Physics and Philosophy of Time

 

(I have aged. Linda has not.)

(I'm re-posting this for a friend.)

I am seventy-four years old. Where has the time gone!? And what, anyway, is "time?" 

Here are some thoughts. For more you might read Now: The Physics of Time, by Berkeley physicist Richard Muller, and Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation, by Alan Burdick. Especially helpful is God and Time: Four Views. 

Scientific American as published several essays on the nature of time -  A Question of Time: The Ultimate Paradox. One of my favorite physicists, Paul Davies, has an essay called "That Mysterious Flow." Here are some of his thoughts on time.

"Nothing in known physics corresponds to the passage of time. Indeed, physicists insist that time doesn’t flow at all; it merely is."

Our commonsense view is that time is "slipping away." It feels like there is a "flow" to time. However, Einstein said, “The past, present and future are only illusions, even if stubborn ones.”

Davies writes: "Physicists prefer to think of time as laid out in its entirety— a timescape, analogous to a landscape— with all past and future events located there together. It is a notion sometimes referred to as block time. Completely absent from this description of nature is anything that singles out a privileged, special moment as the present or any process that would systematically turn future events into present, then past, events. In short, the time of the physicist does not pass or flow."

Time is just as real as space, but "the flow of time" is unreal. 

Time is unidirectional. For example, an egg dropped on the floor will break into pieces. But the reverse process - a broken egg spontaneously assembling itself into an intact egg - is never witnessed. "Nature abounds with irreversible processes." But there is no "arrow of time." Yes, time is unidirectional, but...

..."this does not imply, however, that the arrow is moving toward the future, any more than a compass needle pointing north indicates that the compass is traveling north. Both arrows symbolize an asymmetry, not a movement. The arrow of time denotes an asymmetry of the world in time, not an asymmetry or flux of time. The labels “past” and “future” may legitimately be applied to temporal directions, just as “up” and “down” may be applied to spatial directions, but talk of the past or the future is as meaningless as referring to the up or the down."

Remember - this is physics. We may feel some flow of time, but in reality time is not something that moves or flows. 

Note this: We do not really observe the passage of time. "What we actually observe is that later states of the world differ from earlier states that we still remember. The fact that we remember the past, rather than the future, is an observation not of the passage of time but of the asymmetry of time." Think of individual movie frames. As we watch a movie we experience individual states of affairs that are different from previously experienced states of affairs. That's all.

Think again of the "broken egg" example. Imagine a movie of the egg being dropped on the floor and breaking. Then imagine the film sequence being run backwards. We would see that the backwards sequence was unreal, even though there would seem to be a "flow" to the backwards series. This shows the illusion of the "flow of time." Yes, time is asymmetrical, but "time’s asymmetry is actually a property of states of the world, not a property of time as such."

When I remember the past and the many birthdays I have already celebrated, but do not remember the future birthdays that (hopefully) are forthcoming, this is "an observation not of the passage of time but of the asymmetry of time." Note: only conscious observers register the "flow of time." "Therefore, it appears that the flow of time is subjective, not objective."

I think the biblical distinction between chronos and kairos may help us here. Chronos is "clock time," and the experience of a flow of time. But kairos is more like a discrete, individual frame in a movie isolated from all other events. Kairos is the "right time," or the "appointed time." 

All of this is good news for me. Time has really not "passed me by." Time is not "slippin', slippin', slippin'... into the future."  

Davies writes: 

"What if science were able to explain away the flow of time? Perhaps we would no longer fret about the future or grieve for the past. Worries about death might become as irrelevant as worries about birth. Expectation and nostalgia might cease to be part of human vocabulary. Above all, the sense of urgency that attaches to so much of human activity might evaporate."


