For me, “God” is not a matter of belief, religious faith, science or philosophy, but rather of experience. As the late atheist and social critic Gore Vidal wrote:
“God, or what have you, is not to be found at the far end of a syllogism, no matter how brilliantly phrased.”
Agreed: since I tend to eschew the popular notion of God as a Creator, I cannot deduce his existence from the existence of nature or the cosmos – thus science does not qualify as a means of discovering God. Since philosophy can both affirm and deny God’s existence, I can’t appeal to that intellectual dialogue. And because faith is a substitute for knowledge, I can’t invoke religious faith. That leaves God as an object of experience, rather than an object of intellectual pursuit and/or faith. To know God, for me, is the only pertinent spiritual category. Experience of God through divine union mysticism is to claim personal participation in God, unmediated by philosophy or by religious faith. This is also called “gnosis”, which means unmediated, raw, undomesticated experience of the divine. If faith and philosophy are involved in this, it is only secondarily, as interpretive tools utilized to put the original, raw, experience into normative language, as far as that is possible.
Because the experience of God (or the Spirit, the Sacred, the Wholly Other, the Transcendent) is completely subjective, it cannot be proved by pointing to any external object or process. Experience of God, of course, is profoundly evidential for the experiencing, participating person, but it is useless to anyone else, except as a kind of invitational map or guidebook to those who are also interested in acquiring the experience. Hence: God can be experienced subjectively, but not proved objectively.
As I said, in terms of “proving God”, this path of divine experience is a dead end. In a way, in fact, it “defines God out of existence” – precisely because it so very narrowly conveys God only through the lens of the individual soul (soul defined as one’s deepest subjectivity) – and thereby falls outside the standard parameters of proof.
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