To believe in God, to believe in anything beyond what our senses tell us, in something that exists beyond the body, that survives death – is a choice.  There is ultimately, no proof of it.  I can make inferences based on hypotheses like intelligent design, which statistically infers the existence of a Higher Power based on the complexity of life.  Yet atheists have equally valid inferences to back up their arguments.  Belief and non-belief are both ultimately just arguments. They’re assumptions.  Faith and atheism are choices.  Agnostics probably have the most intellectually honest position, since they recognize that proof one way or the other is impossible.

It could even be argued that for those who do believe in a Higher Power, the focus on an afterlife is a distraction that prevents us from enjoying the here and the now.  Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx both espoused that idea. Marx called religion an opiate, and Freud thought that the belief in God was a wish-fulfillment.

God is always here since It is everywhere.  God is always now since the past no longer is, and the future never really arrives. Past and future are fantasy states.  So, to make conjectures regarding an afterworld, the true nature of which we cannot know, may actually interfere with our experience of God.  Planning for an afterlife may impair our relationship with the God whom believers claim to know.

I have great respect for the fearlessness and honesty of those who don’t believe in God.  For them, life takes great courage to live because it essentially has only the meaning they ascribe to it.  For them, there is no divine comfort here or elsewhere.  I respect the bravery they show when confronted at death with the voidance of their being.  They act and speak with integrity and consistency. Some of the most consistent, moral and loving people I know are atheist or agnostic.

I do believe in God, but I’m not here to convince those who don’t.  I don’t think atheists and agnostics are damned because of their nonbelief. While I believe in God, I don’t believe in God’s opposite, or in hell.  I wouldn’t punish an amoeba for not believing in me.  Why would God punish those who don’t believe in God?  I don’t think my belief is superior. I don’t assume that I have inside information, that I know something that nonbelievers don’t know.  I just make a different assumption than they do.

Let’s face it.  In all of history, no one has ever come back to tell us that there is an afterlife.  I’m not aware of credible evidence that someone on this earth has been visited by someone who has left it.  We have out-of-body and near-death experiences, but they could be ascribed to psychological or physiological phenomenon.  The Bible has stories of visitations by the departed and survival after death, but the Bible is in some ways a historical document.  It doesn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny.

Before he died, Harry Houdini went throughout the world trying to find a spiritualist medium who stood up to skeptic tests and found none.  He gave his wife a code. After he died, she visited mediums all over the world, looking for someone who could supply her with that code, but not one was able to supply it.  Hospitals have placed numbers, words and symbols above the beds of code blues whose hearts have stopped and whose brains have therefore stopped receiving oxygen. As we know, some are revived on the table, and a minority of these individuals who’ve gone terminal report undergoing near-death experiences in which they claim some awareness of the afterlife. These NDE’s are somewhat consistent, but they provide only anecdotal evidence of something which survives death. The numbers, words and symbols over the beds of these individuals were placed there in order to provide experimental proof that the individuals claiming out-of-body experiences would be able to read and recall the codes once they were resuscitated.  No one was ever able to do so.  Not one.  No one’s ever come back from the other side to tell us there is something to believe in, that there is a God.  These studies and anecdotes don’t disprove God or that human consciousness survives bodily death, for it is impossible to prove a negative, especially to disprove the existence of a deity.  Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.  It simply makes belief or non-belief a choice.

If there is something that survives the death of the body, if there is a dimension of existence that transcends the senses, surrounding us but physically impalpable, there may be good reason why it remains non-apparent.  We may float like a fish in the deepest seas, yet be unaware that we live in water.  We may be unaware that water even is.  For most of human history, people have been subject to the laws of gravity, but they never understood its origins.  They experienced the effects of the invisible spectra of electromagnetic radiation, yet never knew what hit them.  Their bodies were composed of cells and molecules and atoms, and they were never aware that these units existed.  Microbes made them sick, yet they weren’t conscious of what made them sick. They were surrounded by stars and galaxies, by superclusters and blackholes, yet never realized that they swam in these deep black seas of space. We knew not of relativity, of quantum mechanics, of the four universal forces, and of the Big Bang that started it all in motion. Spirit may be our ultimate ocean, yet the intellect may be as blind to it as medieval theologians were to the Copernican cosmos in which the earth was not at its center.

We might need to invest in what can be touched and seen, heard and tasted, before we can make the choice to believe in something which lies beyond what our senses inform us to be real.  We have to believe in matter and energy, in space and time before we can make the choice to believe in something beyond them.  In order for us to a limitlessness beyond spacetime, we must fully buy into time and space, into finiteness.  Then, our faith really means something.  Otherwise, our spiritual belief doesn’t mean much.  Faith wouldn’t be faith without the possibility of unbelief.  It would be just like a proof in geometry, something self-evident.

Perhaps believing is seeing, and not the other way around.  Maybe our faith is like a spiritual muscle.  The more we work it, the more powerful it becomes.  Maybe this believing before we see transforms us into miracle makers.  Preserving faith as a choice preserves faith itself.  What the mind focuses on magnifies the object of its focus, like a lens concentrating light. Believing is seeing.

© 2023 by Michael C. Just