I was skiing at Jackson Hole Ski Resort recently. I feel the presence of God in the mountains. Surrounded by stunning beauty, skiing through the woods in silence and “touching the face of God,” I hear my soul cry out, “the heavens declare God’s handiwork.” There is a real sense that we are not alone in the universe when I am in that moment.
Where does that feeling of “something other” come from? I could appreciate the mountain for what it is: produced by millions of years of shifting tectonic plates. Beautiful, that’s it. Why add the transcendent to it? Seems unnecessary. Is it religious conditioning? Could be, but it doesn’t feel like that. To me, the perception of the transcendent is as real as the perception of the glorious mountain itself. As real as the rocks, trees, and snow. Why reject it? For materialists, it might be a matter of visual consensus in the seen and the unreliability of the unseen. I can understand that. But we can miss so much. Sociologist Peter Berger talks about signposts, hints of the supernatural in human experience, such as Hope, Play, and Humor. The mountain experience for me is a hint or a signpost of a potential future. Why would I convince myself the unseen has nothing to offer when my human experience screams otherwise? As William James says, I may be deceiving myself, but it’s a risk either way. Others may be deceiving themselves about the supernatural simply because they can’t see it. I’ll take my chances with faith.
“To preach skepticism to us as a duty until ‘sufficient evidence’ for religion be found, is tantamount therefore to telling us, when in presence of the religious hypothesis, that to yield to our fear of its being error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope that it may be true. It is not intellect against all passions, then; it is only intellect with one passion laying down its law. And by what, forsooth, is the supreme wisdom of this passion warranted? Dupery for dupery, what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear? I, for one, can see no proof; and I simply refuse obedience to the scientist’s command to imitate his kind of option.”
William James, The Will to Believe, 1896