How Do You Know Your God Is Real?

A friend of mine wrote this piece which i thought it would give us some insights on the truthfulness of our own faith.

http://yacht.nicklim.com/blog.php

"How do you know your God is real? If I were to ask a buddhist, hindu, muslim etc they will all give me a common answer that their God(s) is real. Can you tell me from a Christian standpoint as well as logical point of view that your God is real"

Someone in the forum asked the above question. My own response is to first ask the question about epistemology (theory of knowledge). As the response may become irrelevant in the forum because it does not essentially answer the question posted, I decided to post my response here as a blog entry on "epistemology".

---------------------

Thanks for your provocative question. In your post, there are two points which i want to highlight:

1) Real - I assume, it is a pure assumption, that the question to christians about their "knowledge" of the reality of the christian god and observation that folks frm other religion will equally affirm the reality of their god/s, is more of an experiential and existential question. This means, more often than not, each religion, christianity included, approach the issue of reality of the divine in a personal experience and encounter, i.e., my god is real because of what he did in my life, my god is real because i feel his presence all the time.

This may not be the case of your question, but from the tone of it, this is my assumption (see no. 2 below). And this is my observation from dialogue with most laities of different faith concerning the reality of their worldview about god/s.

2) standpoint - Perhaps you did not mean it this way, but the way you structured the question, are you pitting the christian point of view against the logical point of view? This is what led me to my first assumption above. But this is not my point here...As above was a question about approaching god/s tru exprience, this is approaching the god/s question tru logic.

Now in my humble opinion, experience and logic cannot be a perfect instrument. in fact, far from perfect.

Firstly, our experience can be deceiving. No one experience is wrong, as individuals approaches reality differently, therefore respond differently and retain the knowledge of all these differently. I cannot say that your experience is wrong, but i can say that it is bad. One may experience pleasure in pain while the other may not, to give a simplistic example. Both experience are not logical fallacies as in a logical "wrong". Therefore, it does nothing to my knowledge of truth if the whole bunch of religionists, including christians, ALL claim that their exprience is the true one. If experience CANNOT be wrong, it cannot be true either. Experience can only be good or bad experience. And as we all know, bad experience may not necessarily be false, because experience cannot be true/false and as we all know so well, they are so often a valuable lesson in life. Therefore, good and bad experience tells me little (if not nothing - my friend Joshua pointed out that experience does tell us something about the Truth) about the Truth.

Logic, can famously be flawed. Logic is not equivalent to Truth. It is only an instrument to arrive at conclusions. It is a useful instrument, no doubt, but used wrongly, the conclusion of logic can be disasterous. Take this statement: A square circle. Logic tells us that a thing cannot be a square in the same sense and time as it is a circle. Therefore, a square circle cannot exist, it is false. But what about, a pink elephant? Here logic is helpless? If we push for logic to operate, we will probably get a wrong result. Just because no one has seen a pink elephant, does it mean it does not exist? Logic tells us that it is totally okie for an elephant to be pink.

These simple illustration is to highlight my concern about knowledge, experience, logic, reality and truth. I am not saying the experience and logic cannot be continued to be instruments by which we receive truth, no far from it. What i am suggesting is that we must discard them as instruments to MEASURE truth. To receive yes, but to measure, no.

Having said that, what is the epistemology (theory of knowledge) which i hold to? I first propose four aphroisms:

1) Truth is that which conforms to reality, or that which explains reality as it is.

2) Human limitation means that our best knowledge of the Truth can only an approximation
3) Doubt is not necessarily evil, in fact it is inevitable

4) We live in a storied world and the only possible way of knowing is within the context of a story

Then, allow me to suggest that, there are three layers of stories:

1) The overarching story - the Metanarrative

2) The personal stories

3) The community stories

The Metanarrative, is the story about the world. We have to come to realize that Truth is more complex than one liner statement: There is one god. Propositions such as this one cannot be disembodied from the story they exist and operate in. Without further story-telling, no one can REALLY understand, the pregnant reality symbolized by words such as "one god".

