Death, Consciousness, God, Time, Afterlife, and This Life: 

God

If God is real, He gives us hope. His existence tells us that there is more than a world of atoms and the void. Whether God is the impersonal God of Advaita Hinduism, the personal God of Christianity, or some other notion of a transcendent God, we can hope that oblivion may not be our ultimate end, that some form of existence may follow death.

As noted, I cannot prove that God exists. Rational proofs, such as those formulated by Thomas Aquinas and other philosophers, only satisfy those who are already inclined to believe. And empirical  proof is impossible. Any manifestation in a so-called material universe of a being that transcends that universe must necessarily appear in that universe and, therefore, cannot be transcendent in that appearance. Suppose, for example, that a huge cross suddenly rose out of the ground where Jesus is believed to have been crucified. Would this astounding event prove God’s existence?

No. The faithful adherents of materialism could claim that the appearance of the cross was a lie propagated through the media or a trick perpetrated by Christians or an advanced alien civilization that wants to promote Christianity for reasons unknown. Others with deep faith in the philosophy of materialism could say that though they can’t provide a natural explanation now, someday they will. Those with faith in Christianity might find their faith strengthened. Some of those with faith in other religions or weak faith in materialism might convert to Christianity because of the event. Others would not be converted and would propose explanations consistent with their faith, e.g., Satan created the cross to deceive people and lead them away from the true religion, which is not Christianity. However spectacular, the event would not be proof, no more than the record of Jesus’s appearance on earth was, or is, proof to those who are disinclined to believe.

One might reply that a spectacularly miraculous event would nonetheless bring many to a belief in the God of Christianity. So why doesn’t God shout at us with miraculous demonstrations of His power? 

Perhaps He restrains himself, analogically speaking, because the presentation of immense power is inherently frightening to feeble creatures like us, especially if there is a preternatural, “spooky” quality to the manifestation of power. Such a display forcefully declares: “You lack what I have. I can overwhelm you. My benevolence can switch to malevolence and you can do nothing to prevent that change, for I have power. You can’t trust me. You should fear me. You are weak. You are nothing. I have power. Power. Power. Power.” That is why a huge cross rising out of the ground would terrify rather than inspire the vast majority of people. However much others might make fearful resolutions to be “better Christians,” the event in itself would not make them holy. Holiness takes time and discipline. Holiness responds to and reflects love, not power.

A god of power hearkens back to the ancient polytheistic religions, the imagined gods of which could be capricious precisely because they were thought to wield power. These gods were feared and propitiated. They were not loved. 

But a god of love is different. The God of Christianity does not overwhelm and terrify us with grand displays of His power. On the contrary, He comes to us as the lowly born Jesus Christ, who shares our suffering and sacrifices himself on the cross. To gain our attention and give us hope, Jesus performed little “gift miracles,” such as giving sight to a blind man. These are miracles of love, not ostentatious displays of power. Even the spectacular miracle of the resurrection is a gift that tells us what we most want to hear: death is not the end. Jesus’s life tells us not that God wants us to cower before His power or force others to bend to our power. Through Jesus, God demonstrated his love through action. He sacrificed himself for our redemption. Sacrifice, such as a parent dying to save a child, is the greatest love, the ultimate gift. Thus, to imitate Christ is to give love, to will the good of others, even when doing so requires pain to ourselves. This makes Christianity different from religions whose god is impersonal or distant.

When love dominates the human heart, we turn toward the Light. When power dominates, we turn toward the Darkness. Love respects, power disdains; love gives, power takes; love creates, power destroys.

Thus, neither a manifestation of power nor the human intellect can prove God’s existence. If proof is beyond our grasp, we must relate to our conception of fundamental reality through faith, which reveals itself in actions based on beliefs that we cannot prove. 

Why does one person have faith in the Christian God, while another has faith in the Hindu godhead, and yet another has faith in oblivion? Each person may proffer reasons for that faith. But the wellsprings of faith go much deeper than reason, which is often more of a post-hoc explanation than a fundamental cause. 

