Though I continued to attend church as usual, I privately wondered whether the entire enterprise might be rooted in nothing more than a misunderstanding.
This steady diminishing of faith probably would have continued indefinitely, were it not for one brisk autumn afternoon in 2011 when, standing alone at a bus stop, I happened to witness the presence of God.
The unevenly paved lane where I waited was a quiet one-way street tucked away in a clutch of trees. I gazed down the road, preoccupied with other things—midterm exams, campus-club minutiae—and expecting the bus to trundle around the bend. A sudden icy wind tore around the corner instead, sweeping into gray branches and climbing ivy to send a spray of golden birch leaves spiraling into the sky, taking my breath along with them. And I knew that my soul was bared to something indescribably majestic and bracing—something that overwhelmed me with the unmistakable sensation of eye contact. What I saw, I felt, also saw me.
Hmm. Gonna hafta question that “unmistakable” there. I think the sensation was indeed mistakable. Don’t get me wrong, I think the sensation itself is glorious, it’s just interpreting that form of glorious as unmistakable eye contact that I dispute. Be cautious when people sneak in an “unmistakable” where it doesn’t belong.
But that’s not my real issue with this piece.
The latest evidence suggests that God most likely exists, argues a big recent book by Michel-Yves Bolloré, a computer engineer, and Olivier Bonnassies, a Catholic author. Tracts that aim to prove the reality of God are hardly novel. What makes this endeavor unique, say the French writers behind God, The Science, the Evidence: The Dawn of a Revolution, is the scientific nature of their work. Medieval monks toiling away at poetic meditations on the divine have their place, the authors allow, but their own arguments are meant to surpass mere abstract justifications for belief. Instead they assert that cutting-edge empirical proof observable in the natural world makes a firm case for God.
But what is God? How is that short word being defined?
Many sentences later:
The route to durable faith in God often runs not through logical proofs or the sciences, but through awe, wonder, and an attunement to the beauty and poetry of the world, natural and otherwise.
But what is “God”? It still hasn’t been defined, which surely makes it laughably easy to “believe” in it without having to give any reasons at all.
After that brisk autumn afternoon, life went on unremarkably, though I continued to mull over what the experience could mean. That it meant something at all was another strong intuition that I could not entirely account for. There were plenty of ordinary and dismissive explanations for what had happened, all related to the vagaries of the brain. Surely I had just been tired, bleary-eyed, suggestible, available—highly sensitized, in other words, to typical seasonal splendor. That made sense to me, but I didn’t believe it. The natural beauty wasn’t the cause of what I had felt, but rather an invitation to pay attention to what I felt.
But what does that have to do with “God”? What, exactly, is this God? A person who drifts around the planet shaking trees as invitations to other people to…pay attention to what they feel?
It’s nicely written enough but it’s piffle.
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