How does God exist?

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isa 55:8,9 NRSV)

While we must affirm that God is not tied into nature, His otherness comes not from the mode of His being as opposed to the world we see around us but from the interpretation of event and story “that produces otherness that nevertheless belongs to itself”. Behind the Word of God there is a human word. “There is no inhumanness in God.”

The modern person finds run-of-the-mill theological language inflated, it claims too much and invokes a supernatural realm that is, since the rise of natural science, unbelievable. It is no wonder that my scientific colleagues get nervous when I want to talk about theology. They live in a properly disenchanted world in one sense in that they may investigate nature without the problem of inhabiting spirit.

The scientific mind has become exclusively naturalistic; the rainbow is seen as Newton saw it, the refraction of the components of white light. So when we see a rainbow we think of physical mechanism and not the covenant with Noah. This is a disenchanted world. Adherents to this world, like Dawkins (nicely nailed by Terry Eaglton) and Dennett, will produce no great work of art, not because one is a biologist and the other a philosopher, but because their world is flat.

The increasing detail of scientific knowledge fails to ignite the spirit, tell us who we are or trace a hopeful trajectory. The disenchantment of the world has led to the disenchantment of life. We hope now in new technology to ease our burden and extend our lives. Our trust is in progress.

The re-enchantment of life is possible through biblical story, legend and poetry woven as they are from human history and celebrated in the worship of the Church. Christian worship can be astonishing and can be at the centre of life as long as it is saved from the double entry book keeping that places God somewhere else and from the deadening naturalism of the scientists.

While biblical narrative is often derived from actual historical event (Jesus “suffered under Pontius Pilate”) it is also figurative. We do not have to believe that the miracles actually happened for them to confront us with truth. We do not have to believe that the resurrection of Jesus consisted of a resuscitation to understand its centrality for us.

The way should be open for modern men and women to become believers, there is no essential conflict as regards the nature of the physical world. The real reason for our lack of faith lies where it has always lain, in our hardness of heart, in our desire to create and control our own lives. As long as we persist in these, faith will be far from us even though the barriers that scientists have erected have long since fallen over.