I Have Doubts About God (but Buzzfeed helps)

Firstly, have a look at these.

http://distractify.com/culture/32-surreal-places-that-actually-exist-on-earth-i-cant-believe-this-isnt-photoshopped/

Secondly, blog.

This morning I went for a walk, and I admitted to God that in the last couple of months I’ve found myself wondering whether he’s just a figment of our collective imagination much more than I’ve ever done before. More than any time since I got baptised and got serious about Jesus, I have doubted his existence. So, that’s me admitting that.

Now, just to be clear, I really do believe in God. And the first thing I do when I realise that I’m doubting, is remember all the things that convinced me in the first place. There’s three big things:

1) Logic. Rationally I reckon there has to be something (not necessarily God like I know him) beyond the physical universe. Because the scientifically observable physical universe operates according to cause and effect. Everything that happens is caused by something that happens before it – like a chain. And we can trace that chain back to the big bang (just to clarify, I think that’s true), or maybe further to an idea of a multiverse, or an expand-and-collapse universe, but fundamentally wherever we get to, it still needs something to cause it. People say that God doesn’t help because he needs a cause too – but the thing is that if he isn’t part of the system of cause-and-effect, then he doesn’t. And if he’s beyond, apart from, the creator of, the physical cause-and-effect universe, then he could well be outside the system. Hope that made sense. Summary: the physical world is incapable of starting itself, but God is capable of just being, because he’s more than just stuff.

2) Evidence. There’s tonnes of evidence for the existence, and crucially the resurrection, of Jesus of Nazareth. I won’t go into all the details, if you’re interested in it please just drop me a message and I’d love to explain some more – but fundamentally it’s a historically established fact (it was even in an Andrew Marr programme a bit ago…) that there was a whole bunch of people who claimed that they’d seen Jesus back from the dead, who were getting no benefit out of that, gave accounts of themselves and what happened that would have been really stupid ones to make up, and got killed for it rather than say that it wasn’t true. If there might be something beyond the physical world out there, then these guys (and, controversially, women) make a pretty strong case that Jesus is something to do with it.

3) Experience. Let me tell quickly you the story of how I became a Christian.

I’ve always had trouble with believing in a God that does miracles – by which I mean, intervenes in the world and does something exceptional to the normal laws of nature. This scepticism was the big thing that held me back from getting baptised for 3 and a bit years (I started thinking about it when I was 12): the thing was, I’d heard people say that they’d had ‘experiences’ of God when they got baptised, and to be honest, I didn’t really believe them. I didn’t believe that God did that. But at the same time, I thought that if I got baptised and God didn’t do that to me, then I might become less convinced that he was real at all. So I didn’t get baptised.

But then when I was 15 I thought about it some more, and talked it through, and I decided that I was convinced by the logic and the evidence, and I should really say publically that I believed in God, because that was what it was about, not any weird supernatural occurrences or emotional hype. And I talked to my Dad about it, and I remember really clearly the car journey when we talked me through this big list of bits he’d found in the bible when people were baptised, or received the Holy Spirit, and nothing crazy or supernatural seemed to have happened. And it was such a relief for me. Such a relief. I thought, ‘Brilliant. God doesn’t necessarily do this weird stuff. I never really believed it would happen to me and now I know that it won’t and it doesn’t have to. Ideal.’

The funny thing about God, though, is that he likes to surprise us. I went to get baptised, safe in the knowledge that I wouldn’t have one of these weird ‘experiences’, and sure enough, I was overwhelmed by an inexplicably beautiful (and a little bit terrifying) experience of power and love. I just started weeping in this strange, joyful way. I remember it calming down as the song everyone was singing came to an end, and me thinking,
 
‘Ah, OK. It’s probably not God, it’s just that I’m nervous and the music is emotional. If it was God, why would it have stopped?’

And then it came back.

And  I ended up weeping with this strange joy through about half an hour of the service – I have this memory of getting changed into some dry clothes in the disabled toilets (I got dunked in a paddling pool) and still feeling this crazy overwhelming thing, and weeping, and just thinking, ‘God? This is crazy. You’re much more real than I thought you were.’

Now, when its someone else, its very easy to dismiss these things as delusions, as over-emotional things being misread as God. But when you’ve actually experienced it yourself, and you know how normal you were feeling before, how unimpressive the music actually was (no offence to the St. Marks Church band!), and what the experience was actually like – it gets a lot harder to explain away.

Funnily enough though, even after this, I was still sceptical about God doing stuff. It’s just pretty hard to believe, isn’t it? I still wrinkled my suspicious nose at anyone who claimed to have experienced God in church services or Christian conferences. I still thought that people who said that God healed people were probably just doing Derren Brown stuff and trying to make money. (I still think there are plenty of people out there doing that, by the way.) It just seemed unlikely. It felt a bit silly. Believing in God theoretically was acceptable, it made sense, it was rational. But believing in a God who does stuff was messy, it felt undignified, it got you associated with lunatics and conmen, or at least it did in my mind. It would surely be more sensible just not to credit any of that stuff and explain it all away as delusion or trickery. It would certainly be easier. The whole thing just felt silly.

But recently, and I’m finally getting to the point here, things have started to get even more incredible. In both senses of the word. Let me explain briefly.

That distractify.com thing at the top with the crazy places – that was in fact relevant to the blog. There are some amazing pictures – but the thing I find interesting is, that the really incredible ones are literally incredible – they are hard to believe! The one with the sand dune in the background really does look like a surrealist bit of photoshopping until you see the explanation and you think, ‘Sheesh, that’s a real place. I want to go there.’ The more incredible something is, the harder it is to believe.

And this is the thing that’s happened to me this term – the more mind-blowing stuff I see God doing, the harder it is to believe what I’m seeing. And that’s ridiculous in a way, because this is stuff happening that is pretty serious evidence that God is real. Stuff that is really hard to explain without him. But it makes it harder for me to believe in God at all, because the more incredible it gets, the harder my sceptical instinct squirms, and tries to close my eyes and shove its fingers in my ears. Tries to tell me that the whole thing is a mistake, that none of it can be what I think it is. Because it’s really, really weird.

But I’m trying to take my fingers out of my ears, stop squirming so much, and have a look at these things honestly, and see if they are really just coincidences, or the placebo effect, or the product of over-active imaginations, or whether when you combine them with all those other things I was talking about earlier, God might actually be the best explanation. I was going to try and tell you all these different stories of crazy/cool things myself, but then I realised it would be much more fun if I asked the people who they’re about to tell them for themselves! So the next few blogs will be stories from people many of you will know, about being healed, about hearing God speak to them, about their hands buzzing like a mobile phone on vibrate… (OK, actually that last one is mine, but I might tell that story too.)  

The weirdness will probably put you off a bit – it puts me off as I’ve just said – but I hope you’ll find them interesting anyway. I will leave you with a link to another one of these marvellous procrastination tools, and another one that has incredible bits in it. Enjoy!

http://www.buzzfeed.com/daves4/77-facts-that-sound-like-huge-lies-but-are-completely-true