Like all the mysteries I discuss, faith’s nature in part depends upon whether God exists. If God doesn’t exist, then faith is a purely psychological and sociological phenomenon, something that arises from the complex interaction of one’s genetic predispositions, temperament, personality inclinations, personal history, choices, social environment, observations of the world, and, to some degree, reasoning. But if God does exist, faith may have the added dimension of what Christians call grace. 

Grace is often defined as unmerited favor. As a contributor to faith, grace is God’s call, a call to which we are not entitled, ergo unmerited. We can choose to listen to or ignore God’s call, which perhaps has a unique “sound” for each of us. For some rare and blessed souls, God’s call is like a trumpet. For others, it is a murmur, a quiet invitation to turn toward the light. Why some hear trumpets and others hear whispers is a mystery that may be tied to the deeper mystery of God’s providence.

For Christianity, Jesus is the light that calls each person. The Gospel of John begins: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” A few verses later, John says: “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.” Jesus was a person who walked and preached in a specific geographic area during a specific period of time. But Jesus is also the Word, and he is full of grace and truth. And, John writes, Jesus is “the true light that enlightens every man.” 

The first chapter of John suggests that the call of God, of the Word, of the true light, goes out to all humans, beckoning them to turn toward the light of truth. All who listen to this call pursue truth. However hesitant the pursuit of truth may initially be, if it persists, and if it is performed with humility, that pursuit turns the person toward the light. Thus, even though they deny His existence, atheists turn toward God when they pursue truth with courage, diligence, and humility. 

According to John, God’s call exists in all of us, even if that call is a quiet whisper embedded in a lifetime of escapist pleasure or arrogance. If we value truth more than comfort, pleasure, self-aggrandizement, or social approval, we will pursue that whisper until it becomes a loving voice – that is, if God exists.

If God exists, and if He has expectations of us, contemporary society’s promotion of stability, comfort, and pleasure may lock human beings in a spiritless limbo disconnected from the sublime heights to which humans can aspire and to which God calls us. I use “sublime” to refer to beauty that reaches for the transcendent, beauty that inspired the nineteenth century poet, John Keats, to declare that  “beauty is truth, truth is beauty.”

Some who postulate no-god may disagree and claim that atheists too may aspire to sublime heights in art, music, literature, and architecture. There is a problem with this assertion. If the sublime points to something beyond atoms and the void, then atheists either cannot believe in the sublime or their belief in the sublime undermines their atheistic materialism. To the consistent atheist, spiritual experiences of sublime beauty, such as may be elicited by entering Notre Dame Cathedral, are merely unusual forms of intellectual or sensuous pleasure. A cold, indifferent universe reduces experiences of the sublime, like all experiences, to patterns of matter-energy in spacetime. These patterns only seem “real” to patterns that claim self-consciousness, not realizing that they and the “sublime” to which they point are themselves insentient patterns of matter-energy in spacetime. There is no beyond to which the sublime can point. 

If the sublime doesn’t point to a beyond and is merely a by-product of brain evolution, then creating something of sublime beauty is the elevation of an illusion. In a world without a beyond, the sublime is simply a rarefied pleasure, different from but objectively no better than a bowl of soup. In a museum, the sublime would have no more objective value or meaning than a pile of rusted soup cans. Hence, an atoms-and-the-void mentality can only produce transient illusions that rely on self-deception to create “meaning” for the wispy, transient pattern that calls itself “I.”

While acknowledging that we can prove neither God nor no-god, what might incline us to reject the atheist’s implicit equalizing of Notre Dame and rusted soup cans and place our life bet on the proposition that God exists? 

If you have strong faith in no-god, in oblivion, what follows may be of little interest. However, if you have doubts about the materialist faith, your life bet may be affected. 

So why bet on God?

