Encountering God

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I recently read an article and watched a video where the late Prof. Antony Flew admitted to the existence of God. What makes this admission particularly interesting is that Prof. Flew used to be a prominent atheist. In fact, you may say that the atheist community viewed him as one of their "champions" so his sudden conversion must have come as a shock, to put it mildly. You can watch one of his taped interviews here:



According to Prof. Flew, you should start from the position of atheism when trying to answer the question of whether or not God exists. Only when one has found evidence that points to the existence of God can one admit to a theist doctrine. Apparently, Prof. Flew reached that point in 2004 (the year he converted) when he pointed out that the symmetry and intricacy of nature suggests the presence of intelligent design in all things.

Interestingly, using the existence of the created as evidence of a Creator is similar to the position of Master Choa Kok Sui in his book The Existence of God is Self-Evident. In one passage Master Choa writes:

"The existence of God is self-evident. It is amazing that those who have eyes do not see. The existence of a camera factory is self-evident by the existence of the camera. The existence of God is self-evident, by the existence of the eye, which is infinitely more complicated than a camera."

Of course, not everyone comes to the same conclusion even when faced with the same evidence. During a dialogue with the Archbishop of Canterbury held at Oxford University, Prof. Richard Dawkins (another prominent atheist) recognized the beauty and elegance of creation without attributing all of it to a Creator. However, he did admit that he wasn't 100% sure that God didn't exist.

Going back to Prof. Flew, despite his conversion to theism he was still decidedly anti-religion, and I can totally understand why. Religion, more often than not, is the human understanding / conception of God codified into dogma. The problem with this set up is similar to the problem of pork barrel in the Philippines.

Ronald Mendoza, an Associate Professor of Economics at the Asian Institute of Management and Executive Director of the AIM Policy Center, recently wrote an article clearly describing how pork barrel funds skew local and national governance in such a way as to encourage political dynasties and cronyism. His personal take on pork barrel is that:

"It has distorted how citizens think of our local leaders and the role they play in our democracy. Those who defend the pork barrel and the "good" that it can still be shown to do, do not touch on how much better our leaders could behave in the absence of pork, and in the presence of clear, accountable and evidence based allocations (which are the complete opposite of the pork barrel system we have)."

Religion has indeed helped a lot of people and provides a systematized storehouse of spiritual knowledge for the masses. However, just like the pork barrel system, organized religion is set up in such a way that it is vulnerable to exploitation. In a previous article, I briefly touched upon why large spiritual groupings still tend to have bad eggs, so you can see how the problem can be magnified in the case of religions whose congregations number in the millions or even billions.

Recognizing both the benefits and the shortcomings of organized religion, I am of the opinion that it is every person's duty to veer away from blind obedience to religious authority and dogma and instead discover for oneself the esoteric and spiritual truths that religions contain. The Dalai Lama certainly got it right when he said, "My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness."

Be that as it may, Prof. Flew's epiphany (if it may be called that) proves that encountering God is always a personal experience. I see that as a good thing because such an experience supersedes one's philosophy, educational attainment or status in life. You cannot be told what to believe and what to experience, and we need that in a time when there is so much mental noise from our environment and our way of thinking.

The ancient sages said that in the space between sounds is emptiness and silence, and in that emptiness and silence there is God. In trying to study and understand nature, we often forget that we are also nature itself. When we talk about creation, we are talking about us. It is a simple and inseparable truth, yet we often overlook this. When we get to the basics, and remove all the fluff, then even something as simple as watching a falling droplet of water as it catches the rays of the morning sun becomes something sacred. It becomes profound because we are aware of that moment. And in that moment, there is God.