*** 
Here's a review of some philosophical ideas about time. (Special thanks to Manuel Velazquez's excellent Philosophy: A Text With Readings, 11th edition)

PLATO (Ancient Greek philosopher, 429-347 BCE)

• "Time" exists independently of events that occur in time.
• "Time is like an empty container into which things and events may be placed; but it is a container that exists independently of what (if anything) is placed in it." (SEP) 

ARISTOTLE (Ancient greek philosopher, 384-322 BCE)

• Time does not exist independently, contra Plato, of the events that occur in time.
• This view is called "Reductionism with Respect to Time."
• This means that "all talk that appears to be about time can somehow be reduced to talk about temporal relations among things and events." (SEP)
• The idea of a period of time without change is seen as incoherent.
• Thus "time" cannot exist independently of what is placed in it. Apart from events, no time exists.

AUGUSTINE (Augustine of Hippo, 354-430)

• Time, in a sense, does not exist.
• The past no longer exists.
• The future does not yet exist.
• Only the present moment is real.
• But the present moment has, in itself, neither a past nor a future.
• The present moment is timeless.
• "Time," from God's perspective, is different from our perspective.
• God is outside of time.
• Time is like a line of events stretched out before God.
• Every moment - past, present, and future - lies on this line. Everything on the "line of time" is fixed. This is God's perspective. (Cmp. C.S. Lewis who, in Mere Christianity, employed Augustine's view of time.)

McTAGGERT (British philosopher M.E. McTaggert, 1886-1925)

• Compare McTaggert to Davies, who cites McTaggert in his essay.
• The flow of time as we experience it is unreal.
• "Time" is a fixed series of moments, each moment either "before" or "after" the other moments. This is "objective time."
• We can also think of "time" as a sequence of flowing moments. Each moment changes or flows from "future" to "present" to "past." This is "subjective time."
• "Past," "present," and "future" are incompatible with each other. Therefore it is impossible for the same thing (viz., the same "moment") to be simultaneously future, present, and past.
• But if time did "flow," then every moment would have to be future, and then present, and then past.
• So the idea of subjective time as a sequence of flowing moments is unreal.
• Subjective time is unreal. Our experience of time as "passing" is an illusion.
• Following this McTaggert said, "I believe that nothing that exists can be temporal, and that therefore time [subjective] is unreal." (The Nature of Existence)
• "Time" is an unchanging, fixed series of events frozen onto the "line of time" that makes up the series. But this is not really time, because there is no flow or change here. And, since subjective time is unreal, time cannot be real.

KANT (German philosopher Immanuel Kant, 1724-1804)

• Time - whether subjective or objective - is simply a construct of the human mind.
• "Time" and "space" are categories of the mind that the mind uses to organize the flow of changing sensations.
• Kant said, "Time is therefore given a priori." "Time" as a mental category is "prior to experience" and organizes or categorizes experience.
• Time is not real but is a mental construct.

HUSSERL (German phenomenological philosopher, 1859-1938)

• See Husserl's The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness.
• Husserl is in the Kantian stream of thinking. He is not interested in the metaphysical status of time, but time as transcendental, as lying at the base of consciousness, and giving shape to our experience. 
• Husserl "considers the present, past, and future as modes of appearing or modes by which we experience things and events as now, no longer (past) or not yet (future)." (IEP)

BERGSON (French philosopher Henri Bergson, 1859-1941)

• "Objective time," the "time" of the scientist, is just a conceptual abstraction, a construct of the mind.
• The image of time as a line is simply an image; the concept of objective time is only a concept. Neither images nor concepts can get at the reality.
• Only what we directly experience is real; viz., what we "intuit."
• We directly experience or intuit the flow of time. Bergson says we have the "intuition of duration."
• Real time is subjective time. This is the "flow of time" that I experience moving from future, through present, and into the past.
• Objective time is an intellectual reconstruction and thus is an illusion."Time" does not actually exist "out there" in the world (it's not a reality transcendent to human subjectivity).

WILLIAM LANE CRAIG (Christian theist, 1947 - present)

• Apart from events time does not exist.
• Prior to creation time did not exist.
• A personal God need not experience a temporal succession of mental events. "God could know the content of all knowledge - past, present, and future - in a simultaneous and eternal intuition." (See Craig, "God, Time, and Eternity")
• "The proper understanding of God, time, and eternity would be that God exists changelessly and timelessly prior to creation and in time after creation."
• There are no "events" prior to creation. Therefore, since God exists prior to creation and is an "eventless" being, "time" does not exist prior to creation. At the creation of the universe time begins. On a relational view of time God now relates to the universe, "and God subjects himself to time by being related to changing things."

