PENDLE HILL PAMPHLET 21
Reality Of The
Spiritual World

Published 1942, by Pendle Hill
Republished electronically � 2003 by Pendle Hill
http://www.pendlehill.org/pendle_hill_pamphlets.htm


God
How can we be sure that God is real, and not just a
creation of our wishes? We have disquieting desires for a
God, for a real God. There come to us times of loneliness
when we seem to have a premonition of a deep vastness in
ourselves, when the universe about us, gigantic as it is in
all its starry depths, seems cramped and narrow for our
souls, and something makes us long for an abiding Home.
We have times of fatigue, of confusion, of exhaustion, of
utter discouragement, when we long for a serene and
everlasting Bosom on which to lay our heads and be at peace.
But how can we be sure that what we call God is not a
product of our wishful thinking, a self-delusion we create, a
giant shadow of our longings flung up against the sky and
asserted to be real?

We have moments when we long, not for freedom and
yet more freedom, but for self-surrender, self-dedication,
self-abandonment in utter loyalty to an Overself. If I could
find an Object worthy of my utmost allegiance, if I could
find a Mark worthy to be the aim of the bow of my life, I
should gladly pull the arrow back to its head and let all fly
upon a single shot. I should be integrated, freed from internal
conflicts, those confusions and tangles within which make
me ineffective, indecisive, wavering, half-hearted, unhappy.
I should gladly be a slave of such a Being, and know that I
am truly free when I am His utter slave. But I see men and
women, my brothers and sisters in Germany and Italy and
Russia, who joyfully commit their all to the State, to an
earthly state, to a state which to them seems noble, glorious,
and ideal. They seem to get integration and joy in
enslavement similar to that which my religious friends get
from commitment to an invisible, spiritual world. Maybe
the values all lie on the subjective side, on the integration
of self and the dedication of will to any object which is
conceived as worthy. Maybe the object doesn�t have to be
real but just to be thought to be real with a vigorous, fanatical
intensity. I know that false ideas and misplaced enthusiasms
have had as real effects upon men and upon history as have
well-grounded beliefs and ideals. Maybe the whole conviction
of a Spiritual Reality shadowing over us all is such a hoax,
a useful hoax as long as we believe it intensely, a hoax that
stabilizes men and society and one that ought to be preserved
and nourished and fostered for its useful social effect. Such
is the almost universal argument in the mind of educated
man.

But there is an inner integrity in us all which rejects
all programs of As If. We cannot merely act as if there were
a God, while we secretly keep our fingers crossed. This inner
integrity demands the real; we cannot long tolerate complex
ways of kidding ourselves, nor forever whistle to keep our
courage up. It is an old maxim, with a double meaning:  Let
the truth be known, though the heavens fall.  We are such
creatures as demand to build upon the Truth. And if the
Truth is that there are no heavens, but only earth, no real
God, but only human cravings for a God, then we want to
know that, and adjust our lonely lives to that awful fact.


First Argument: Analogy
Caught in this difficulty, that we long for a Real God,
no, demand a Real God, yet can be sure of only our subjective
longings, not of God�s objective existence, we ask a devout
friend,  Are you sure that God is real?  And he replies,  Yes,
I am absolutely sure.  We then continue,  But why are you
so sure there is a Reality, an actually existent reality
corresponding to your religious cravings?  He replies,  I find
myself in a world which furnishes real objects to answer all
my central cravings. In me, subjectively, there is a craving
for food. And I find, out there, in the world, that the Universe
furnishes me real food. In me I find a profound craving for
companionship. And out in the world there are real men
and women who give their fellowship in answer to my
craving. In me is an insistent craving for sex. And I find
myself set in a universe that furnishes real beings of the
opposite sex. I find in myself a craving for beauty, and out
there I find beautiful objects that satisfy my soul. And when
I find in myself a profound craving for God, for an absolute
resting place for my soul�s devotion, an Object for my last
loyalty, I believe that here, too, there is an answering Object.
The same structural situation   subjective craving,
satisfying Object is to be expected.

But,  we answer,  you are arguing from analogy. And
analogies are notoriously treacherous. You argue that the
fact of food-hunger, with its answering object of real food,
gives you the right to say, �From the fact of God-hunger I
am sure there is a real Bread of Life.� But analogies break
down. If analogies were always perfect, they would cease to
be analogies and become identities. No, the time comes when
similar situations part company, and are different. Perhaps
the matter of God�s real existence is just such a case. One
can�t be sure. And I want to be sure. At best your argument
from analogy only indicates the possibility that there is an
objectively real God, corresponding to my hunger for Him.
Perhaps it even indicates probability. But I want deeper
grounds than that.


