I want to look at the objection that this relationship we have with God is all in our minds; that we have merely imagined it. After all, if it is merely a psychological trick, or, indeed, a wish-fulfillment - could not our mind play a sufficient trick on us, one which would bring about a mistaken belief that it is all true?
Sometimes it does seem that way - it sometimes seems so very likely that our rejection of the atheistic world is only the disappointed cat's attempt to convince himself that there is no mouse in the hole. And it also seems true in this modern age that many people's perception of church and, indeed, Christianity, is one of 'boring' and 'inconsequential'.
If we are to fully understand the defence against the accusations that our belief is a mere psychological wish-fulfillment, or a psychological replacement for things that are not very satisfying in our everyday lives, we will have to look at other things which are ordinarily seen as wish-fulfillments or replacements and see how this accusation measures up. In other words, we need to examine whether, in similar situations, the replacement would show itself to be less satisfying than the very thing which it was displacing.
When trying to analyse the realities for which things are replacements, we should not conclude that religion, as a mere replacement for these things, would be quite so satisfying as it first appeared; for we do not have our ego stroked by becoming a Christian. In fact it seems to demand changes of us that we are naturally resistant to; that is, it insists upon changes that are so often perceived as changes that run counter to our natural desires.
Of course having been a Christian for several years now - it is quite easy to see how all accusations that Christianity is a mere psychological replacement are, in fact, quite groundless. I have seen how the outside position of the Christian faith is so very different to the experience itself.
But this is not so surprising; after all, I have an example from everyday life which shows that replacements do not always gravitate towards misleading falsity. When I was growing up I never went to see live music; I would listen to all the music I liked on vinyl and compact disc. I had become so used to the songs recorded in the studio that when I did eventually go to see some of these artists live, I was disappointed with them because they did not produce the same sound that they did on vinyl or compact disc. The live music lacked the polish I had come to expect. I felt that the live music was not 'The real thing' - when, in fact, the recorded sound is precisely a replacement, and live music is the real thing. But owing to my young age and musical mis-education the reality appeared to be a replacement and the replacement a reality. Now of course there are several things I could have done as a child to correct my mistake. I could have asked professional musicians, or I could have inferred from the price differential that, as concerts were more expensive than records, my perception that they were 'inferior sound' might have been wrong. But as soon as I started to appreciate live music, I began to see how my initial perception of replacements was not quite correct.
Here is another example. When I was growing up, I used to enjoy a dollop of salad cream with some of my meals. One week, due to a salad cream drought at my local supermarket, I had to buy mayonnaise instead. Now at first I would have been reluctant to call it a superior replacement because my palate was enjoying it less than it enjoyed salad cream - it felt like an ersatz replacement. But by the time the stocks were replenished and I had the option of salad cream again, I never wanted to buy it again, for mayonnaise had revealed itself to be, by far, the more satisfying of the two. This is different from the previous example because here I started knowing, which, in fact, was the replacement. The mere immediate taste of mayonnaise did not confirm that it was a superior replacement as such, because at first it did not seem quite as nice as the salad cream. It was only after a period of time that the mayonnaise revealed itself to my senses as the superior of the two.
And here we are starting to see that things which are often seen as ersatz replacements are, very often, better than the things which they are displacing. To the philanderer, faithful love, when it does not appear repellent and unappealing, appears at best a mere insipid replacement for that tumultuous world of infidelity that has become to him the only source of contentment. Every pocket of life provides us with examples of what I am talking about. Young boys who enjoy a surreptitious swig out of their father's can of lager would have an unpleasant surprise if they did the same out of his whisky bottle. They would see the replacement as inferior, and quite vile I should imagine. But to the trained palate, whisky, far from being a mere inferior lager replacement is, is fact, the better of the two. Those who are brought up with Blood Sweat and Tears and Frank Zappa cannot quite believe that Miles Davis is anything but inferior to the complex musicianship being created by the said artists. The Times newspaper seems quite disagreeable to a man who has spent all his life reading The Sun. To the woman whose interest in reading is that of mere rudimentary escapisms - Dante, Shakespeare and Joyce would seem, at first, a pale reflection of the novels by Jilly Cooper, Jackie Collins and Catherine Cookson that she is used to enjoying.
From all this I want to conclude that appreciation of something new not only takes time, but it can be very different to that which is initially perceived. Pensiveness is of no use at all in deciding which of two experiences is a replacement or second best. If our perception of what a replacement will be like is so often misguided; that is, if we very often have to experience the thing being perceived before we can make a true judgement of it, we should expect that those who are on the outside of the Christian faith will invariably perceive it the same way that we have perceived other replacements. In our criterion between a real and a replaced feeling, true realisation must be sought through the thing itself. That is a little bit of what Christ means when He says that when we seek we shall find. Only by finding something can we realise fully what we have left behind.
