The absolute absurdity of God

[Neo-Scholastic]

How could one even go about offering defeaters to an falsifiable, subjective experience like sensus divinitatus?

Some experiences are inherently veridical. IMHO opinion there is nothing more obviously real than pain. Pain, especially excruciating physical pain, death, loss and catastrophe are more certain than the material world ever was. The notion of a material world acting according to natural laws is a relatively young idea, less than 500 years, whereas the reality of pain and suffering has been blatantly obvious from the dawn of Mankind.

Now to say that, well gee, now we know better, reflects a profound and two-fold modern ignorance. First, we presume that our 500-year old naturalistic account of what stuff is made out of  serves as a better map of reality “as it truly is” than 12,000 years of reflecting on reality as it is lived. Secondly, it wrong-headed to say that people before the modern period were trying to describe the material world and natural phenomena with the flawed tools of myth and magic, when they didn’t even care about matter and natural laws. That was the furthest thing from their minds. A flash of lightning was not an occasion to speculate on what kind of stuff it’s made of or where is comes from. No. The very fact that there is lightning at all opened the minds of our ancestors to reflect about what it means to be surviving and prosper in a capricious and hostile world. One of the unique ideas of Christianity, the one that gave birth to the scientific revolution, was of a rationally ordered universe reflecting a rational God. The mechanics of the world were interesting to the founders of modern science mostly because they believed that the operation of the natural world was a portal through which they could understand the Divine Mind.

I submit to you that 90% of how you navigate through life is by attending to the meanings of the things around you. You don’t see a flat slab of wood in a rectangular opening; you see a doorway that, depending on your intentions, can be either a barrier or a pathway. No one, other than a mathematician, thinks about coffee cups as the topological equivalents of a torus rather than as containers for the purpose of holding hot beverages. Your reality is not composed just of matter and energy. It is mostly composed of goals, functions, patterns, signs and omens. It is about a relationship to the world richly endowed with meanings that are every bit as real to you as the material through which those manifest.

Where I am going with this is that the sensus divinitatus serves as the corollary to the sense of tragedy and despair, just as real and just as old. In Christian terms, God created the universe out of the abyss, the unstructured void that at every moment threatens to devour our world unless some transcendent principle holds it all together. That is not just some poetic metaphor. That’s an inescapable fact of human existence. If you stop trying to understand what is happening in your life your world will collapse around you in potentially fatal ways. And that same understanding informs many of the apologetic proofs for a necessary being, the prime mover, etc. The same reason for why you live will fall apart if you don't have proper goals and good values is the exact same reason why the entire universe will devolve into chaos in the absense of ultimate purpose and eternal sustenance.

So how do you make sense of that?

What I’m saying is that naturalism is an extremely useful way to circumscribe a narrow sliver of reality but that a reductionist way of looking at the world is also an extremely limiting, ineffective, pitiful, and bleak way to understand life. Knowing your specific gravity is far less important than knowing who loves you. The story of your life is infinitely larger than any account, no matter how comprehensive, of your electrochemical states over time.

So against that backdrop…

Just because I can’t demonstrate such a feeling isn’t the lord calling to you, that doesn’t mean it’s rational for you to believe that it is.  Can you honestly say that you have ruled out every natural explanation for this spiritual yearning to the conclusion that a divine sense is the most well-supported and most likely cause?

What if there isn’t a difference? In your life, as you live it, your values and intentions are constantly at play with the matter and physical forces. Not necessarily in a back and forth interplay between two independent entities; but rather (I believe) both inalienably and distinct in substances. I don’t see the mind-body problem. It is a non-issue to me. In our reality physical matter (whatever that is) serves as the means by which values, and intentions manifest. And those non-physical aspects manifest within matter to sustain and direct it.

Everyone I know doesn’t just believe in diverse facts but also a transcendent Truth, capital ‘T’, that binds it all together and makes it whole. Christianity is a well-developed picture of that Truth and a response to the fact that life is tragic and gives sophisticated form to and understanding of the transcendence, the Logos, that makes it all important and worthwhile. It speaks to our relationship with reality beyond measuring the distance between stars. Its central claim, a triumphant victory over death, literally embodies a Divine Providential Order that reaches into the world, not just physically, not just psychologically, not simply as myth, or spiritual enlightenment; but rather on all those levels simultaneously.