The Experience of God

According to the classical arguments, universal rational order—not just this or that particular instance of complexity—is what speaks of the divine mind: a cosmic harmony as resplendently evident in the simplicity of a raindrop as in the molecular labyrinths of a living cell.

all knowledge involves an adventure of the mind beyond itself.

what the mind seeks in attempting to discover the truth is a kind of delight, a kind of fulfillment that can supersede the momentary disappointments or frustrations that the search for truth brings.

A stone is capable of affecting and being affected, but an insect has a much greater range of affective powers, and a rational animal has powers immeasurably more various and comprehensive still (most especially creative powers); hence, in the rational creature, being’s power unfolds itself more fully, for both good and ill, than in things lacking

it would have offended against many Christian philosophers’ understanding of divine transcendence to imagine that God really made the world through a succession of cosmic interventions; they assumed that God’s creative act is eternal, not temporal, occurring not at a discrete instant in the past, but rather pervading all of time.

The only fully consistent alternative to belief in God, properly understood, is some version of “materialism” or “physicalism” or (to use the term most widely preferred at present) “naturalism”; and naturalism—the doctrine that there is nothing apart from the physical order, and certainly nothing supernatural—is an incorrigibly incoherent concept,

I for one am more than willing to acknowledge that the God described by the new atheists definitely does not exist; but, to be perfectly honest, that is an altogether painless concession to make.

“Love is sufficient in itself, gives pleasure through itself and because of itself. It is its own merit, its own reward. Love looks for no cause outside itself, no effect beyond itself. … I love because I love, I love so that I may love. Love is something great insofar as it returns constantly to its fountainhead and flows back to its source, from

“being,” “consciousness,” and “bliss.”