Rationalism, experience, substantiation; on these three, mixed in permutational proportions, all our knowledge depends. By stating this, I am simply trying to put the whole problem of psychological trickery the right way round; to make it clear that the real validity of a contention must be dependent upon a realisation, not of outside conjecture, but upon a true realisation of the complete picture.
You cannot expect to know what a trip to Paris is like by reading about it in a holiday brochure. And it should be observed that if Christians are right - if they really do have a personal relationship with God, it will follow that a real encounter with the divine - a relationship with Christ - is the real and genuine truth of our earthly existence and that our natural experiences are secondary in value.
And allow me to point out that whichever view we accept as true, emotions and feelings will continue to deceive that which we think is our satisfying conclusion. Just as lovers have moments when they begin to believe that their beloved 's love for them is rather more self-serving than mere perception can reveal, there will moments when a real fractious exchange can reveal to them a strength in depth that they did not know existed.
Similarly, the Christian faith seems, at times, to be contrary to propounded naturalistic explanations, but other times (to which the majority of Christian feelings belong) it appears as the most real part of our existence - the only thing that offers a true explanation of why we are here. I do not mean that we believe it to be true because we think that the universe owes us meaning, for this is not necessarily true. I mean that Christianity is the only thing that makes perfect sense when we have put everything that needs to be examined into a melting pot. If we are able to apply all this rationale correctly, we will start to see, when we have enough initial faith, that the replacement for everyday secular life might actually be better than we first anticipated - we will start to see our lives become enriched in every way.
I do think, however, that in this contemporary age, the word 'faith' has negative connotations; after all, does not faith mean believing something without evidence? Certainly not. In general we are quite reticent when it comes to speaking about faith as a virtue - for science has tried so hard to make a mockery of faith. But of course, faith does not mean believing in something that we think is untrue, and it certainly should not mean (although I suspect sometimes it does) that a man will go on believing something regardless of whether he thinks it true or not.
And it is also fallacious to suppose that anything which is claimed to be a real experience or a real event must be a testable hypothesis; for a little thought shows us that there are many non-religious things which are felt to be true or even known to be true that are not empirically testable.
It is probably true that being a Christian in a country which has a prevalence of unbelievers is harder than being a Christian in a country whose occupants are predominantly Christian, but all good scientists know that a ubiquitous belief or disbelief in something does not, by itself, alter its efficacy or even its testability. It takes the consideration of other factors before we can come to proper conclusions. And if a man were to were to examine cognition properly, he would not be in a strange land if he came to the conclusion that all those claims by Christians of miracles in their own lives; of healing, of supernatural visions, and most importantly, the experience of the divine appearing inside their own cognisance, sensory structure and reasoning power, when it was wholly unexpected and, at times, unwelcome, seems quite real and honest.
It is quite obvious that very often people's moods and feelings go some way in creating their reasons, so we should not be surprised to find that all claims of religion being an inferior and ersatz replacement for a more real existence do not in any way explain why it is that our Lord can, in a instant, come into the lives of people who are either very resistant to religion or whose enthusiastic enjoyment of everyday life has left them so preoccupied with pleasure, covetousness, hedonism, sin, and gratification that all suggestion of self-surrender seemed, at the time of conversion, impossible.
It is a big myth that when we encourage people to Christ we are asking them to suspend reason or put their faith into something which they believe to be contrary to their own fervent beliefs. Once a man has passionately decided that he does not want Christianity to be true; once he has decided that his temptation to earthly things is his whole raison d'être - you have as much chance of converting him as an ice cube has of retaining its shape when thrown onto a bonfire.
But with God, all thing are possible - it is up to us to provide answers when our faith is questioned; and equally, it is up to us to show men and women that Christianity is not just one truth of man - it is the only truth. All of this is encapsulated in one statement by Christ - that He is the Way, the Truth and the Life - for here we have an embodied description of the direction that every man and woman should be heading, what this journey will lead us towards, and finally, an explanation as to why this universe is here in the first place. He is the life - everything that we know as living, was created by Him and because of Him. All creation occurred so that He could love us and have a relationship with us.
If this is to be fully realised, we have to rely on God to give us the gift of faith to begin with. We must hope for the power to go on believing that we are able to conquer fear, apprehension, envy, indifference, boredom and self-governance, and that all those things which rationalism, experience and substantiation, or all three, will deliver to us, shall continue to engender a positive growth in Christ - that we might be able to be blessed in the decimation of all those earthly things which are unhelpful to us and which cause us disconsolation if they are not undertaken with God acknowledged as the primacy of our existence.
When faith in God is seen as something negative, it is almost always due to the fact that the pleasure one feels from knowing God is something that can never be conceived of if no knowledge of God has ever been present in the doubter's mind. But once it is realised that faith is not a negative thing, but essential in the incipient stages of the journey, it can soon reveal to those who search earnestly, that when our Lord says 'seek and you will find', He really means it.
