How Can You Prove That God Even Exists?

Earlier this year, Ella Anderson penned a beautiful article about this very puzzle.

She called it The Idea of God Has a Major Flaw and it’s definitely worth your time. Her thesis is that from the standpoint of science, the idea of God is non-falsifiable. You can’t conclusively demonstrate God doesn’t exist.

And she’s right.

Using science alone, you can’t prove the non-existence of God. Ella stands in a long line of esteemed thinkers who have come to the same conclusion.

But here is the problem with this approach: it relies only on science, the pursuit of cause and effect, as the method of proof.

Something more than science

Life, and reality as we know it, is more than science (as logical and beautiful and useful as science may be). We experience life through a combination of the material body, intellectual mind and even spirit impressions.

Material existence leads us to a sense of cause and effect, the realm of scientific fact. Our intellect leads us to an exploration of relationships, the realm of morality and philosophy. Our sense of spirit, resting ever so delicately on top of mind, leads to us an experience of divinity (however we understand divinity). For the most part, religion (different from but related to spirit) is an attempt to share and socialize these spiritual experiences.

God is mostly a spiritual entity, and to evaluate such an entity we need a method of proof that includes the domain of spirit. If we arrive at a factual material statement, or even if we assemble many of these corroborating material facts, that doesn’t necessarily mean we arrive at the spiritual truth of a situation.

These two — material fact and spiritual truth — are different in kind. Our attempts to use one to “prove” the other, either positively or negatively, aren’t going to work. We need an altogether different sort of evaluation. But where will we find it?

Well, is there anything else that’s non-falsifiable? Yes, there is.

Experience.

Everything combines in personal experience

Personal experience isn’t falsifiable. What proof can you offer that you didn’t feel something, or didn’t think something? By that same token, it’s not provable. What proof can you offer to show you did feel something? The short answer is there is no proof. The most you can do is tell a convincing story.

However, personal experience is the only field where all three levels of reality can be had at once: material fact, intellectual ideas and spiritual values. Personal experience is the most real thing to us, even though scientists say it’s unreliable and philosophers cannot logically “prove” it.

Take love, for instance.

Your mother loves you. You know this as a fact because you experience it. It’s so real you can feel it in your heart. But can you prove it? No. You can’t see it or weigh it or measure it.

This love has meaning to you, an incredibly deep and sustaining meaning. But can you capture that meaning in formal logic, in philosophic reasoning? No. It is beyond logic, it is more than philosophy.

Despite the inability of facts or meaning to capture, prove or demonstrate your mother’s love, it’s so real you’ve based much of your life, perhaps even your identity, on it.

In the incredibly broad domain of experience, love functions between personalities. To be aware of love, to give and receive it, personhood is required. Between non-personalities — grains of subatomic particles, bacteria and viruses, grasses and trees — love has no meaning.

Without persons, without personhood or personality, love does not exist.

The proof of God

This personal experience of love is the great experiential “proof” that God exists.

Love is a personal phenomenon. It didn’t come from earthly nature or its progenitor, the cosmos. It didn’t arise as an evolutionary construct from the lower levels of the animal kingdom. It didn’t even originate in humanity. Love comes from God, the original personality.

In its highest form of human expression, love is demonstrated by people who embrace and tried to live out their understanding of how God loves them.

Think of the most elevated teachers in history: Zoroaster, Melchizedek, Lao Tse, Buddha, Jesus, the Dali Lama, and other great religious teachers. The more of God they could relate to and personally express, the more they were guided, even dominated by love.

Each of these teachers had a different concept of God and different way of expressing that in their life, but there’s no question about their singular aim: to live love in the highest form they understood.

Love finds its origin in God, as a function of personality. We’re just trying to duplicate it in our own lives down here.

When you feel the swell of love, for your loved ones, for children or parents, for a stranger you’ve only just met, there blooms the proof that God exists, where you can undeniably feel and experience it.

“You cannot perceive spiritual truth until you feelingly experience it . . .” — The Urantia Book, pg 557