Second Argument: Authority
Disappointed in this first argument for the reality of a
Spiritual Being wherein we may cradle our life, we turn in a
second direction and ask a devout Protestant:  Do you believe
that God is utterly real?  He replies,  Yes,  and you ask,
 Why?  to which he answers,  The Bible tells me God is
real, that in Him we live and move and have our being.
 But why do you believe the Bible?  To this he replies,
 Because the Scriptures are inspired.  You reply,  Yes, I
strongly agree with you. But I suspect you and I may mean
different things. Why do you say Scripture is inspired? Is it
because you find in it the record of men who were drinking
from the same fountains of life that well up in you, so that
you; too, could write inspired words that would feed other
hungry souls?   Oh, no, no,  he might hastily reply,  I am
no such great soul. God chose special men to write the
Scriptures, and I�m not one of them.  To this you may reply,
 I disagree, and am bold enough to believe that the fountains
of inspiration are not stopped. There is no one age of
inspiration, no one special class of inspired. Either divine
inspiration is renewed in every age and in all peoples, or it
never flowed at all. Now tell me, why do you believe the
Bible is inspired so that you can rely upon its testimony to
the reality of God?  He answers,  The Bible is inspired
because it is written, �All Scripture is given of God.�    But
wait. Do you mean to prove the Bible by the Bible? That is
the crudest circle in argument. By the same argument the
Book of Mormon is inspired, for it says it is, and therefore
you must believe all Mormon teachings.  Then he retreats
and says,  But the Bible is an ancient and revered authority,
tested by time, canonized by Councils, and believed by
multitudes.  You answer,  So are the Buddhist scriptures,
such as the Dhammapada and The Lotus of the Wonderful
Law. Your argument only amounts to this, �Forty million
Frenchmen can�t be wrong.� You only argue, �Forty million
or forty billion Christians can�t be wrong in trusting the
Bible.� But if you ask forty million Asiatics you�ll get a
different answer. You�ll have to surrender the authority of
the Bible if it is based upon the circular argument, �The
Bible is authoritative because it says authoritatively that it
is authoritative.� After which you can�t retreat into the
argument, �The Bible is a good and reliable authority because
masses of people believe in it,� imposing as that fact is, Mass
agreement, even upon the existence of God, is not enough
to prove that God exists. Maybe the whole of mankind is
deluded on the matter. That�s just my problem. And you
don�t settle it for me by appealing to the authority of a revered
Book, if that authority is guaranteed only by mass
acceptance.

The authoritarian evidence for the reality of God as
given by many Protestants, who make the Book the supreme
authority, reappears in different form if an average Roman
Catholic is approached. His final defense of the authority of
the Bible might be that Holy Church guaranteed the
reliability of the Bible, and of the widespread conviction that
there is a really existent God. For did not the Church Fathers
and the Councils and the Bible agree in this matter, that
there is a God in heaven, brooding over the world in love?
But long ago Abelard startled the Roman Church by printing
a little book with each page in two columns, in which, without
comment, he set side by side contradictory statements of
the Fathers of the Church. Evidently authorities disagree.
And when authorities disagree, who shall be the authority
to choose between authorities? Roman Catholics would reply,
 The Pope is infallible when he officially makes a decision.
But you ask,  Who guarantees the infallibility of the Pope? 
Answer:  The Vatican Council in 1870 pronounced the Pope
infallible.  But are Church Councils infallible, so that they
can infallibly guarantee the infallibility of the Pope? No, only
the Pope is infallible. And there you are with authoritarian
guarantees of the reality of God fallen to the ground.


Third Argument: Causation
I shall take time to state only one more effort to prove
the objective  . For, honestly, all
these arguments leave me cold. Even if they were sound
and none of them is watertight   they would only quiet my
intellectual questionings. They would never motivate me to
absolute dedication to Him for whom I yearn. But religious
men are dedicated men, joyously enslaved men, bondservants
of God and of his Christ, given in will to God.
Arguments are devised subsequent to our deep conviction,
not preceding our conviction. They bolster faith; they do
not create it.

