Alan, I appreciate (to the extent I’m able) what you’re saying. As to God’s existence, it’s true that you can’t prove it with a mathematical formula and you can’t discover it with the Large Hadron Collider (or can you? 
) You can deceive yourself (perhaps) into thinking you feel His presence when all you’ve done in fact is to make a break-through in your meditative practice. It is perhaps more probable than you could prove the necessity of His existence via philosophical and logical proofs, but that’s a bit more esoteric and perhaps too much so for a man of science. For you, it makes all the difference that you seek Him – the unknown and (to your mind) unknowable God who is good. That search will have to be good enough. I trust that if you continue to seek you’ll find Him in the right time. He promised.
But for me, when you say this my first thought is, “then how can anyone know anything at all?” What if I’m just a thought thinking? What if something akin to the Matrix is true? How can I tell whether I’m awake remembering a dream or in a dream remembering waking? Perhaps I’m just a character in someone else’s dream. What makes the evidence of our maths and our sciences and our philosophy so convincing? How reliable is our visual sense? People are constantly seeing things that didn’t happen, or didn’t happen quite that way – or even close. Interview six eye witnesses to an accident and you’ll get six different stories even if they were all standing together on the sidewalk. Are they lying? No. No, for each of them, the accident happened exactly as they describe it. My mom’s memory is failing. She still likes to tell stories though, and her stories are always good. Every time she tells them they change and every time she tells them she firmly believes herself to be telling the absolute truth. For her it is truth. It is fact. She lived it. It’s not a subjective matter for her because she has the empirical evidence of her senses and her personal experience.
My point is that neither you nor I nor anyone else has any true empirical evidence for anything at all. We have the evidence of our six senses (including proprioception of which I’ve only recently learned) and every single one of those senses is subjective. Even our logic is subjective. We don’t know whether we’re acting or reacting only. If the latter, nothing we say here is more than the ripples created by a pebble tossed into a pond. If we had a rock to stand on, then maybe we could deduce true things about the world, but depending only on our amorphous and undependable senses, we have nothing. Many of us want to make human knowledge into that rock, but our knowledge is as changeable as the sea. We think we know things, but we only know in part (very small part). We can know more and more and make things work better for us, it’s true – as in medical science – but we will never ever get there on our own. Never. Depending on our own ability to know good from evil and choose the good is the way of death. At some point we MUST take that leap of faith and simply choose to depend on the life offered us by God in Christ Jesus, and choose to depend on the mind of Christ. Jesus showed us the way to live, to the small extent we were able to receive it, and He continues to show us if we listen to Him.
But if we want to be pleasing to our Father (and by pleasing, I mean the kind of pleasure a father takes in his child, who is learning and maturing through contact with him) then we must believe that He IS. Anyone who comes to God must believe that He IS and that He rewards those who seek Him (presumably the reward of seeking is to find the desired object).
It’s the leap of faith, and Father gives to every person the measure of faith. We of course must act on that faith and choose to believe. It is Indiana Jones crawling out onto the invisible bridge in “The Last Crusade.” When I was a tiny girl I delighted in jumping off the couch when my daddy was anywhere in the room, because I KNEW he would catch me (I remember this). He always did, even if he was standing clear across the room facing the other direction. He might have failed at some point though he did not, but Father cannot fail. There are times that I question, but then I remember the things He’s done for me. I behold the amazing world He created, and I’m comforted. Not because I’m too stupid to know anything of the mechanisms scientists have proposed for the existence of these things, but because I know all these amazing things must have a source – a foundation – and I know that foundation, that rock, is God. Even when I’m in doubt I have no lasting doubt – even when I doubt that I personally can truly hear from Him through the clamor and chatter and confusion of my own mind, I know that HE is available to speak to me just as surely as communication-laden energies are passing through this room, though I cannot perceive them unless I turn on the radio and tune in.
There is no such thing as color though we perceive it via our eyes. You and I are invisible though people think they see us (they really only see light waves bouncing from our bodies – no one has seen US at any time). Sound is as inaudible as a radio signal. We sense movement in our inner ear via hair cells and transmit that to our brains where the conception of sound is manufactured and sorted for meaning. We only perceive “up” and “down” because of tiny crystals responding to gravity in our inner ears – fool those and you can’t even stand on your feet. Touch is nothing but the stimulation of various nerves in our skin (mostly). It’s all in our heads, literally. What we perceive as a smell is just our nervous system reacting to microscopic particles in the air – and if we lose the ability to respond to those, most of our taste receptors don’t function either. Both of those senses are highly subjective and dead easy to fool. Our brains depend on the input of our senses and are, besides that, subject to their own delusions, mispprehensions, miscalculations, false conclusions and confusions and befuddlement.
If you take this inability to know to its logical (imo) conclusion, then we cannot know anything at all. In order to function, we must take a leap of faith and CHOOSE to believe the “evidence” of our senses – at least to some extent. Likewise, without the leap of faith, it is impossible to please God, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He rewards those who seek Him. I believe that it IS possible to find God (when He chooses to so reward our search) and that we CAN know God as much as we can know that wild roses delight our eyes, noses and skin, that the embraces of our loved ones fill us with joy, and that the fire on our hearth keeps us warm. The evidence for God is not less real than the evidence for the fire, and the evidence for the fire is not MORE real than the evidence for God. We are more accustomed to knowing the world through our fleshly senses, yet they can deceive us. We must know God through our spiritual senses. They can likewise deceive us. That doesn’t mean that God cannot be as real to me or to you as the fire or the embrace of love or the wild fragrance of the rose.
