Proof of God’s existence

Whenever I feel like reminding myself what a glorious city London is, I walk out of my building and look around. But I don’t see London.

All I can see is some quarter-mile of the New King’s Road, a few shops, restaurants, pedestrians, trees, cars. That’s all one sees at street level: street. The vantage point is too low.

I could move around, see other streets, other parts of the city. But I still wouldn’t see London, only its multiple isolated parts, much as I’d like to see the whole thing.

Such a vision can’t come piecemeal. It requires a single point of view, high enough to encompass the whole panoramic scene. Hence, I climb, huffing and puffing, up on the roof of my four-storey building.

That exertion uncovers a greater field of sight. Now I can see much of Fulham, all the way to the river to the south, Chelsea to the east, perhaps Hammersmith to the north. I can even see the taller buildings in Putney, on the other side of the Thames. But London? I still can’t see it.

I don’t know how high I’d have to climb to see all of London. A couple of miles? More? Still, the limits of human vision are such that the total picture I seek will forever remain elusive. But one thing for sure: the higher one soars, the more one can see.

It’s my observation that only theology, that summit of the mountain of philosophy, provides a single point of view from which one can see and understand much of life. A theory of everything may not exist but, if it did, that’s where it would be found.

Numerous attempts to explore other pathways and other destinations have been made, by physicists, chemists, biologists, neuropsychologists, geologists and other scientists. They’ve uncovered many of life’s mysteries, but without ever even coming within touching distance of explaining the world, its origin and its most unfathomable denizen, man.

Only theology assisted by philosophy satisfies the requirement Sherlock Holmes explained to his hapless sidekick, Dr Watson. Having investigated all the possibilities but one and found that they don’t explain the available facts, then the remaining theory, no matter how seemingly improbable, has to be true.

Only theology, and a system of thought based on it, provides such a theory. But say this in polite, which these days means atheistic, society, and you’ll be deafened with a chorus of “Proof! Prove that God exists!”

He doesn’t, I invariably say. It’s because of God that everything else exists. This never fails to add a few decibels to the litany: “Proof! Where’s your proof?!?”

Modern vulgarians, it has to be said, understand proof only as the empirical outcome of forensic investigation, something conducted in a lab or on a test stand. In that sense, there isn’t, nor can there be, any proof – practically by definition.

Proving means understanding and, with God, that’s patently impossible. A higher system can understand a lower one, but not the other way around.

But if there is no empirical proof, there are many indications – of a life above physical realities. If you don’t believe me, ask any pathologist.

Those professionals handle the human brain every workday of their lives. They touch it, they feel it, they study it – they certainly see it. Yet not one of them has ever seen a mind, the spectacular, tangible and yet undefinable product of the brain.

Does this mean the mind doesn’t exist? Not even the rankest atheist would suggest that, not unless he is imbecilic as well. They thus accept the reality of metaphysical phenomena, while illogically refusing to acknowledge their ultimate source. But then no one has accused atheists of a talent for logical ratiocination.

Today’s lot get hung up on all sorts of causes, half- or quarter-truths at best, and usually not even that. They sense how pitiful a wholly egocentric existence is, and so they have to issue a statement of caring – for ‘our planet’, animals, trees, minorities, assorted victims assigned to that category arbitrarily.

Thereby they hope to rise to the superpersonal without touching on the supernatural. A forlorn hope, that. Hugging the trees of trivial causes, they can’t see the luxuriant wood of truth.

However, if that vulgar proof of God can’t possibly exist, there are plenty of proofs of superphysical phenomena. I happen to be living with one of them, my wife Penelope.

As a brilliant artist, she has an in-built receiver attuned to high frequencies imperceptible to regular folk like me. Still, for her to be able to receive those UHF signals, someone has to send them to begin with. So is it empirical proofs you want? Here are three of them.

We moved to London from New York in 1988, when Penelope’s father lay gravely ill in hospital 200 miles away, in Exeter, their home city.

In those days Penelope could sleep for England. She’d drop off within minutes of her head hitting the pillow and sleep without stirring until woken up the next morning. If not woken up, she could sleep 10-11 hours, approaching Olympic standards.

Yet one of our first nights in England she couldn’t go to sleep at all. Something was bothering her, she was tossing and turning, dozing off for a few minutes, then waking up again – I had never seen that before.

Suddenly, at about 1.00 AM, she went quiet and fell asleep with a serene expression on her face. The next day we found out that her father had died at exactly that time, to the minute. She had known it – without knowing it in any empirical sense.

Then a couple of years later we stayed with friends in Amsterdam, who gave us a comfortable bedroom in the loft. The same thing happened: Penelope was so anxious she couldn’t sleep. She claimed she could sense some emanations in the air, and she might have even used the word ‘vibes’ that I dislike.

So I told her to forget those old wives’ tales and go to sleep. Then over breakfast the next morning our friends showed us a written history of their house – and what do you know. During the war a Jewish family was hiding in that very loft. They were betrayed, arrested, shipped off to a concentration camp and never seen again.

I could cite many such examples but, lest you accuse me of being uxorious, I’ll give you only one more. Fast-forward a few more years, and we stayed with another friend in Moscow.

We arrived on a crispy cold night and, that being Penelope’s first visit to the city of my birth, went out for a walk straight away. We took a long street (Myasnitskaya, which in my day used to be called Kirov Street) leading from the boulevard ring to Lubyanka, the square that houses… well, you know what it houses.

I must emphasise that Penelope knew nothing of Moscow’s geography and didn’t have a clue what that street was and where it was leading. I don’t know if she had seen photographs of the KGB building but, if she had, they would have only shown the façade.

Since we were approaching that sinister place from the rear and from the side, there was no way anyone but a Muscovite would have known what it was. I knew, but said nothing.

When we reached the rear corner of the building, Penelope again said something about evil emanations and, that dread word, ‘vibes’. Somehow she was in communion with the souls of the thousands murdered in that building, and the millions sent to their deaths from there.

Neither she nor I nor any scientist can explain such phenomena. They belong to a kingdom not of this world – certainly not of this physical world. But that doesn’t make them any less real. They simply point to the existence of another, higher reality, and most people are aware of at least some of it.

And yet many of those same people refuse to accept even in theory that a higher reality also has to exist. Thereby they reject the notion of causality, making Newton et al. weep in their graves. The rest of us know that, if something exists, something else caused it to exist – and notice I’m deliberately staying within the realm of reason.

Faith is something else again, and it’s a more sophisticated cognitive mechanism. But we don’t have to talk about it, even though it’s Sunday.