Evidence for the Existence of God from Experience, Part 3: Encountering God

The experience of encountering God takes the experience of human faith to the next level. Beyond the fact that humans have universally held to the existence of a Supreme Being in every age, culture, and civilization, there are innumerable claims from a great number of people to have experienced God in a deeper way than merely an acceptance of His existence. People have encountered God. Whether by prayers answered or a profound confidence and peace felt after worship or meditation, or the more dramatic experience of a vision or locution, people of every age and culture are on record as having experienced the divine. It’s a substantial record. But, is it reliable?

No, say the atheists. It’s argument by authority, an obvious logical fallacy. The existence of God is supposed to be accepted because some neurotic visionary or shifty “faith healer” claims to have experienced God’s vision or healing power? Absurd! More likely, they are hoping to experience the transfer of your hard-earned money from your savings account to theirs. The mentally or emotional fragile and the frauds and professional manipulators notwithstanding, the great majority of religious experience is that of ordinary folks in the context of their ordinary lives. The testimony is impressive.

Fatima

In the spring of 1916, three young children of central Portugal, Lucia dos Santo and her two cousins, Francisco and Jacinta Martos (all under ten years old at the time) were herding sheep at a hollow called the Cova de Iria near their village home of Fatima. There they experienced visions of an angel on three different occasions, telling the children to pray, sacrifice and prepare for greater things.

On May 13 of the next year, the children had a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary. She instructed them to pray the rosary daily and to make sacrifices for penance for sins. She said she would visit them again on the thirteenth of each month for the next three months. At first, the children agreed not to tell anyone. But Jacinta, the youngest, couldn’t resist. She told her parents. Her father believed her, while her mother was less inclined to do so. They passed the story on to their neighbors, who told others, and soon the story was causing a sensation far beyond the tiny hamlet of Fatima. Many people believed them, but many ridiculed them. On August 13, the mayor of the town stopped them as they made their way to their appointed meeting with Mary, putting them in jail and subjecting them to intense questioning and pressure to deny their story.

The visionaries of Fatima were peasant children. They weren’t highly educated or sophisticated, and the oldest of them was only ten. Subjected to much criticism and ridicule, especially in the secular press that was fiercely anti-Catholic at the time, they had nothing to gain by the fabrication of their remarkable account of heavenly visions and messages. It’s reasonable to think that most children, especially seven-year old Jacinta, would cave under such pressure. Can you imagine being seven years old and placed in jail unless you agreed to expose your lie? Why did they stick by their story? Why, too, did they up the ante by making outrageous claims of miraculous events to take place on a specific day at a specific time? The children claimed that, according to the Virgin, a miracle would take place at noon on October 13, 1917.

On that day estimates of 70,000 people gathered to witness the promised miracle. Not all among them were believers. Many were skeptics, including reporters from the anti-Catholic newspapers that had been running stories over the previous months ridiculing the children. The most notorious of these, Avelino de Almeida of O Seculo, was in the field that day. Almeida’s articles on previous days had devoted much skepticism and ridicule to the events of Fatima and to those he thought gullible enough to believe the children’s claims. However, his account of the events of October 13, 1917 is not one of ridicule, mockery or satisfaction at having been present to witness the exposure of the children’s fantasy. Rather, he offers an objective account of what he himself witnessed:

“In the astonished eyes of these people, whose attitude takes us back to Biblical times, and who, white faced with shock, with their heads uncovered, face the blue sky: the sun trembled, the sun has made sudden movements that were outside all cosmic laws – the sun ‘danced’, according to the typical expression of the country people. ...

“And next they ask each other if they have seen or not seen. Most confess that they have seen the dancing of the sun; others, however, declare they have seen the smiling face of the Virgin herself. They swear that the sun spun about itself like a ring of fireworks, that it came down almost to the point of burning the Earth with its rays. …

“And what about the little shepherds? Lucia, ‘she who speaks with the Virgin,’ tells everyone, with theatrical gestures, … that the war will end and that our soldiers will come back. This news, however, does not increase the joy of those who are listening. The heavenly sign was everything. … That which they were all looking for – a sign from Heaven – has been enough to satisfy them and make them convinced of their faith. …”

Challenged by his cohorts in the anti-clerical press, Almeida didn’t back down from his original reporting. Rather, he reaffirmed his account of the events of the day two weeks later in his review, Illustracao Portuguesa, including with his article a number of photographs of the large crowd, staring at the sun in amazement:

“What did I see at Fatima that was even stranger? The rain, at an hour announced in advance, ceased falling; the thick mass of clouds dissolved; and the sun – a dull silver disc – came into view at its zenith, and began to dance in a violent and convulsive movement, which a great number of witnesses compared to a serpentine dance, because the colours taken on by the surface of the sun were so beautiful and gleaming.”

Finally, Almeida concludes, trying to maintain a professional level of reporting, but not willing to deny what his own eyes had witnessed:

“Miracle, as the people shouted? A natural phenomenon, as the learned would say? For the moment, I do not trouble myself with finding out, but only with affirming what I saw … The rest is a matter between Science and the Church.”