STEPHEN HAWKING (Physicist, author of A Brief History of Time, 1942-present)

• Time is understood in relation to events. Hawking writes: 
• 
  
• "Since events before the Big Bang have no observational consequences, one may as well cut them out of the theory, and say that time began at the Big Bang. Events before the Big Bang are simply not defined, because there's no way one could measure what happened at them... [T]he universe, and time itself, had a beginning in the Big Bang, about 15 billion years ago. The beginning of real time would have been a singularity at which the laws of physics would have broken down." (See here) 

(For diagram + explanation, see here.)

FOR MORE READING: God and Time: Four Views. 

And: W.L. Craig, "God, Time, and Eternity"

***


In my book Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God I write about hearing and discerning the voice of God and not much about time. But subjectively praying brings us into kairos moments, felt timeless experiences that are nondirectional because one's heart has arrived in the presence of God.

Willam P. Alston – Religious Experience as Perception of God

Self

Today I've been looking over some old notes on religious experience, mysticism, and properly basic beliefs. Theistic philosopher William P. Alston is a central figure in this discussion. Here are my notes/thoughts on Alston re. religious experience as perception of God.

1 - The thesis Alston defends is: If God exists, then mystical experience is quite properly thought of as mystical perception. [If God exists, then we should expect mystical experience.]
Alston is not here arguing for the existence of God. Alston is showing that it is rational to be a theist, and rational to experience God immediately (as distinguished from mediately).

2 - Alston restricts this discussion to “direct awareness of God.” Which means: Unmediated, not mediated, religious experience. [Alston is interested in direct, not indirect, experience of God.]
Alston: “My reason for concentrating on direct experience of God, where there is no other object of experience in or through which God is experienced, is that these experiences are the ones that are most plausibly regarded as presentations of God to the individual, in somewhat the way in which physical objects are presented to sense perception, as I will shortly make explicit.” (Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings, 52)
Alston is not talking here about, e.g., becoming aware of God through nature, or through the Bible, or through a sermon. Or through a logical argument. He means something like: “I hear the voice of God speaking to me.”

3 - Alston advocates a “perceptual model of mystical experience.” (53) [Alston claims mystical experience is like sense experience.]
Alston’s view of perception is called the “Theory of Appearing.” Which means: “perceiving X simply consists in X’s appearing to a subject S, for example, or being presented to one, as so-and-so. That’s all there is to it, as far as what perception is, in contrast to its causes and effects. Where X is an external physical object like a book, to perceive the book is just for the book to appear to one in a certain way.” (53)
A direct awareness does not essentially involve conceptualization and judgment (such as reasoning from premises to a conclusion). Perception consists of something presenting itself to me in a certain way, apart from my conceptualizing it or making judgments about it. E.g…, Now I see the keyboard, directly.

4 - Alston concentrates on nonsensory experiences. Why? Because God is understood as a purely spiritual being.
Because God is purely spiritual, “a nonsensory experience has a greater chance of presenting Him as He is than any sensory experience.” (52)
Alston says: “I shall refer to nonsensory experience as “mystical experience.” (52)
“Mystical perception” is the kind of perception that experiences God.
“Mystical experience” refers to “supposed nonsensory experience (perception) of God.” (52)

5 - Alston admits that many people will find this idea incredible, unintelligible, and incoherent. What idea? The idea that there could be something that counts as a presentation like a sense perception but is without any sensory content.
But Alston doesn't think experiences should be limited to sensory experiences. He asks: “Why should we suppose that the possibilities of experiential givenness, for human beings or otherwise, are exhausted by the powers of our five senses.” (52)
This is obviously contrary to logical empiricism; viz., the idea that experiences are real only if they are seen, smelled, touched, tasted, or felt.
Alston is arguing:
i. Mystical experience is the right sort of experience to constitute a genuine perception of God if the other requirements are met.
ii. There is no bar in principle to these other requirements being satisfied if God does exist.