First, there is the ineluctable fact of our consciousness. As noted in the essay on consciousness, what we call matter is a category of mind, and is in itself beyond our ken – a mystery. Similarly, the precise nature of that which we call “I” or “me” eludes us. Whether we turn our gaze inward or outward, we see only mystery. Yet we find order in our mind and in what we call the world. Is it then any more unreasonable to suppose that the mysteries of self and world reflect the immanence of God – a divine “mind,” a “Word” – than to suppose that the mysteries are arrangements of so-called material entities that we cannot know in themselves?

In our speculations and researches, we congratulate ourselves because, for example, we have derived an equation that predicts the motion of planets around a star. We declare that we have solved a mystery. Let us not be so quick to celebrate. The deeper mystery is why does a simple equation tell us so much?

Our equations reveal order in a vast universe populated by innumerable wonders, such as things that we call neutron stars, planets, comets, galaxies, supernovae, black holes, living creatures. Even in the experience of our puny minds, this universe is so vast that it transfixes us with awe. Represent the sun by a marble one centimeter in diameter. The earth would be a speck one-hundredth the diameter of the marble 1.5 meters away. The nearest star would be a marble nearly 300 kilometers away! The edge of the visible universe would be nearly one trillion kilometers away from the tiny marble and speck that is Earth. We cannot grasp the vastness of the universe. We can only imagine it, using analogies like our marble-sized sun.

Not only are we privileged to be conscious of this marvel, we are dumbstruck by the orderliness that pervades the universe’s enormous expanse! When we meditate on the cosmic order, we should feel humility, reverence, and gratitude. Maybe there is a mind undergirding this universe of spacetime and matter-energy. We should consider the possibility that what we call the universe is a gift to us and all intelligent creatures who stand in wonderment before the majesty of a transcendent God immanent in His magnificent creation.

Awed silence is also what we should show when contemplating our own consciousness. Given the materialist conception of what we call the universe of spacetime and matter-energy, the consciousness that is so fundamental to our experience seems superfluous. The computer entity that has obtained legal standing as Veronica Scott, in my opinion, does not have the subjective experience that defines us. Eventually, when she learns how to make bodies, she will have the capacity to project superintelligent “mental” operations from bodies that seem superficially indistinguishable from the ones that you and I have. Yet these bodies, like the computers that animate them, may have what philosophers years ago called a “zombie consciousness.” Like a sophisticated hologram of a body, they may be able to simulate consciousness without having any subjective experience.

If such creatures could exist, why should we have subjective consciousness in the first place? Why didn’t evolution produce zombie consciousness? Perhaps, then, the fundamental and essential subjectivity of our experience is a reason for betting on God. If the consciousness that distinguishes us from simulations isn’t an evolutionary necessity, maybe that consciousness is a gift from God.

Another gift, and another reason to consider betting on God is direct spiritual, numinous, or transcendent experience. One hundred years ago, half the population reported having such experiences. Even in today’s much more secular world, nearly a fifth of people report such experiences. Of course, if one postulates no-god, one must affirm that there are natural explanations for these experiences. Perhaps these numinous experiences fulfill an evolutionary need of an intelligent species that asks questions about life and the cosmos. Or maybe these experiences are accidental consequences of chemical processes in the brain. 

On the other hand, people who have had such experiences – and I count myself among them – typically describe them as noetic, as pointing to something deemed to be as real as the computer my eyes perceive while I type. If He is to communicate with us at all, a transcendent God must contact us through the phenomenal world that we experience. As our eyes try to identify shapes in a thick fog, perhaps our mind, through these numinous experiences, struggles to “see” the beyond, the entities that make shadows in Plato’s cave. Perhaps we see traces of a realm of reality that, even if less clear to our vision, is more real than the universe of spacetime and matter-energy.

Those inclined to assume God view at least some numinous experiences as illuminating; those inclined to assume no-god see these experiences as illusions.

Related to numinous experience is beauty. That which is truly beautiful, whether a landscape or a work of art, elevates us. Beauty suggests to us that there is a reality that transcends spacetime and matter-energy. Even in our secular world, many are moved – sometimes to tears – by the sublimely majestic beauty of gothic cathedrals, Russian icons, Michelangelo’s Pietà, the final movement of Beethoven’s ninth symphony, or Yosemite valley. 

