Detecting God

Occasionally two events coincide and end up cross-pollinating (or, if you prefer, cross-contaminating) each other in my brain. Since this leads to subjects for posts other than me moaning about my medical misadventures, I don’t really mind.

In this instance, those two things are a book and a board game, but not in that order.

The board game is one we played last Monday, instead of our regular roleplay session, and which I’d never played before. It’s Scotland Yard, a game in which one person plays a criminal on the run in London, and the rest of you play detectives trying to track them down and capture them. Occasionally throughout the game, the criminal’s whereabouts are made known. From that point onwards the detectives only have vague clues as to where the criminal might be and in which direction they’re moving until they’re revealed again several turns later. They win by working together to close in on where they think the criminal is, trap them and capture them. If they fail to do this in a set number of turns, the criminal wins.

The book is one I received for Christmas; Proofs of God by Matthew Levering, which is a run-down of the arguments of various luminary theologians and philosophers throughout history.

I’ve only just started reading it. I’m still on the introduction, and I’ll admit that it’s rather denser than the usual popular theologies I normally read. It’s one of those books in which the footnotes take up more of the page than the actual text. Still, it looks like it’s going to be very interesting.

As I’ve said, I’m only on the introduction so far, but Dr. Levering  is discussing the definition of ‘proof’, and whether or not it is indeed possible to demonstrate the existence of God using reason alone. Reading this, it made me wonder how God views our fumbling attempts to prove His existence, and whether He finds it amusing. In His place I certainly would.

This led me onto thinking about our game of Scotland Yard. My wife ended up playing the criminal (which she did exceedingly well), and I remembered her look of amusement as the three of us who were playing the detectives squinted at the board, saying things like ‘Right, so she was here two turns ago, so she must have gone here, and then here or here. But going there wouldn’t make sense, so she must be here.’

Then, a turn later her location would be revealed, and it would turn out that she’d slipped through our supposedly impenetrable logic and was actually on almost the opposite side of the board, miles away from our pieces.

Scotland Yard starts not only with the existence of the criminal known, but the initial location too. Most theologians would argue that the existence of God is similarly known; it’s just the details that are unclear. Of course, a great many people would dispute even the existence of God, something which would make Scotland Yard a much more difficult and more philosophical game than the designers obviously intended.

Possibly a theological version could be made, in which the criminal is replaced by The Truth of God, and the public transport tickets the detectives (aka theologians) have to use as clues are replaced by various theological and philosophical schools. However the game would have to be based on the premise that God wishes to hide His nature from humankind, rather than it merely being incomprehensible to mortal minds.

Instead, we’re informed that God wishes to be known to all people. ‘Why then,’ we’re sometimes asked, ‘doesn’t He just reveal Himself and make everything clear, instead of providing only occasional revelations and leaving us to grope around as best we can with feeble theologies and philosophies and barely-educated guesses?’

A good question. To some extent, I guess it’s about free will. After all, if everyone knew that God definitely existed, and if we knew the exact arrangements for the afterlife, the universe and everything, it would rather skew people’s behaviour. Psychological experiments only really work if the experimentee doesn’t realise it’s happening. I’m not suggesting that existence is any kind of experiment on God’s part, but presumably he’d prefer our reactions to be honest rather than forced.

Obviously, for many of us our behaviour is already strongly influenced by what we think God wants, but the element of uncertainty, of Faith, keeps us guessing, keeps us searching, keeps us refining what we believe God is and what we believe God wants. I think that when that search stops and a faith ossifies, something extremely important is lost, and cultural constructs from ages and societies long gone exert an undue amount of influence. Not, I hasten to add, that they can be automatically rejected simply because of their age or cultural provenance; I’m no chronological snob. However, they mustn’t be automatically accepted either, simply because they are now ‘tradition’.

We don’t know the answers, but perhaps it is the search and the attempt that is important, rather than the answer itself. God wishes all to come to Him, not to inflict himself on all people. As Christians, it is our journey that defines us, not just our destination.

And for the record, my wife won the game. We never did manage to track her down.