6 – You can’t argue for the validity of such experiences without assuming such experiences. That’s the nature of doxastic practices. [Doxastic practices are properly basic beliefs. You can't argue for them.]
They are “properly basic.”
We can’t argue for the reliability of our sense perceptions without using sense perception. What does Alston mean by this? Elsewhere he writes: "The supposition that there is a physical world (that there are physical things spread out in space, exhibiting various perceivable qualities) is constitutive of the practice of forming particular beliefs about particular physical things on the basis of sense experience in the way we usually do. (Call this "perceptual practice".) ... [I]n learning to form physical-object beliefs on the basis of sense experience we are, at least implicitly and in practice, accepting the proposition that the physical world exists (and that we are aware of it in sense experience). Thus the question of the rationality of this belief is the question of the rationality of perceptual practice."
Or, to cite another example of doxastic practice: We can’t argue for the reliability of logic without using logic.
So, our arguments for the reliability of these basic doxastic practices exhibit epistemic circularity.
Should we then be skeptical and not trust in our sense perceptions or in logic? Alston argues that it is reasonable to continue to engage in those doxastic practices which are well established socially, and which would be psychologically difficult to avoid. Therefore, we should continue to regard our sense perception, memory, introspection and faculties of rational inference as generally reliable.

7 – We describe mystical experiences by using comparative language. This is, in essence, no different than using comparative language to describe sense experiences. [Mystical experiences are described like sense experiences; viz., by using comparative language.]

8 - Alston concludes: "If my arguments have been sound, we are justified in thinking of the experience of God as a mode of perception in the same generic sense of the term as sense perception. And if God exists, there is no reason to suppose that this perception is not sometimes veridical [true; representative of] rather than delusory." (57) [Alston thinks religious experience is justifiable and rational.]

*****
From “Mysticism,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Q1 - “Is a person warranted in thinking that his or her experiences are veridical, or have evidential value?”

This is the question Alston is answering “yes” to.

The Doxastic Practice Approach

“William Alston has defended beliefs a person forms based on mystical and numinous (in the terminology of this entry) experience, specifically of a theistic kind (Alston, 1991). Alston defines a ‘doxastic practice’ as consisting of socially established ways of forming and epistemically evaluating beliefs (the “output”) from a certain kind of content from various inputs, such as cognitive and perceptual ones (Alston, 1991, 100). The practice of forming physical-object beliefs derived from sense perception is an example of a ‘doxastic practice’ and the practice of drawing deductive conclusions in a certain way from premises is another. Now, Alston argues that the justification of every doxastic practice is “epistemically circular,” that is, its reliability cannot be established in any way independent of the practice itself. (See Alston, 1993) This includes the “sense-perception practice.” However, we cannot avoid engaging in doxastic practices. Therefore, Alston contends, it is rational to engage in the doxastic practices we do engage in providing there is no good reason to think they are unreliable. Now, there are doxastic practices consisting of forming beliefs about God, God's purposes for us, and the like, grounded on religious and mystical experiences such as “God is now appearing to me.” Such, for example, is the “Christian Doxastic Practice.” It follows from Alston's argument that it is rational for a person in such a practice to take its belief outputs as true unless the practice is shown to be unreliable. Thus we have an affirmative answer to question (Q1).”

***

One of my books is Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God.

Adultery: It's Not Complicated (Some Moral Truths Don't Change)

 

When it comes to "sin," things have pretty much been the same over the centuries. Stealing is still experienced as wrong. Lying, too. Hating, as well. Also, killing innocent people for fun. And so on.

And adultery, too. It's not really complicated. And, there's a lot of moral subjective relativism involved, which is something logicians abhor. (See, e.g., the logic text I used at MCCC - Vaughn's Critical Thinking.)

As far as I can tell, Facebook popularized the response, "It's complicated." I remember reading a woman's Facebook page. She described her extramarital affair as, "It's complicated." 

