Is God Dishonest for Designing a Universe Where it looks as if he doesn't exist?

Dale · March 6, 2023, 3:22pm

I think you walk away from sadducees, telling them as Jesus did, “You are badly mistaken”, and shake the dust from your feet. If someone wants to find God, is willing to say they need God, or is interested in or willing to listen to evidence and says tell me more, and if they aren’t daring you to prove God’s existence to them, having already presuppositionally and resolutely denied his existence in their established worldview and habitual thinking, even denying the existence of the supernatural, that is another case. ‘Preach the Gospel to them’ and tell them why you believe in God and what your experience is and why you know he is real and how he has changed your heart and heart’s desires.

The grounds of [true¹] belief in God is the experience of God: God is not the conclusion of an argument but the subject of an experience report.

Roy Clouser

What’s the main reason, not reasons, on why you are a Christian? - #56 by RoyC

That experience of God does need to entail objective external facts as comprised in the ‘evidence’ link above, but shouldn’t there at least be objective evidence in your mind and thinking to know that you’ve experienced God? I don’t think mere feelings are trustworthy, and they can be manipulated, either by yourself or by someone else.

Here is a pretty potent example of what I’m talking about, the conversion experience of Phil Yancey, not that they need to be this remarkable. From his Where the Light Fell:

A few days later the university team gathers for a prayer meeting, as we do every Wednesday. We follow a consistent pattern: Joe prays, Craig prays, Chris prays, then all three pause politely, waiting for me. I never pray, and after a brief silence we open our eyes and return to our dorm rooms.

With the essay deadline looming, I join the team grudgingly for the requisite meeting. Joe prays, Craig prays, Chris prays, and they wait the usual few seconds. To everyone’s surprise—most of all my own—I begin to pray aloud.

“God…” I say, and the room crackles with tension. A door slams down the hall, interrupting me.

I start again. “God, here we are, supposed to be concerned about those ten thousand students at the university who are going to Hell. Well, you know that I don’t care if they all go to Hell, if there is one. I don’t care if I go to Hell.”

I might as well be invoking witchcraft or offering child sacrifices. Even so, these are my friends, and no one moves. My mouth goes dry. I swallow hard and continue. For some reason I start talking about the parable of the Good Samaritan, which one of my classes has just been studying. “We’re supposed to feel the same concern for university students as the Samaritan felt for the bloodied Jew lying in the ditch,” I pray. “I feel no such concern. I feel nothing.”

And then it happens. In the middle of my prayer, as I am admitting my lack of care for our designated targets of compassion, the parable comes to me in a new light. I have been visualizing the scene as I speak: a swarthy Middle Eastern man, dressed in robes and a turban, bending over a dirty, blood-stained form in a ditch. Without warning, those two figures now morph on the internal screen of my mind. The Samaritan takes on the face of Jesus. The Jew, pitiable victim of a highway robbery, also takes on another face—one I recognize with a start as my own.

In slow motion, I watch Jesus reach down with a moistened rag to clean my wounds and stanch the flow of blood. As he bends toward me, I see myself, the wounded victim of a crime, open my eyes and spit on him, full in the face. Just that. The image unnerves me—the apostate who doesn’t believe in visions or in biblical parables. I am rendered speechless. Abruptly, I stop praying, rise, and leave the room.

All that evening I brood over what took place. It wasn’t exactly a vision—more like a vivid daydream or an epiphany. Regardless, I can’t put the scene out of mind. In a single stroke my cockiness has been shattered. I have always found security in my outsider status, which at a Bible college means an outsider to belief. Now I have caught a new and humbling glimpse of myself. In my arrogance and mocking condescension, maybe I’m the neediest one of all.

¹ As opposed to merely intellectual and impersonal academic assent.