God Interrogated

Introduction

Among the most important questions that have ever been asked are those concerning the way everything we know came into being, and how this process or event may be related to the purposes of our existence. Three major religious traditions known as monotheisms attribute the whole of reality to a divine, all-powerful creator. The earliest, Judaism, holds that God revealed himself to the Israelites, and that if they obey his laws he will acknowledge them as the people he has chosen to bring his light to the world. Christianity teaches that God came to earth in the form of his son, Jesus of Nazareth. Through faith in the saving death and resurrection of Jesus, it is claimed, our relationship with God, broken due to our sinfulness and rebellion against him, can be restored. Within Islam, the name of the one true God is Allah, and the Quran is his most perfect revelation. Muhammad is the final prophet sent by Allah to teach human beings how to live. 

The decision to believe in God may result from a sense that there must be a higher power who is responsible for everything that exists. Alternatively, it may arise from an instinctive feeling that there is something more to life than can be explained by what is immediately apparent. Belief in God may also be based on the awareness of deficiencies in a person’s experience. Among the needs that could met in this context would be a sense of having sins forgiven, of receiving divine love, guidance, and protection, and of finding meaning and purpose in life. 

Although the existence of God cannot be proved, a person who decides to exercise faith in him would expect to receive an assurance that some kind of transformation has occurred as a result of taking that decision. It is possible however for a person to accept the doctrines of a given faith and to put into practice the behaviours it requires, without at the same time experiencing any deep-seated sense of inner change. If on other hand such an awareness should become a reality, the individual would have reason to regard the experience as a confirmation of the teachings embraced. 

One of the factors working against the validation of beliefs by personal experience is that similar kinds of transformation can take place in the lives of adherents within the different traditions. Although there are certain areas of commonality among the teachings of the monotheisms, a comparison of specific doctrines shows that many of them are contradictory, or at least inconsistent, so that what is held to be true in one system of belief would be regarded as false in another. An example would be the Christian doctrine that God became man in the person of Jesus, whereas the idea of an incarnated God is regarded as blasphemous in both Judaism and Islam. From this it follows that if similar kinds of inner change occur in the lives of believers from the different faiths, transformative processes based on truth would appear to exist alongside those based on untruth. Because of the distinction between the experiences themselves and the concepts on which they are based, inner change of itself is insufficient to establish the accuracy of the beliefs held, regardless of the status attributed to them by the individual. 

My own interest in this subject arose from fifty years of deep commitment to the Christian faith. Although I had no doubt that Christianity was true, I did not experience anything of the transformation that is described in the scriptures as being normative for the believer. During this period I met people of various religious persuasions who were living examples of the qualities I lacked.