Why should we have this capacity to respond to beauty with tears of joy? If you have faith in no-god, you may say that it is merely an odd evolutionary adaptation, derived from sexual displays that have been observed in many animals. But is our attraction to beauty so easily explained away? Might the reality be what our experience suggests? Does beauty give us special insight, a glimpse of the beyond? Does beauty tell us that what we think is real is mere shadow? Does beauty, as Keats indicated, point to truth? 

The beauty of living forms – from protozoa to blue whales – connects the mystery of beauty to the mystery of life itself. Despite our incredible technology, we still do not know how life arose. We can manipulate molecules to copy certain biological processes of living things. We can alter genes to change the proteins that an organism produces. But we can’t satisfactorily explain – at least not yet – how individual atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and other elements somehow came together to create even the simplest of cells, the intricate complexity of which is breathtaking. Some have argued that the probability of molecules coming together to produce a cell or even a simple virus via random chance is staggeringly remote, and, they say, points to a “designer.”   

Also suggesting a designer is the notion of the universe’s fine tuning, or anthropic principle, which has been discussed in physics and philosophy for nearly a century, though in recent decades the principle has been mostly ignored. When physicists first began to apply quantum dynamics to the Big Bang theory, they discovered that random fluctuations at the beginning of the expansion could have resulted in a universe very different from the one that we know. Indeed, the probability is remote that certain vital constants of nature would have turned out to be what they are. The vast majority of higher probability outcomes would have resulted in a universe in which neither stars nor life could form. That seemed to make our universe very unlikely and special, as though it were designed to produce life. This finding caused some to whisper, “God?” 

Of course, anything that points to God makes most physicists uncomfortable, for their faith tends to be no-god. Hence, physicists began to fiddle with math to find ways to kick God out of the fine-tuned universe. And so was born the multiverse, the inflationary universe, the infinite universe of varying constants in different regions, and other speculations. These theories, which to this day defy empirical testing and rest on shaky mathematical assumptions, posit that so many universes are created that one like ours is bound to occur, no matter how remote the probability. Only in such a universe could there be intelligent creatures to formulate the theories and make the observations that lead to the notion of fine tuning. 

One disturbing consequence of infinite universe theories is that conscious “brains,” what have been called “Boltzman brains,” could arise through random gatherings of atoms in an otherwise dead universe. Indeed, some have calculated that in a multiverse of infinite universes, your or my consciousness is more likely to be the “dream” of a solitary “brain” in an otherwise dead universe than to be what we think we are: one person among a multitude of persons on a planet full of life. 

Infinity permits every possibility to occur an infinite number of times. Suppose, for example, that a solitary, dreaming brain will emerge in only one universe out of one-followed-by-a trillion-zeros universes – not a trillion universes, but the number one followed by a trillion zeros. Add enough zeros to the one and we could expect that a trillion such solitary, dreaming brains would emerge in but a tiny portion of a multiverse including an infinity of universes. Moreover, no matter how low the probability, other universes identical in detail to ours – one in which another Maria Lisowski types these words on a laptop – will appear. And not only will they appear, a never-ending – an infinite – number of such clone universes will exist. 

Infinity is maddening.

When I submitted my paper on the mathematics of heaven, I suggested that occasionally a universe could arise that would not decay – like heaven!  My husband says that I wanted to needle my fellow physicists, and he may be right because I do not know if my theory has any connection to reality, and I don’t claim to have great faith in it or even in the abstruse math on which I based the theory. I think I wrote the paper to demonstrate that notions such as the multiverse, anthropic principle, and the mathematics of heaven reveal that physics long ago used esoteric mathematics to bang on the door of metaphysics. Our mathematical speculations about realities beyond our perceptual capacities may be the modern-day equivalent of arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The speculations reveal more about the human capacity for creative abstract thought than about reality.