This silly meme fails to get at the truth, which is: It's not complicated. Not really. Adultery boils down to one truth: she chose not to keep her vows. 

But what about the reasons underlying the breaking of the wedding promise? Are the reasons for the deception complicated? Not really. Adultery is unoriginal and uncreative. It's boring. Reasons for adultery are easy to unravel. They boil down to the binary algorithm "either-or." At some point a choice is made. Adultery presents us with nothing new under the sun.

Truth is not complicated. It may be hard to understand at times, but not because it is complicated. Truth is binary. Truth is either-or. 

In my logic classes I demystify the nature of rationality and clear away the foggy delusion of "complicated." I explain that a statement is a sentence that is either true or false. A statement describes a state of affairs that either obtains, or it does not. Period. (If that astonishes you, then I wish you had taken one of my Logic classes at MCCC. Or, pick up any university Logic text and begin to read.)

"It's complicated" presents the adulterer as some kind of mysterious genius who has woven a web of relationships that only they understand. They are a complicated person, epistemically inaccessible to common folks. As if they have figured this horror out, when all they really did was old-fashioned cheating and hiding. 

Cheat and hide. Again and again, as they faced ever-growing waves of *Kierkegaardian either-ors and, simply and as old as humanity, chose evil. That's not very complicated, right?

Some things just don't change. Some moral values have not "evolved." And, if moral truths did keep changing, then the moral truths of today will be unpopular moral falsehoods tomorrow, so why adhere to any of them? (Some philosophical atheists would agree here.)

(The same, of course, goes for men.)

***

See Danah Boyd, It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. 

*Shall we choose the feeling/aesthetic life, or the ethical life? See Kierkegaard, Either-Or. A choice may be difficult, but not because it is "complicated."

Why So Many Kids Are Not OK

 

                                                      (Empire Beach sunset (Michigan))

Jonathan Haidt's book The Coddling of the American Mind was so good I read it twice. And refer to it often.

Haidt's recent book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, came out in March 2024. Haidt makes a powerful case that the shift from play-based to phone-based childhoods is wreaking havoc on mental health and social development.

Some of you already know this, right? 

***

Listen to Russell Moore's interview with Haidt HERE.

Two Reasons to Abstain from Degrading People

 

                                                                  (Our church yard)

A follower of Jesus will not abuse people verbally.

For biblical reasons like these.

There is one whose rash words are like sword thrusts, but the tongue of the wise brings healing. —Proverbs 12:18 (ESV)

The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks. —Luke 6:45

I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak. —Matthew 12:36 

If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person’s religion is worthless. —James 1:26

A word out of your mouth may seem of no account, but it can accomplish nearly anything—or destroy it! It only takes a spark, remember, to set off a forest fire. A careless or wrongly placed word out of your mouth can do that. By our speech we can ruin the world, turn harmony to chaos, throw mud on a reputation, send the whole world up in smoke and go up in smoke with it, smoke right from the pit of hell. - James 3:4–6, The Message

The tongue runs wild, a wanton killer. With our tongues we bless God our Father; with the same tongues we curse the very men and women he made in his image. Curses and blessings out of the same mouth! - James 3:7–10 (Emphasis mine.)

Not only is verbally abusing people unbiblical, it is irrational. 

I taught logic for seventeen years at Monroe County Community College. Logic is the tool by which a person formulates and evaluates arguments. 

Logical arguments can go wrong in at least two ways. They can go wrong formally. That is, if a logical form is invalid (for deductive arguments) or weak (for inductive arguments. Like this.

1. If it is raining, then the ground is wet.

2. The ground is wet.

3. Therefore, it is raining.

This argument fails formally. The conclusion does not logically follow from the premises, because it's logical form is invalid.

Then, therre are arguments that commit an informal fallacy. (There are many types of informal fallacies.) Like this.

1. X is a total idiot.

2. Therefore, his argument against abortion is false.

That argument commits what is called an ad hominem abusive fallacy. The truth or falsity of an argument has nothing to do with whether or not the argument-maker is an idiot.