People from 30 to 40 miles away, who were completely unaware of the crowd gathered in the field at Cova da Iria, much less aware of why they gathered, reported seeing the sun spin, dance and display a variety of colors on that day, testifying to what has come to be called the “Miracle of the Sun.”

When the day and time passed, why did so many convert from skepticism to faith? Why were the children not publicly rebuked and punished by the civil authorities for causing such a commotion, if the claims and predictions they made were empty? Given the immense crowd that gathered on the expected day, a crowd filled as much by skeptics as believers, one would have expected a riot to break out when the subterfuge was revealed. But, no such thing happened. Just the opposite. The crowd, bedazzled by the miraculous events, left peacefully, many convinced that they had experienced nothing less than the divine mercifully encouraging them to greater faithfulness and prayer.

Most accounts of religious experience are far less dramatic than those of Fatima, and far more personal. This should not dissuade us of their authenticity. Such experiences are not simply dismissed by people as interesting events in their lives, but transformative events, lending weight to their reality. It’s worth asking: will respectable, responsible, intelligent and balanced individuals risk losing their reputations, their positions and their relationships for an interesting delusion?

Alexis Carrel

In 1902, Alexis Carrel, French surgeon and biologist who would later receive the 1912 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for pioneering vascular suturing, witnessed a miracle at Lourdes, the site of St. Bernadette’s visions of Mary and of the spring waters reputed to cause miraculous healings. Carrel was invited to accompany a train of ill persons to Lourdes by a doctor friend and there met Marie Bailly, who was dying of tubercular peritonitis. Carrel, who had been called to her side a number of times because of concerns of her imminent death, accompanied Bailly to the Lourdes springs, where he witnessed water from the springs being poured on her bloated and firm abdomen three times. In front of his own eyes, Carrel then saw Bailly’s abdomen reduce in size, finally becoming flat and soft. She was examined by three doctors afterwards, including Carrel, who could only declare her cured. The next day, she was energetic and making plans to join the Sisters of Charity, where she would dedicate her life to caring for the infirm.

Carrel continued to follow her care for months after, until she was formally declared cured by her own doctors shortly before entering the novitiate. Carrel at first did not accept the cure as miraculous, but continued to visit Lourdes in the effort to study the quick healings being observed and recorded there. In 1910, Carrel was witness to a second healing, that of an 18 month old boy who had been born blind. Still, Carrel refused to embrace the Catholic faith of his childhood, which he had renounced years earlier, and continued to dedicate his life to medicine, even succumbing to the attraction of eugenics as a way of solving human difficulties, as so many intellectuals did prior to World War II.

In 1940, Carrel became acquainted with a priest, Fr. Alexis Presse, who was on a mission to rebuild ruined monasteries across France. Carrel experienced a strange feeling when he met the priest who shared his name. In November, 1944, Carrel lay on his deathbed in Paris. Fr. Presse was beckoned. Arriving just in time, Carrel was reconciled to the Church and received the sacraments from Fr. Presse. Though it took decades to sink in, the miracles that Alexis Carrel witnessed at Lourdes eventually moved him to embrace the divine.

Avery Dulles

Avery Dulles came from a distinguished political family. His father served as Secretary of State and his uncle as director of the CIA. Avery would distinguish himself as a Catholic theologian and cardinal. Before that, however, he entered Harvard University in 1936 as a convinced atheist. He gave little thought to religion, having surrendered his nominal Presbyterian upbringing, but was distressed even still by the ramifications of a lack of objective values in the public sphere. Moral laws became social convention, and his cohorts at Harvard, and many others of his generation, seemed to put their best efforts in obtaining the perks of materialism. The ancient philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, buoyed by contemporary Catholic philosophers Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson, helped him to find some sense in the world and the time-honored truths that really mattered. Finally, after reading a chapter of St. Augustine of Hippo’s City of God at the library at Harvard one spring day, he walked out and came upon a tree budding on the banks of the Charles River. “Never, since the eventful day which I have described,” Dulles later wrote, “have I doubted the existence of an all-good and omnipotent God.” (“Avery Dulles’s Long Road to Rome,” by Robert Royal, “Crisis Magazine,” July-August, 2001.)

Dulles’ experience might seem quaint, almost child-like, to some. But, it changed his life. He later converted to Catholicism and, joined the Society of Jesus, was ordained a priest and, after a long and distinguished career as a theologian, was named to the College of Cardinals by Pope John Paul II. Dulles was no intellectual slouch, but one of the best and brightest the United States has produced in the twentieth century. An international lecturer, he was the author of over 700 articles and twenty-two books, a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the recipient of thirty-three honorary doctorates. Such a man of intellectual vigor and distinction simply must be taken seriously by any who would dismiss out of hand the religious experience of the human community.

Be Christ for all. Bring Christ to all. See Christ in all.