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It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that He should not exist; that the soul should be joined to the body, and that we should have no soul; that the world should be created, and that it should not be created.
—Blaise Pascal, Pensees
One night I sat up until two o'clock listening to two friends recount their difficulties in relating to God. Judy described her many attempts to "break through" to God—attempts that had produced nothing but a sense of cold, disapproving silence. Stanley told of his lifelong struggle to feel that he mattered, that God cared.
I knew these two friends well, and it seemed obvious to me they were projecting their own family dynamics onto God. Judy had lost her mother at an early age. Although her father valiantly worked to raise three daughters in a stable home, he had never conveyed much warmth. She viewed him more as a schoolteacher, or an athletic coach, judging her performance and always raising the bar one notch higher.
Stanley came from a large, lively family of seven which had no lack of warmth or energy. Still, as the fourth child, and a twin at that, he had the persistent, nagging sense of being overlooked. Teachers in school invariably compared him to his older siblings. His father never quite mastered the skill of telling him apart from his twin, even though the two were not identical. "I sometimes think if I disappeared from my family, it would take a week or two for anyone to notice," he said with a wry smile.
In our conversation, I described the God I had come to know, a personality very different from their projections, and also very different from my childhood pictures of God. That evening reminded me that everyone has an image of God distorted in some way—we must, of course, since God transcends our capacities to imagine him. Our experiences of family and church combine with stray hints from literature and movies (The Scarlet Letter, "Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God") to determine what image of God we carry around. Judy told me that a single phrase used at her mother's funeral, "God took her to be with him," formed a block in her relationship with God that she has yet to overcome.
How, then, do we know the true God? If Judy and Stanley had been de scribing one of my friends, and I sensed they had an unfair impression, I could introduce them to my friend to help them form a different, truer picture. (In fact, something very similar had happened: Judy had very negative impressions of Stanley until I insisted she must get to know him better.) How can I do that with God? Knowing an invisible God has little in common with knowing a living, breathing person. Or does it?
To answer that question, I must first digress to explore how we know anything. The process of knowing takes place in the brain, the most isolated part of the human body. Ironically, simple animals, such as amoebae, experience reality more directly than we do. An amoeba wanders into a morsel of food and engulfs it; it touches a toxic chemical and shrinks back in alarm. The amoeba has no processing center, like a brain, to interpret and mediate what it encounters: all of the animal experiences the reality before it. "Higher" animals, and especially we humans, experience reality more indirectly, through the brain—which, though isolated, has amazing powers of reflection and projection.
A thick sheath of bone protects this seat of knowledge from any contact with the outside world. The brain never "sees": if a surgeon exposed it to light for an extended time, it would see nothing, and likely be irreparably harmed. The brain never "hears": so cushioned is it against shock that brain cells can detect only the loudest sounds, like a jet airplane, which cause them to vibrate. The brain has no touch or pain cells. A brain surgeon need only anesthetize for the procedure of cutting through the skull; once inside, he can move or cut brain tissue at will. Its temperature varies no more than a few degrees; it never feels heat or cold. It almost never sustains a mechanical force; encountering one, it would quickly lapse into unconsciousness.
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