How to Find God

When asked what it would take to convince him that there were a God, Tyrrell McAllister writes in reply:

I don’t know, but my imagination is limited. Nonetheless, I am certain that an omnipotent and omniscient God, unburdened by my limits, could think of something.

If there is a God, then I want to believe that there is a God. I sincerely hope, and strongly believe, that, if there is a God, then it would be possible for some evidence to convince me.

I confess that my limited imagination cannot picture in detail what that evidence would be. But that doesn’t worry me too much, because I can’t currently imagine a lot of things that actually exist or will actually happen. That is obvious. I can see that what I can now imagine is too paltry an image to possibly be a perfectly accurate and complete picture of reality.

That my paltry imagination doesn’t contain something is only very weak evidence that that “something” doesn’t exist. (In this case, the “something” is evidence that would convince me of God’s existence.) Here, this weak evidence is overwhelmed by the fact that it is even harder for me to imagine what could possibly stop God, if he existed, from finding a way to convince me.

The arguments that you and your commenters make above about post-modern epistemology and peoples’ obstinate immunity to all evidence doesn’t help me to see how God could be unable to convince me. I am not a post-modernist, and I don’t believe that I am immune to all possible evidence. Therefore, were God unable to convince me, it seems to me unlikely that it would be for the reasons that you have given.

Brother, I sympathize more than I can say. It was when I reached a point in my atheist pondering when I realized that no miracle, no evidence, nothing whatsoever I could see with my eyes could possibly convince me of the existence of God that I came to myself, and realized my method of inquire was grossly inadequate. It was a thought prison.

If you are not a modern or a postmodern thinker, and you are looking for evidence in the existence of God, allow me in all humility to suggest two things.

First, I suggest the use of reason.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.