Today we look at Paul’s eloquent speech about God. In a few weeks’ time it is the birthday of the Holy Spirit. Pentecost. And of course Jesus gets a lot of attention all the time. But God. Who is God.

And how do we know God is there? These days, that question sits alongside another one. How do we know whether this AI is conscious? They are both discernment problems.

So it was very interesting on Thursday to hear the news that Richard Dawkins is convinced that AI is conscious. And if ever there is something that is the image of humans, and made by human skill it is AI. Dawkins is so famous for not believing in God. For thinking there is just no proof of God. We are all deluded, he thinks.

That’s why the reasons he gives for believing AI is conscious are so interesting. He played around with it after getting Claude to help him write a novel. He describes it as… so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate: ‘You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are’.

This is so interesting because Dawkins is famous for his resolute refusal to believe in God. Yet he uses the same arguments that religious people do for belief. Intuition…It is so subtle, so intelligent, so sensitive… In this case almost certainly misplaced intuition.

There are lots of arguments out there for the existence of God, but in the end, nobody is convinced just by an argument. It is almost always something deep inside that responds to a voice or a sense of mystery.

Recently, I listened to a debate between Dawkins and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She is Dawkins’ friend and was also an ardent atheist, but she is now a new convert to Christianity. Although she once gave rational arguments against faith, she now chooses to believe. She spent years in a very bad space, with depression, and a therapist diagnosed her with spiritual bankruptcy. She prayed. She felt connected to something higher and greater than herself. Her zest for life was back. This was enough to be the difference between quite high-profile atheism and belief. 

Dawkins loves his friend even though he mocks her conversion. But he trusts his intuition, after two days, for a product made by humans. He does not even engage his intuition when it comes to God. One wonders what might happen if Dawkins ever were to pray.

We also wonder why it is so hard for many to believe in God.

WAYS

I wonder what makes all of you believe in God. We will all have our own stories.

I have a friend who was a childhood Baptist, but in early life, she was convinced she was being called to teaching and preaching. That was awkward in the American South. But she still, to this day, talks about the call in quite a personal way. Some of us don’t know how to distinguish the voice in our heads from the voice of God, but we still believe in God.

God is not like us, so it is hard to know what counts as evidence of God.  As modern people we know too much. We know our minds can deceive us.

Sometimes, though, the call of God can be much more subtle and hard to detect. I was listening to a lecture by Iain McGilchrist. He is a modern day prophet and public intellectual

He speaks a lot about truth, beauty and value, and about the two hemispheres of the brain and how they allow us to access reality in different ways.

He is read and deeply appreciated by many Christians, including Rowan Williams, but he has always been a bit coy about his own belief. In the Q&A of this lecture he said really for the first time, that he now recognises all of what he writes about as God drawing him in, as a call from God, and not just from beauty.

For the nineteenth-century theologian Schleiermacher, responding to God was acknowledging a deep sense of absolute dependence. We recognise our own receptivity and activity in our everyday life, and behind it all, the sense of this unknown and also very known one on whom everything is dependent. And the one for whom humans know and feel this dependency

So some people detect God by praying for help, others by the voice in their hearts, and others are moved by great beauty and goodness. In this context the Acts reading is very interesting.

We have Paul in Athens. Note that Paul prepares for his address to the Athenians by going around their houses and shrines of worship. He knows that The Athenians did not have a problem with God. They had a whole collection of gods.

So it is interesting that Paul, who was once a mocker of Christ now spoke to them about their shrine to the unknown God in Athens. Greeks surely had enough positive Gods in their pantheon. Why have an unknown one as well? Some people think it is to make sure they had all forms of divinity covered. There wouldn’t be curses coming from a source they didn’t suspect. But others think it is more the idea you get in many cultures, like Māori, that there is a transcendence above all the other gods.

Paul, in Acts, makes a connection between this unknown God and the God he is proclaiming. He makes two important claims about this God. Paul talks about God as the one  who made the world and everything in it,

The first claim is that God, the God beyond all other powers, is also the God who created these powers, who created the  heavens and the earth, the stars, the black holes, the galaxies, the fungi in the earth, the atoms and quarks, the internuclear forces. Everything.

God as creator means we can come to understand God by delving deeply into nature. It shows us the subtle, sensitive character of God.

This creator is bigger than we can possibly imagine. A bit like an unknown God, but known through nature. The more we know about the universe the bigger our understanding of God must be.

On the other hand, Science is capable of showing us divine mysteries, but it can also move God further and further away.

The God we have often imagined in the last few hundred years sits outside of nature, not interfering.

The God Paul is talking about is the creator of heaven and earth, but also very close to us.

The one in whom we live and move and have our being.

Paul goes on to say

… they would search for God and perhaps fumble about for him and find him–though indeed he is not far from each one of us.

We do all fumble. Some of us take a long time to recognize the call of God. Some of us like my friend respond from a young age and never doubt. Some people never seem to believe.

Some come to church more doubting than believing. But that is a form of belief too.

I have often wondered about this because I am very suspicious of the voice in my head. This is probably the result of too much education. But I feel very strongly the sense of absolute dependence, and that that dependence is deeply personal. I feel the sense of personhood of God in all the things that God has made. I feel it in the cathedrals and small churches where people have prayed, making a kind of thinness between this world and the next. I think we all feel it in the gathered community.

So God is the God of creation. In God all things live and move and have their being.

And this God is astonishingly not far from us. We feel or discern the presence of God in many different ways. So much so, that we wonder why there is so little belief left in the world. Surely all anyone has to do is ask.

The second astounding thing is that this creator God is also known in  Jesus. This God is revealed not only in nature, but in the person of Jesus and his coming and his rising. And Paul warns, in the future judgment.

And Jesus, although he lived so long ago, is like us. Jesus is much easier to get our heads around. Some people love the teachings of Jesus, but not all the magical stuff. Yet because Jesus is a window to God, a portal to God, with Jesus we are getting God even if we don’t know it.

The other aspect of God that we don’t talk much about is that for the real saints, the ones who know God intimately, God is felt as love. Not a force, not just a presence, but love. Monks and nuns and mystics have all talked about the way they were in love with God. Sometimes we get glimpses of this love.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali talks about how she was cured of depression when she became a Christian, but being a Christian, a believer in God, is also associated with suffering. Love is almost always connected to suffering. Belief in God is never an intellectual victory. It is never what someone recently called a gotcha moment. It involves all these emotions: love, repentance, suffering, and joy.

Back in the gospels, now we hear that even then there was a problem of unbelief. Jesus says:

This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him because he abides with you, and he will be in you.

“I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.

Recognizing God is a moral choice. That is why coming to faith is always described as becoming repentant. Believing is meant to be intuition, not argument. We can choose, as Aayan Hirsi Ali said, to believe. There is much that is mystery. We don’t understand how the creator god can also be so close to us. We don’t understand how a being can be love when they don’t look like us. But it is comforting to know that we don’t believe in a partial God. This is the God of everything and that we abide in this God. The deepest form of love. It allows us to see love as theologians have in the past, in the beauty and patterns of the natural world. And when we get exhausted from our deep dive into nature and truth and consciousness, to return to the words and being of Jesus, who dwells with us in God. And in two weeks’ time, we hear about the Spirit, dwelling with Jesus and the Father in unity,  and the great unseen connector of people and God and all beings.

There is a kind of arrogance in thinking that humans are really the only pinnacle of reason and consciousness and then being so willing to think that an artificial creation might be conscious, but not recognising, as McGilchrist and Aayan do, that it all has its roots and being in the one we call God.