God, Intuition, & William James
I have long suspected that the sheer endurance of religion through millennia is a powerful stamp of validation to the idea of God. In this time-lapse view of humanity, the collective-unconscious shines through. Put aside your rhetorical arsenal for a moment, that lawyer-like impulse to pipe up with some sharp-edged polemic.
For the stunning breadth of history in its own right is a keen illuminator. Even more, a great embalmer of our mysterious human longings — which have a curiously tricky time nudging their way into the religion debate. (Why? Perhaps we squirm in the face of our vulnerabilities.)
Through the ravages of war, through the great phase changes of history, across miles of oceans and altitudes of cultural advancement God still lingers. I am oddly impressed by this longevity and yet entirely unsurprised by it. The reign of religion (of which I am using, perhaps untidily, interchangeably with ‘God’) inspires an exhale of Fate-heavy inevitability. It makes sense. But what kind of sense?
Reason
Now that’s an interesting question. The Western world has been enchanted with the fluorescent beam of scientific rationality for centuries. Seeing as devotion to this Enlightenment-ideal bred countless success stories and helped cobble together a new [higher] plane of existence, it was only natural for…