An ad hominem fallacy attacks the person who makes an argument. That's illogical. The rule is: attack the argument, not the person. And let your attack be moral and logical.

Name-calling and person-denigrating is logically irrelevant, and thereby fails to support a conclusion.

Add to this name-calling as unbiblical and morally wrong, and we have two powerful reasons, for someone who self-refers as a Jesus-follower, to abtain from degrading people made in the image of God.

Praying on the "Thank God Ledge"

(I'm re-posting this. It's from my book Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God. Linda and I saw "Free Solo" at the Imax in Ann Arbor. It's about Alex Honnold's rope-less climb of El Capitan. Amazing, and frightening!) 

Several years ago I watched a "60 Minutes" segment that fully engaged me. I dvr-ed it and showed it to several people. It was on rock climber Alex Honnold's "free solo" of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park.

Half Dome is a nearly vertical 2000-foot sheer granite wall. Alex climbs it... without the assistance of ropes or harness. It's just him, his hands, and his tennis shoes. It made me nervous watching him, even though I knew he survived. The shots of him clinging to the wall, with the trees and river a half mile below him, are astounding.

No one else in the world has done this. Perhaps no one else can. Alex's focus is amazing! One cannot help but think: one mistake and you are dead. No second chance. It's either perfection and completeness or total failure. This sport is unforgiving. To conquer Half Dome you have to be perfect.

Nine-tenths of the way up Half Dome there is a place climbers call "Thank God Ledge." This ledge is a 35-foot-long ramp that is anywhere from 5 to 12 inches wide. If a climber can get himself on this ledge he can jam his fingers into small cracks in the wall and "take a break." "Thank God Ledge" is a place of relief. It's a slim moment of mercy, grace, and forgiveness.

Alex Honnold on
Thank God Ledge

Fortunately, when it comes to God, it's all about forgiveness, mercy, and grace. In Matthew 18 we read: "Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?” Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times."" (vv. 21-22) Which means: we just keep on forgiving other people when they fail and when they fall. Why? Because we have been forgiven. Of much. Paul writes, in Colossians 3:13: "Forgive as you have been forgiven."

Thank God that he is forgiving! His forgiveness is not narrow. God's love is wide. 

Back in the 70s I wrote a song called "How Many Times?" The words go: "How many times we all fall down, broken and bent by the wind. How many times His love comes down, lifts us up again." 

In the forgiveness of the Cross God has placed us on "Thank God Ledge." When we experience his forgiveness we are lifted up to this place of beauty and rest. It is a place of restoration and healing. When experienced and understood, it provokes praise. When we forgive others we invite them to join us in this place. Unforgiveness lets people fall to their destruction. Forgiveness rescues.

In the Cross of Christ you have been conquered by God.

There's plenty of room on Thank God Ledge. Pray there.

Faith and Knowledge. Grace and Effort.

 

                                                    (Looking out one of our church windows.)

One of my morning devotional books is Hearing God Through the Year: A 365-Day Devotional, by Dallas Willard. Here is from the Sept. 27 entry.

"People of faith sometimes think knowledge is unimportant because they think they should have faith instead of knowledge. But having faith is not the opposite of having knowledge. Faith and knowledge work together. (Instead, the opposite of living by faith is living only by sight.) People of faith often misunderstand grace as well. They think grace is the opposite of effort and since they are “saved by grace,” they should not make effort. God’s grace and our effort work together. (The opposite of grace is earning.)" 

Why I Am Still A Christian

 

(Self portrait)

(I re-post this periodically, to keep it in play.)

At the end of one of my Philosophy of Religion classes a student asked me why I am a Christian. Why, among the world religions, would I choose Christianity? My answer went like this (I'm expanding on it here). 

My Christian faith is based on the following.

1. My Conversion Experience
2. My Subsequent Studies

3. My Ongoing Experience.

I came to believe because of a powerful experience that changed my life and worldview. The result of this experience included subsequent study and increasing experience. Credo (I believed); Intelligam (I grew in understanding).