The third argument is this: Here is a world, amazingly
complex, astonishingly interknit. Here are flowers, depending
upon bees for pollination, and bees dependent upon flowers
for food. Yonder are the starry heavens, adjusted,
maintained, wheeling their way through staggering spaces
in perfect rhythm and order. Whence comes it all, if not
from God? And here am I, a complex being, of amazing detail
of body and astounding reaches of mind. Yet my parents
didn�t make me ; they are as incapable of being my true
cause as I am incapable of being the true cause of my
children. This whole spectacle is too vast, too well articulated
to be caused by any single thing in the world. There must
be a cause outside and beneath the whole, which I call God,
who creates, maintains, and preserves the whole world order.
Such an argument seems imposing and appealing to
us all. But it is not absolutely watertight. For notice, this is
not a perfect world, as we all know only too well from
observation and experience. There are imperfections and
flaws in it, notes that jar as well as notes that blend. The
argument rests upon only half the evidence, the good in the
world, not the evil and dislocation. There are maladjustments
as well as adjustments. We may marvel at the human eye.
But the great physicist Helmholtz said that if an optical
workman made for him an apparatus as imperfect and
inefficient as a human eye, he would dismiss him. Here is
the point: You can�t argue from an imperfect effect, the world,
to a perfect cause, God. An imperfect effect can only
legitimately imply an imperfect cause, not a perfect one. If a
World Cause made this world, He was not omniscient, but
had a streak of stupidity in Him, to have allowed flaws to
creep in. Or else, if He was omniscient, He was not
omnipotent, for, knowing what would be a world without
flaws, He couldn�t produce it. Again, if He was omniscient
and omnipotent, but still made an imperfect world, then he
was not omni-benevolent but malicious, and delighted in
torturing his creation by creating men with dreams of
perfection, yet tantalizingly setting them in a world that
grinds out the dreams of their hearts.

And David Hume, knowing all this, added the
suggestion, maybe the world is the result of a superhuman
but not divine creator who used trial and error and bungled
many worlds before he succeeded in making this one. Look
at a modern ocean liner, amazingly compact and
interdependent, seeming to imply a master mind behind it.
And then be introduced to the ship-builder, who may be a
very mediocre person, just a man like ourselves. He merely
inherited the experience of repeated ship-builders over the
centuries, each of whom was no master mind but just found
out a little detail and added it to the heritage. Maybe the
World-Creator is stupid and bungling, but given sufficiently
repeated trials and errors He may turn out a fairly decent
world.


Other Arguments Indicated
I shall not complete the list nor state the ontological
argument, which argues from the notion of a perfect being
involving its existence. Nor shall I state the moral argument,
which argues that moral experience requires a God for its
final validation. Nor shall I state the argument from the
agreement of the race, from the universality of religion among
all tribes of men, for I have referred to it already in pointing
out that mass agreement cannot back up any belief in an
authority.

But there is a wholly different way of being sure that
God is real. It is not an intellectual proof, a reasoned
sequence of thoughts. It is the fact that men experience the
presence of God. Into our lives come times when, all
unexpectedly, He shadows over us, steals into the inner
recesses of our souls, and lifts us up in a wonderful joy and
peace. The curtains of heaven are raised and we find
ourselves in heavenly peace in Christ Jesus. Sometimes
these moments of visitation come to us in strange
surroundings   on lonely country roads, in a class room,
at the kitchen sink. Sometimes they come in the hour of
worship, when we are gathered into one Holy Presence who
stands in our midst and welds us together in breathless
hush, and wraps us all in sweet comfortableness into His
arms of love. In such times of direct experience of Presence,
we know that God is utterly real. We need no argument.
When we are gazing into the sun we need no argument, no
proof that the sun is shining.

This evidence for the reality of God is the one the
Quakers primarily appeal to. It is the evidence upon which
the mystics of all times rest their testimony. Quakerism is
essentially empirical; it relies upon direct and immediate
experience. We keep insisting: It isn�t enough to believe in
the love of God, as a doctrine; you must experience the love
of God. It isn�t enough to believe that Christ was born in
Bethlehem, you must experience a Bethlehem, a birth of
Christ in your hearts. To be able to defend a creed
intellectually isn�t enough; you must experience as reality
first of all what the creed asserts. And unless the experience
is there, behind it, the mere belief is not enough.
We must therefore examine this evidence from
experience of God with some care, to see if it is sound, for it
is crucial.

First, let us notice that this experience which seems so
clearly to be an experience of God energizes us enormously,
in a way far different from arguments. Arguments that
convince our intellect alone leave us merely with questions
answered, but they do not bring us to our knees in humble,
joyful submission into His hands of all that we are. They do
not bring the unutterable joy that makes Paul and Silas
sing hymns at midnight in prison. Even though moments of
the experience of Presence may dawn upon us, and then
fade, we are thereafter new men and women, plowed through
to our depths, ready to run and not be weary, and to walk
and not faint. We love God with a new and joyous love,
wholly and completely. It is no commanded love, it is the
joyful answer of our whole being to His revealed love. Our
will becomes dedicated, our self-offering to God is vitalized
by deep emotional reinforcement. Such experiences of God
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