Touched by the Spirit

The Holy Sprit touched me today at a shopping mall.

I was walking in Festival Walk, on my way to the bus stop, when a memory popped into my mind.

I was in junior high then, and on a ski lift at Aspen.  A presumably American lady asked me if I knew who Jesus was.

What would I say now?  I knew what I would say - He was the Son of God.  And then I corrected myself - not was, but is: He is the Son of God. Was implies history, while the present tense means that it is still true, and in some instances, always true.  The sun is a star.

Jesus is the Son of God.

At that moment, I felt an overwhelming urge to cry, while walking in the mall.  Tears were welling up under my eyes.  Had I not stopped and tried to detach myself, wondering why I felt that urge, I would definitely have knelt down and cried in the crowds.

But of course I knew why - and the urge only grew stronger when I repeated the words.

It’s hard being a Christian outside of fellowship or church.  Today I received a huge encouragement from above.

Agnosticism and the Soul

I attended church for the first time in many weeks yesterday.  Picked up a Bible last night for the first time in at least six months.  God grant me the perseverance and humility necessary to soldier on — God willing.

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When I last examined my religious beliefs, I found that I was agnostic.  I still am.  I believed that nothing material in this world can ever prove or disprove the existence of God.  Religion and science govern two very different realms, and I still confirm that belief.

However, I had a bit of a breakthrough again.  God is in this world, and this does not have to conflict with agnosticism.

I remembered Prof. Hall telling me about Thomas’s theories (Thomas = St. Aquinas) in a law school interview more than a year ago.  Essentially, Thomas claimed that we can only fully ponder the nature of something if we are superior to it.  Thus we can examine the behavior of animals — study their biological mechanisms, and their reaction to stimuli, for example.  There are no surprises.  A dog will react to a gunshot unless trained; they cannot simply choose to ignore the sound.

But there are things that we cannot fully understand.  Life is one of them.  Science, for all its intelligence, cannot create life out of nothing.  True, we can create new organisms, but it is only by using existing living biological machines can we manage to program new itierations of DNA.  We can only use life to create new life, and not the void to create life.

Conversely, consider the nature of time.  Animals do not perceive time the way we do.  We dwell on the past, and attempt to foresee the future.  Animals look but at the present, and memory for them is what is necessary only for survival.  Animals don’t take a trip down memory lane just for the hell of it.  We do, a lot.

Thomas then postulates that there is something within us that is superior to time, such that we can analyze in such great detail its aspects.  We also have a great understanding of space, continuously refining our knowledge from Descartes to Newton to Einstein. 

What is that within us that transcends space and time?  Thomas believed it to be the soul.

Now if we combine that with my belief in agnosticism:

I accept that there is such a thing as a soul.  There must be, to allow our existence to have any meaning.  Without a soul, all our personalities, characters and consciences are nothing more than a spectre raised by the interaction of our body biochemistry — what an unflattering and depressing vision that is. 

And if we have a soul — that soul is not of this material world.  Nothing in this material world can prove nor disprove the existence of a soul, for the very concept of a soul breaks the laws of physics.  The soul must transcend time and space, although I suppose it must be limited to what our physical bodies are capable of.

Recall, for a second, what I said about God not being present in the material world.  Flip that around and the necessary implication is that God can touch our souls.  They are both in the spiritual dimension.  Then the line becomes impossibly blurred.  If God can touch our souls, that must influence how we behave in the material world.

Many possibilities open up.  Miracle coincidences?  (True story: Surgeon and wife stranded in their broken car in freezing New Zealand weather.  They pray for help after hours.  A farmer rescues them from certain death.) This is certainly explainable through the laws of chance.  It is also explainable through the soul theory.  Both theories cannot at the same time apply, but they can co-exist perfectly well together.

I am thus forced to accept that God must be in this world — all around us although by definition completely undetectable by our material senses and our material tools.  If we choose to make a covenant with God and we believe there is a soul, then whether we are agnostic or not makes no difference: God is here and God is watching, from the very depths of our souls.

But I think too much.  Brothers in Christ have reminded me that God is not some philosophical concept we dream up in our heads.  God is not a logical argument.  God is.

I am reminded of Exodus 3:14 (hereafter refered to as the pi verse)

“God said to Moses, “I am who I am . This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’ “

That is enough to dispose of the matter.