Credo: My Conversion Experience

From age 18-21 I was heavily into alcohol and drugs. I flunked out of college. A lot of things were getting ruined in my life as a result of my addictions. I was in a deep hole dug by myself. I was afflicted, and didn’t know where to turn. Actually, I didn't think I needed help.

One day I hit a low. I thought, "I am screwed up." I prayed and said, “God if you are real and if Jesus is real, then help me. If you help me I’ll follow you.” That was the last day I did drugs. 

This happened. My worldview was rocked. I attribute it to Jesus.

I'm no C. S. Lewis, but I see similarities between my conversion to Christianity and Lewis's conversion from atheism to Christianity. Lewis wrote:

"As the dry bones shook and came together in that dreadful valley of Ezekiel's, so now a philosophical theorem, cerebrally entertained, began to stir and heave and throw off its grave cloths, and stood upright and became a living presence. I was to be allowed to play at philosophy no longer. It might, as I say, still be true that my "Spirit" differed in some way from "the God of popular religion." My Adversary waived the point. It sank into utter unimportance. He would not argue about it. He only said, "I am the Lord"; "I am that I am"; "I am." People who are naturally religious find difficulty in understanding the horror of such a revelation. Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about "man's search for God." To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse's search for the cat." (From Surprised By Joy)

The cat found the mouse. God found me. I was receptive. God exists. God loves me. 

Intelligam: Understanding What Happened to Me 

This didn't happen in a vacuum. The soil of my heart had been softening for some time. I was looking for Help. Help came. My life forever changed. What shall I make of this?

• If this event had not happened I would not have become a Jesus-follower. I needed something experiential that could change me. It happened. 
• I agree with William James who, in his Varieties of Religious Experience, writes: "A mystical experience is authoritative for the one who experiences it. But a mystical experience that happens to one person need not be authoritative for other people." I'm good with that. (With the exception that the mystical-religious experiences of certain other persons have carried authority with me because of, to me, their credibility.)
• My initial religious experience ripped me out of non-reflective deism into full-blown Christian theism. I now believed in God, and in Jesus. This experiential belief had an evidential quality for me, and propelled me to go after an understanding of what had happened. 55 years later, this has not stopped. Today I am a deeper believer in God and Jesus than ever.
• True religion (not the jeans - they are not costly enough) includes experience. Theory without experience is empty. Hebrew-Christianity is essentially about a relationship with God, a mutual indwelling experiential reality. This includes prayer-as-dialogue with God, the sense of God's presence, being-led by God, and so on. And worship. 
• Worship is experiential and logical in the sense that: If God is love, and God is real, and love is about relationship (love has an "other"), then it follows that one will know and be known by God. ("Know," in Hebrew, means experiential intimacy, and not Cartesian subject-object distance. For more,  see Notre Dame philosopher Alvin Plantinga's chapter of faith as knowledge, in Knowledge and Christian Belief.)
• I realize certain atheists claim to have no religious experience at all. John Allen Paulos, for example, in his Irreligion, claims not to have a religious bone in his body. I don't doubt this. This fact does not rationally deter me, just as I am certain C.S. Lewis's religious experiences don't budge Paulos from his atheism. (I'm now thinking of Antony Flew's conversion from atheism to deism. Flew was moved by the logic of the fine-tuning argument for God's existence. And the case of the famous and brilliant British atheist A.J. Ayer who had a vision and began to be interested in God.)
• I keep returning to my initial God-encounter. It functions, for me, as a raison d-etre. Philosophically, it's one of a number of "properly basic" experiences I've had, still have, and will have. (See, e.g., philosophers like William P. Alston.)

I began to study about Christianity. I wanted to know: is Christianity true? Is there any epistemic warrant for my God-encounter experience? I changed my major in college from music theory to philosophy.

My studies confirmed my initial act of faith. Here are some things I believe to be academically sound.

