Hi Nathan,
I’m happy to hear that my own story can be an encouragement for you. In fact, I also experience your presence here as a huge encouragement (and, seeing the other comments, I am sure others do too!). It shows that we’re talking about real human lives here, instead of just intellectual sparring between people who have already settled on their positions. My prayers go out to you and your family.
For me, this has been a journey from acknowledging the plausibility of the Creator towards accepting Christ as my Savior. It’s a huge topic so it won’t be exhaustive, but I’ll try to condense it into some of the essentials that helped me.
I myself was not raised in Christian surroundings, but through reflection and conversation with others, I arrived at a point at which I could acknowledge the following:
“If there is a person who lovingly created us, then I would be happy and willing to get to know this person…”
I think this statement is something that agnostics and even atheists can concede. At that point in my life, those who were inspiring to me were those who claimed having a personal relationship with God, especially Christians whom I had met, and who also showed fruits of that in their lives, a certain kindness on a deep level. But while I could acknowledge that what they were speaking of was something truly beautiful, I didn’t want to (and simply couldn’t) fool myself into believing it merely on basis of its appeal. I was thirsty for truth so I didn’t want to settle on some kind of beautiful illusion. It was the same sentiment you expressed here:
I felt exactly that. But, at the same time, I knew that I didn’t have much to lose anyway, because nothing truly matters in an atheistic (godless) or a deistic (aloof creator) worldview. At some point, I allowed myself to pray in earnest, because that wouldn’t harm even if God wasn’t there. In stepping across that fear of being mistaken or “wrong”, I started to realize that the thirst in my heart could actually be seen as a sign of God Himself. It could be compared to finding a lock on which no key fits… If none of the keys you’ve tried “fit”, it implies there is another key out there somewhere. Extending this analogy even further, the inner workings of the lock actually tell something important about the shape of that key. In this sense, the emptiness or thirst for God in our own hearts is an important indicator, not only of God’s existence (the missing key), but also of who God is (the “shape” of the missing key). In extension, one could compare all forms of idolatry with using wrongly shaped keys that actually damage the lock. Sometimes, those keys almost fit, in that they reflect some part of God’s nature (e.g., a loving partner), but they are still different on essential points and still result in damage to the lock.
This point of view turns the existential thirst of mankind from something gut-wrenching into a wonderful gift, a valuable pointer towards God. I found it guiding me into three main questions or themes. In short, I found myself wanting to know (1) what the truth was, (2) how to live, and (3) how to meet God. Through contemplation of the words and deeds of Jesus Christ and interactions with Christians, I came to accept Him as the fulfilment of those three themes. He boldly claimed, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” (John 14:6) Jesus is that perfect “key”, the only one able to quench the thirst. John 4:14 “but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” For me, understanding more about the Old and New Testament and the history of the Church came largely after acknowledging Jesus as the Holy One. This echoes the words of Peter when Jesus asked His disciples why they didn’t walk away from Him like the rest of the crowd: "Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that You are the Holy One of God.” (John 6:69) Peter spoke those words before he could even remotely fathom the Resurrection or the future Church and its mission.
After that, I still had to grow a lot. But I can definitely say that it is the person of Jesus, as revealed in the Scriptures and Christian testimonies, who connected the dots for me. Without Him, I would not have stepped beyond merely accepting the plausibility of God’s existence. Does that clarify things? Feel free to ask more questions on this.
I think I disagree with that atheist physicist on several points. However, it may be good to avoid an all-out philosophical treatise so I’ll just highlight some of them and give some counter-examples. Firstly, his example of temperature in thermodynamics glosses over a crucial mistake. While it is indeed true that the temperature (higher order) does not influence an individual molecule (lower order), exactly the same thing can be said in the other direction: an individual atom (lower order) does not influence the temperature (higher order). Only when we take into account the dynamics of a multitude of atoms (which is, in itself already a higher order phenomenon), we can say something about the temperature (higher order). As the Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka once said, “The whole is other than the sum of its parts.” The properties of a gas (such as temperature) are different from the sum of its constituent molecules. An individual atom is completely unpredictable, but when taken collectively multitudes of atoms can show orderly behavior. An individual atom does not “cause” any difference in temperature.
Okay, that issue aside, I think it is helpful to think of causality in broader terms than that of the narrow “bottom-up” approach of the person you were referring to. In that respect, we can take useful insights from the framework of dynamicism, which is basically the home town of formal definitions of emergence. Within dynamicism, we view a system as being described by a “state space”, the collection of possible states, some of which are more stable than others (attractor versus repellor states). This may be visualized as a landscape with valleys and peaks. The lower-order phenomena can cause changes in the location within the landscape, while higher-order phenomena can cause changes in the shape of the landscape itself. In other words, the higher-order phenomena constrain the possibilities of the system, while lower-order phenomena change the state of the system within those constraints. One nice example is that of a river. The small-scale corrosive processes describe how the river slowly carves its way through the sediment. At the same time, the overall trajectory of the river will place constraints on where the corrosion will take place.
Another note, which may come across as totally ad hominem but must nonetheless be taken seriously: never blindly trust the physicists when they speak about other fields of research (such as consciousness). Besides studying neuroscience, I’m also a graduate student in astrophysics and in that field we are constantly made aware of the “cultural” differences between astronomy and physics. Physicists have the tendency to think everything can be as clear-cut as the laws of thermodynamics. Astronomers are a bit closer to biologists in the sense that they are used to messy causality (and horrible data!) in the systems they study, which renders them more humble about the science. For example, look at the physicist’s claim that I highlighted in bold above. In light of my small causality discussion, we see that it’s more of a problem with his narrow concept of causality. Then again, he was trained to be a physicist, not a philosopher. If we look at it from within the framework of dynamicism, we can easily identify many examples of top-down causality. The river is just one of those. The brain is actually a much more impressive example! Actually, in the article to which I linked earlier (in my conversation with George) the author conceptualizes conscious intending playing a causal role as it places constraints on the dynamics of lower-order processes.
Finally, from the top of my head I can think of several fields of research which show that the physicist’s claim (highlighted in bold) is just blatantly false. There is already incontrovertible evidence of higher-order phenomena influencing lower-order phenomena. For example, the placebo effect (where a fake medicine can have effects just because a person believes that it will have an effect) is known to be related to actual changes in biological functioning.
I would not say I have “the ultimate answer” to that question. But, one possible, reasonable answer would seem to require two parts. Firstly, while consciousness does not move individual molecules (only molecule-level phenomena can move individual molecules), it is able to constrain the possibilities available to molecules or “change the landscape of possibilities”. In fact, that’s what scientists do when they consciously manipulate matter to subject it to their experiments. Secondly, while the molecules may be constitutive elements of man, man is still more and “other” than molecules. “The whole is other than the sum of its parts.”
These are my thoughts. It became a lot longer than I planned it to be, hope that’s fine for you.[quote=“DrebNay, post:45, topic:5722”]
It strikes at the heart of my hope in the very existence of the Holy Spirit; the church seems such a mess.
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Yes, the Church is a mess in many ways, so the fact that God still chooses to work through all of us helps us to understand how amazing His grace is. I still see His light shining through the Christians of that same universal Church, although imperfectly.
Praying for you,
Casper