- The boy: "Daddy… Mommy's home!"
- Dad: "No she's not, she went to the doctor, then to a friend's house."
- The boy: "No daddy, mommy IS home."
- Dad: "Alex I already told you she is not."
- The boy: "No she IS."
- Dad: "Let's go to the garage and look for her car. Is mommy's car there?"
- The boy: "Nooooo."
- Dad: "Did mommy drive her car away?"
- The boy: "Yeeeesss."
- Dad: "So is mommy home?"
- The boy (grinning): "Nooooo."
- Dad: "Want chicken and peas for dinner tonight?"
- The boy: "YEAH!"
I use this dialogue to illustrate a major disconnect between those who believe in God and atheists. My son was a true believer. He had no evidence that mom was home other than perhaps something that he heard or something else that he perceived that he had mistaken for my wife's car or the sound of the car door slamming. I was the skeptic. The evidence that satisfied his understanding of things to suggest that mom was home was not really evidence that pointed in that direction at all – but some other direction. I had to show him that mom was indeed not home because her car was not there. The he was OK with it.
Christians do not understand why atheists ask for evidence so much and this is why. There is simply no shared experience that legitimates an atheist apprehension of the world as being something related to cosmic presence called God. They want Christians to show them that there is indeed a "car in our garage" that offers substantial evidence that the God who was once here is still there or coming back "soon". But Christians cannot provide them with such evidence. The only evidence as such is an empty tomb. The evidence must be a shared experience. Therefore existence precedes experience for the atheist.
Here is the difference. My son still had a hope that mom would come back. Even though I proved to him that mom was not home, he trusted me at that point that mom would be back home. It is his experience with his mother that informed and legitimated that conclusion. Without an experience of God of some kind, it becomes quite difficult to legitimate that there is a God at all. Therefore, for the Christian, experience precedes existence.
Apologetics seeks to found the reasonableness of faith sans experience. Hence apologetics fails. It seeks to do something that it cannot – ground the facticity of a being that has not been experienced by the doubter. Arguing for God's existence is therefore experiential. My son's hope and trust that mom would come back home to be with him – even if he learned by evidence that mom was not there right now – was grounded first in his life with his mother. The experience of the relationship is what grounds her existence. This is a pretheoretical legitimation. As Peter Berger notes in The Sacred Canopy:
If legitimation had to consist of theoretically coherent propositions, it would support the social order only for that minority of intellectuals that have such theoretical interests – obviously not a very practical program. Most legitimation, consequently, is pretheoretical in character (p.30).
This is why theoretical legitimations of God's existence drill down to absurdities and have atheists arguing on theoretical grounds alone licking their chops. And they should be licking their chops. Such arguments from the side of Christianity not only will ultimately fail, they will also miss the facticity of God's existence which is irreducibly grounded in their experience of God in a pretheoretical relationship.
Thus the inquiry:
Can one be a Christian without some experience of God to ground one's belief?
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