• Good reasons can be given to believe in God.  I have, since 1970, studied and taught the arguments for and against the existence of God. I believe it is more rational to believe in God than to disbelieve.
• The New Testament documents are reliable in their witness to the historical person Jesus. (The minority Facebook claim that Jesus never existed is sheer unstudied goofiness. See, e.g., something like Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, or Craig Keener's The Historical Jesus of the Gospels.)
• A strong inductive argument can be made for the bodily resurrection of Jesus from the dead. (I shared briefly about this in my response to the student's question.)
• Miracles - I have seen many, by means of inference to the best explanation. That is, I have seen and written of events that are best explained supernaturally, not naturally.
• Christianity is qualitatively distinct from the other major world religions. Only Christianity tells us that God loves us not for what we do or where we live but for who we are. The Christian word for this is “grace” and, to me, this is huge. The other major world religions are rule-based; Christianity is grace-based. And, in distinction from other religious alternatives, Christianity's claim is that God has come to us. These kind of things make Christianity more plausible than the other alternatives.

My initial life-changing encounter with God led to a lifetime of Jesus-following, God-knowing, and God-seeking. God did and continues to reveal himself to me. My faith is experiential, relational, and rational/reasonable. (Note: it's not without questions. Anyone who studies their own worldview will have intra-worldview puzzles. This includes me.)

For these reasons I became a follower of Jesus and remain one. This has made all the difference in my life,

***
I describe my ongoing experience with God in two books:

Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God

Leading the Presence-Driven Church

An Apprentice to Jesus Says “Thank You”

 

                                                 (Trail through the woods in our backyard.)

I have a habit of making lists of things I am thankful for. I put the list in my pocket and carry it with me. I pull it out and re-read it. As a disciple of Jesus, He has given me much to be thankful for!  

I was taught thankfulness by my parents. They trained me to say the words, "Thank you." Whenever I received a gift, my mother would make me write a thank-you note to the giver. Thank you, Mom, for doing this.  

My parents had thankful hearts. I remember my mother telling me how, when a little girl, she once received an orange from her parents as a Christmas gift. That was it! Her family was poor. She treasured the gift, and was thankful.  

Whenever someone helped my dad by lending him a tool, or working on a project, I could see gratitude on his face, and in the way he talked about the people who helped him. Dad lent tools out to many people. At his funeral, I addressed the people and said, "If any of you have some of my father's tools, please return them."

 The attitude of a disciple is one of gratitude. I could never understand the ingratitude of nine of the ten lepers in Luke 17.  They see Jesus, and call from a distance because they are unclean, "Jesus, Master, have pity on us!" The Greek word for 'pity' is eleison, like "Kyrie eleison" - "Lord, have mercy!" "Bend down to our level and rescue us!"  

He does. Jesus heals them. And then, nine of them just walk away, without saying even a simple "Thanks for the healing."    

Then we read: One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back, praising God in a loud voice. He threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him...  And here is the shocker - he was a Samaritan. 

When I wake in the morning, get out of bed, walk down the stairs, prepare breakfast, I find myself, in my mind, and sometimes whispering quietly, these words: "Thank you." Jesus rescued me and became my lifetime Mentor. Thank you!  

For Linda and I, one of our Christian heroes is Dallas Willard. Even though we never met him, he is a mentor to us. Not just with his words, but with his life. We both read Gary Moon's excellent book on Willard. Gary Black, one of Dallas's close friends, was with Dallas when he died. Moon writes:

"Then, as Gary [Black] describes, “in a voice clearer than I had heard in days, he leaned his head back slightly and with his eyes closed said, ‘Thank you.’” Gary did not feel that Dallas was talking to him, but to another presence that Dallas seemed to sense in the room."  (Moon, Becoming Dallas Willard, p. 240)

 Thank You, Jesus.

 I bless you with a renewed heart of gratitude.

DECLARATIONS

 I am going through this day with a heart overflowing with thankfulness.

 My constant attitude is one of gratitude to God.

 I remember what God has done for me and given me.

 I am thankful for knowing Jesus, my Lord and my Savior!

 I have lists of things to thank God for.

The words "Thank you" are never far from my lips.

 I throw myself at the feet of Jesus, and praise Him, with thanksgiving!

(From my book 31 Letters to the Church on Discipleship.)