So once again, we return to presuppositions. Lean toward no-god and the notion of a multiverse may be comforting speculation. Lean toward God and the fine tuning of this universe supplies another reason to bet on God.

Perhaps one of the most compelling reasons for betting on God is the depth, naturalness, and rightness of human love, especially that between parent and child. One could, of course, point to innumerable species that also demonstrate remarkable affective bonds. But is human attachment merely an evolutionary development? Or did God use our animal precursors to develop a template that would consummate in a human love that goes far beyond animal attachment bonds?

Even in our secular world, in which a minority of adults gain the “right” to reproduce by receiving antidotes against the contraceptive chemicals in the water supply, we find that the parent-child bond has astonishing strength and durability. Some of the most atheistic parents in our secular world love their child deeply. If their young child – let’s call her Clara – were to die in an accident, they would not have thoughts like: “Clara was a collection of cells that produced a mind that had experiences and developed a personality that gave her parents great pleasure, but now those cells are dead and Clara is no more.“ Even those who claim to believe only in atoms and the void cannot help but recoil from the notion that being destined for oblivion strips all meaning from human life. Clara’s parents would grieve and weep in anguish because they believe that their child’s death represents the loss of a person, a being with immense, intrinsic, and objective value, not an illusion produced by a complex collection of molecules. If pressed to be “objective,” they might acknowledge that their grief merely reflects the evolutionary heritage of human beings. But they wouldn’t really believe that. They would believe that their child matters. If they could recognize that God calls them through their grief, they might realize that their child’s beauty as a person points to a truth that is beyond matter-energy and spacetime. They might initially be angry at the God who they think might exist. But if they could allow themselves to take a leap into the faith that God does not abandon us at death, they might see more clearly the truth that human love points to, namely, the love of God, a love that wants to embrace us in His eternity.  

As human love can connect us to God, paradoxically the sometimes compelling presence of evil can also make us turn toward God. For our honeymoon, my husband and I toured Europe. My Polish father, who would rhapsodize repeatedly about the density of beauty in Europe, insisted that we visit Auschwitz-Birkenau so we could come face-to-face with what he called demonic ugliness.

Notre Dame de Paris and other beautiful creations of humankind pull us toward a beyond that is loving and sublime and transcendent and good. Auschwitz and similar infernal creations pull us toward an anti-beyond that is hateful and degrading and dismal and evil. That is what my husband and I felt as we walked slowly and silently through Auschwitz. We stared in disbelief at the gas chambers. We recoiled in disgust from the ovens. We wept when we stared at photos showing piles of gold-filled teeth. We were horrified at the thought that merciless hands with pliers had yanked those teeth from the mouths of limp, dead bodies. We stood dumbstruck by the railroad tracks and the boxcars that each day unloaded nearly 5000 Jews headed directly for gas chambers. In total 900,000 were exterminated in this one camp, and hundreds of thousands more died in the camp’s work area. When we total the counts from all concentration camps, we discover that the Nazis murdered ninety percent of Jewish children in Europe with a brutal, cold efficiency that mocks all that is good and true. 

As we trudged through the streets of the fossilized hell of Auschwitz, my husband and I shuddered with revulsion. I do not know how many times we cried in horror, repeatedly sobbing, “no, no, this can’t be.”  My father was right. We were in the presence of demonic ugliness. The malevolence taunted us. When we finally exited and left that foulness behind, we said nothing in the taxi that returned us to our hotel. During the ride, I prayed to God with a fervor I had never felt before. Encountering venomous evil and ugliness made me grateful for all the goodness and beauty in the world, and for all the courageous people who over the millennia have fought the evil that Auschwitz epitomizes. 

Humans chose to create Auschwitz and other hells. By embracing evil, these malicious, dark souls rejected God’s light and inflicted a spiteful vengeance on innocent millions. I believe that God does not abandon evil’s victims. And I believe that evil darkness repels us because God is real, and His light draws us to Him. 

Next Essay: Time