Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

source, that prayers have been answered or that a vision of the future has been experienced. Whilst these experiences, in themselves, may not point to the existence of a Being that the name God traditionally conveys, they are at least evidence of something beyond everyday commonplace reality. As personal experience, they are, of course, difficult to verify. But such experience, whilst perhaps not pointing to a God, certainly seems to point to a wider view of reality, which has meaning to an individual.

Christians also believe that the Spirit of God indwells them — but the idea of God's Spirit somehow indwelling a human life is a very difficult one. The belief in God traditionally includes the notion of a Being who is both transcendent and immanent. God being immanent would imply that He/She/It is already present at every point in physical space. It would seem necessary then to discern a presence of God that is somehow more than this — perhaps a link with the mind, or soul of an individual. Different Christian denominations have different ways of describing this. Some say God's Spirit can be with a person but not in them unless they are a Christian. Others see a further division in that a Christian can have God's Spirit in them but may or may not have God's Spirit filling them. Do these distinctions point to some real experience or are they just descriptions of different kinds or qualities of religious experience? It’s a question that seems impossible to answer, and as such, relies on a believer’s personal faith.

Having looked at the arguments for the existence of God, let’s look briefly at the

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