moment.  But we eventually departed, and thanked God for what we had experienced that day.

Why I believe in God: Empiricism and human chauvinism

The phrase "human chauvinism" is taken from an idea that Douglas Hofstadter describes in "Godel, Escher, Bach" (although he calls it "earth chauvinism").  I'm extrapolating Hofstadter's ideas into my own thesis here, but let me define human chauvinism as "the notion that humans have a monopoly on information-gathering".  To give you some background, I'll explain what Hofstadter means by earth chauvinism.

Hofstadter prefaces earth chauvinism with an extended analogy of messages, meanings, and how messages are interpreted by intelligence.  A message is compared to a record, the meaning is compared to the music isomorphically encoded within the record, and the interpreting intelligence is compared to a jukebox.  Hofstadter explains that different records could be played differently by different jukeboxes; thus, a single record would not have the same music (meaning) everywhere.  Likewise, the meaning encoded in a message is not invariable; it is not an intrinsic, unalterable property of the object.

In our minds, Hofstadter explains, "the ascribing of meaning to a message comes from the invariance of the processing of the messages by intelligences distributed anywhere in the universe".  We could say that a message's meaning is completely intrinsic if and only if every single intelligence in the universe interpreted it in exactly the same way (which is highly improbable).  Humans, of course, are used to the way that humans interpret messages, although a fair degree of variance does exist between cultures, languages, perspectives, etc.  Human chauvinism, or earth chauvinism, occurs when we assume that our method of interpretation is universal, simultaneously excluding the possibility of messages or meanings that cannot be interpreted using our method.

Breaking free of chauvinism is done by "imagin[ing] that there could exist other kinds of 'jukeboxes'--intelligences--which communicate among each other via messages which we would never recognize as messages".  Such speculation opens our minds to other methods of interpretation beyond those which we are accustomed to using.  The most simple level of "meaning-interpretation" for us is done involuntarily by the sensory nervous system, the five "jukeboxes" we refer to as sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch.  From this basic input, through the millennia, we have created additional, more complex jukeboxes such as science, philosophy, mathematics, and every other academic discipline known to man.

What does this all have to do with my belief in God?  For one, I think it highlights the irrationality of empiricism, the idea that knowledge comes completely from sensory experience.  To say that all information comes through the five senses is to say that there are no other ways of interpreting meaning or gathering information.  In a less extreme sense, to say that all worthwhile information comes through the five senses is to say that there are no other worthwhile ways of interpreting meaning.  It is to discredit the existence of countless plausible forms of information and truth simply because they are inaccessible to us.

To those who haven't figured out where I'm going with this, here it is:  a supreme being (or any intelligence for that matter) does not have to conform to our system of information-gathering in order to communicate with us.  The idea that no one has found any sensory evidence of a supreme being does not and cannot imply that such a being is nonexistent.  The only way that this conclusion could logically stand is if our sensory system was, in fact, the embodiment of all possible forms of information-gathering.  I find this extremely improbable.

At this point, one might ask, "If God doesn't have to communicate through the five senses, how will we know of his existence?"  My reply is that we need to break away from chauvinism and entertain the possibility of other forms of information transmission in the past and the present.  As a Mormon, I consider the most important of these to be the Holy Ghost, but I certainly am not limiting it to that.  I intend to give a sampling of some examples of alternative information transmission (that which I consider to be communication from God) from my own life, which leads me into my next post.