One another level, there is the personal or individual stories. Stories which each person receive and retain as they interact with the Metanarrative: When water reaches a certain degree of temperature, it changes into gas. We knew it as a story, there is a context, there are actors, and storyline. And we know that touching the boiling kettle will scald the hand, this is a story among many many stories which we receive and retain as we approache reality. And among these stories which we retain, each of them could be detrimental to one another, e.g. we could hold on to two stories which are totally ironical and still held both to be true to reality. Having said that, we come to the question, what sorts of stories are the right stories?

Man (and woman) encountering the story of the world, becomes part of the story itself. We are not detached observers, looking into a microscope into reality. And unless we presume to be the whole of reality or larger than reality, then we definitely cannot peer into it like a scientist on a bacteria. We become involved in the story, both individual stories and the Metanarrative. The Metanarrative - the whole story - will force us to comply as much as possible to it. Like the hot kettle, we can choose to believe that it does not scalp, but as we act in the story, we cannot but to know it does and if we still refuse to change our story, we will taste the bitter fruit of pain and torture for living against reality.

The personal stories, gained tru the instruments of senses, experience, mind (logic?) are formed within the Metanarrative, never without it, and are formed as man and woman act within the Metanarrative, not as passive audiences of it. So when Sakyamuni taught the four noble truth:

1) The reality of sufferings

2) The cause of sufferings

3) The cessation of sufferings

4) The path of cessation of sufferings

he discovered the first two as part of his involvment in the storied world. There is pain and there is pain. The persons who say that all is fine is living in an illusion, against the Metanarrative. The reality of pain and suffering is a story which is shared by all major religions and taught by the great sages of different times and cultures. But the Indian philosophical mind led Sakyamuni to the 3rd and 4th noble truth. They are the logical conclusion from the 1st and 2nd noble truth. But as we have noted, logic may be flawed, it may lead to the wrong conclusion and still be perfectly logical (how this is so in the 3rd and 4th noble truth, shall occupy another discussion). Bearing this in mind, I have no problem to understand why and to say that there is some truth in every religions.

Therefore, as we begin to examine our stories, our lives, we will begin to pit one story against another, comparing them to the Metanarrative. It is in this process that we begin to strike out and discard stories which are not conformed to reality.

Finally, there is the level of community stories, stories shared by people who form a community, whether religious or cultural or political. Stories shared by christians, buddhists, democrats, republicans, communists, stamp collectors, lawyers, housewives. We may as well call them traditions. Of course, traditions or community stories can be wrong, well a whole community may live in illusion (and commit suicide en masse?), therefore the warnings to not follow traditions blindly are sound and valid. Yet, let us also realize that most of the time, our stories do not come from nowhere. I cannot possible conduct every experiment or experience every events in the whole of reality to be able to construct a meaning story about the Truth. No, i am the beneficieary of the community stories. These are stories which 1) are formed with each individuals contributing their personal stories, 2) are formed with the whole community acting out the Metanarrative together. Stories which I bring into a community will be challenged by and will challenge the stories which are already treasured in it. The community stories will then help to form my understanding and shape it in the way acceptable to them.

How then can we know the truth? I propose within the Christian community, three active actions:

1) Rigorous study - incl. reading and dialogue
2) Rigorous prayers
3) Community

I believe this is how we should apply in studies the injunction by Jesus when he said, be perfect for your Father is perfect. We are to go all out to search for the truth, like the man who found a field of buried treasures and sold all he has to purchase the field. As we engage in studies, in reading, in discussions, in dialogue, we are in essence allowing our stories to be challenged by the possibly different stories we will encounter. There will be a mental clash in which the stories wihch conform most to the Metanarrative will prevail. Of course, the more stories we have, the more coherence story we will form. In fact i would love to think of the stories we retain not as building blocks, one above another, but as pieces of jigsaw puzzle, forming together to give us a picture of reality. As we engage, the awkward pieces will be moved to the right places and the wrong pieces will be discarded.

Prayers, as Christians, we believe in a god who is Wisdom and who claims to be the Truth and who is our Teacher. We believe that there is no reality apart from god and therefore, it is imperative that we should seek him rigorously in our quest for the Truth.

Community, the Church has treasured community stories and will continue to have new and fresh stories as she goes tru different ages and times. It is within this community that we should allow ourselves to be humbled and challenged and taught. This is what is means to sharpen one another, to edify one another as we assemble as god's people.

May god have mercy on our petty minds. Let us exercise our minds and exercise our minds in the service of the Lord.