Proving the Existence of a Mr. Apollo

     Whenever I am cornered into reading the attacks on Christianity by atheists with a soapbox, I'm struck by how paltry they are compared to the great dark atheists of the past, such as Nietzsche.  They will admit, they say, only evidence for God that can be gathered from the senses directly.  By this they do not mean what Thomas Aquinas meant when he agreed with Aristotle, saying that all human knowledge begins in the senses.  They mean that knowledge essentially begins and ends in the senses: what we know must be verified in turn by what we can sense.

     The position rules out all metaphysics, all moral philosophy, all ontology, and all theology, if by "God" we mean something like the Being that Christians are supposed to worship.  (Mathematics and logic are under the gun, too, but that's another blog.)  He is "closer to us than we are to ourselves," says Augustine.  He is infinite -- and not merely successively endless -- goodness, beauty, and truth.  He enjoys eternal, and not merely everlasting, life.  He not only comprehends the greatest things, but is comprehended by the smallest.  By the very nature of God, then, and by the nature of the limitations of our own intellects, His existence cannot be proved by sensory data alone.  In fact, the only demonstrations of His existence that can be decisive, other than a direct illumination of the intellect, must involve a departure from the senses.  They must be metaphysical.  That is a pretty elementary point, but one the resisters will not admit.

     Take for instance the story of the twice-cured woman whom I wrote about a couple of days ago.  I didn't make that story up; I have it on the word of the son-in-law and daughter, who are friends of ours.  The woman is in town, too, and can verify the events.  The events she can verify, but not the interpretation of the events.  That's because even a miracle is still only a sign for faith to grasp, and not a proof to settle the matter.  She's been cured twice, miraculously I'd say, yet she will not attribute the cure to God.  Why should she?  It could be that a demon answered the prayer.  It could be mind-boggling coincidence, squared.

     It could be the work of an alien being, of intelligence and power far beyond our own, playing with us.  Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of the DNA helix, apparently believes that there is strong evidence for intelligent design of biological life on earth, but attributes that design to an alien power -- a being whose intellect would stand in relation to ours as, perhaps, ours stands in relation to that of a dog or a horse.  Or think of us as programmed virtual beings (virtual for the world of the programmer), who live out our existence in the program, and who are occasionally made aware, by means of a blatant "sign," of the existence of a great geeky alien boy named Daggo, not infinitely good, not eternal, not even particularly aware of the world around him.

     So when the critics demand a sign, do they then ask what the sign would prove?  I ask for a piece of supposedly incontrovertible evidence.  I pray, "Show me a banner in the sky, visible to all the world, that reads 'I exist'.  Place it somewhere between Jupiter and Saturn.  Encode it in binary flashes of light."  Then suppose it happens.  What does that prove?  I'm not asking what it suggests.  What does it prove?  That a power beyond my own has heard me -- that is all it proves.  It proves the existence of a Mister Apollo.  Is the power good?  Is it evil?  Is it a mischievous mix?  How would the human race react to it?  Would they flock to their churches?  Would they raise their fists in impatience, demanding more and more?  Would they apostasize, feeling cramped by the nearness of the power?  In what way, practically speaking, would it be good for the human race to see such a sign?  Or, why would the God of infinite goodness provide His people, once they have passed an early stage of barbarism, with pyrotechnical and tricksy proofs not of His own existence, but of the existence of Mr. Apollo, especially when Mr. Apollo really is a figment of the imagination? 

     The miracle that is a confirmation of faithful prayer works rather from within, silently, in the wilderness, in a kind of sensory solitude -- and its effect, in those who behold it, is to usher them more deeply into the divine life.  In that sense it is a sign -- or rather a signpost, for those who would take up their pallets and walk.