Wednesday, 09 July 2008

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  O Taste and See: Chocolate, Music, and the Existence of God

  I have a friend who has no sense of taste.  I don’t mean that she’s un-cultured; in fact, her preferences in art and music are quite sophisticated.  I mean that when she puts food in her mouth, she doesn’t taste a thing.  It’s not a terribly disabling handicap, as handicaps go; she still gets all the nutrition she needs and leads a perfectly healthy and active life.  It’s just that, to her, there’s no real difference between eating wedding cake and eating tofu.

  So here’s the question: How would you go about describing to this person exactly how chocolate tastes?

  You could write something, maybe a descriptive sensuous sort of poem, or maybe a detailed technical analysis of how the chemicals in chocolate interact with the pleasure centers of the brain.  Maybe if you’re musically inclined you could write a tune that depicts what it feels like to eat chocolate.  (J. S. Bach once wrote a hilarious “Coffee Cantata,” so this is actually not too farfetched.)  You could copy those splendid sequences from the film Ratatouille where a surrealistic montage of color represents Remy’s emotional response to the flavors of food.  You’d probably come closest by letting her smell a Hershey bar, but even that just isn’t the same as tasting it.

  Until we stop and think about it, we don’t realize how much our perception is limited to our senses.  There’s really only one or two ways to perceive most of the things around us.  You can’t smell a sunset, see a symphony, touch a flavor, or hear the scent of a rose.  If it wasn’t that we happened to have the right senses to experience these things, more than likely we’d never know they exist. 

  Imagine having no sense of smell and being told that a rose has the most beautiful scent in the world.  You put it to your nose and inhale.  You can’t smell a thing.  “What are you talking about?” you say.  “There’s nothing there.”  “What do you mean?” says your friend, sniffing the rose herself.  “It’s the most wonderful thing I’ve ever smelled.”  “But I can’t smell anything…”

  Logically, there are two choices: 1) There is nothing there, and your friend is creating her own delusional alternate reality, or 2) There is something there, but you lack the proper capacity to perceive it.

  Hopefully, for the case of the flower, you’d eventually go with the second.  We all know that our senses can be limited.  Even when our senses are perfectly healthy and functional, they’re still surprisingly narrow.  We all know about light that is “beyond the visible spectrum”, or the famous “whistle only dogs can hear.”  There are even some animals that have senses we know nothing about.  We know of eels that can locate other objects by their electrical field, birds and fish that can navigate the world with their own internal GPS.  It’s perfectly natural, even though it seems to us like a superpower.

  If we think it through, and if we’re honest, we have to admit that there could be any number of things out there that exist, but that we simply lack the capacity to perceive with our senses.  Our senses aren’t exhaustive guides to the reality even of things we know about.  

  I think this is where many of our discussions on “the existence of God” miss the mark.  “Where’s the evidence that God exists?” an atheist or skeptic will ask.  Or, almost as common, “I would believe that God exists if I saw such-and-such, but I believe that is impossible.”  Christians then try to answer them on their own terms, and are often left fumbling for a good way to reply.

  For instance, I had a dialogue with an outspoken atheist a while back in which he said he would not believe in God unless God could tell him the exact number of check marks in a certain book on his shelf.  Presumably an omniscient God would indeed be capable of doing that if He wanted, but what if (I asked) God exists but simply has no interest in playing pick-a-number?  (He didn’t take that very well.)

  Here’s the thing.  What if someone said, “Where’s the evidence that the music of Beethoven exists?  Until I see a symphony, I won’t believe it’s real.”  Well then, that person is going to keep right on disbelieving in Beethoven, because your eyes are not the right way to perceive music.  You can watch the musicians perform, you can look at the score, you can even smell the fine antique wood of a musical instrument, but music itself belongs to the sense of hearing.  If you can’t hear, you’re left wondering what the fuss is about.

  It’s not that philosophy, or science, or the world around us offer evidence against the reality of God; I think there are plausible arguments to be made from any of them.  In the same way, you could argue to a deaf person that music exists because they can see that all those people with violins have to be doing something.  But that’s not the best way to make the point.  There’s a lot more than the visual presentation that goes into making music.

  So if our senses are insufficient, what’s the best way to find the reality of God?  A great saint, martyr, and devoutly spiritual man once wrote this (read it carefully):

  “But, as it is written,
  
      ‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
          nor the heart of man imagined,
      what God has prepared for those who love him’––
  
  these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.  For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.  Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God.  And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.  The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.”

  —2 Corinthians 2:9-14 ESV (italics mine)

  There’s so much in there that to examine it all would take a great deal of space (I also once used it in a sermon on “receiving the Holy Spirit”).  But his main points are simple: You can’t see, hear, or even imagine what God is like on your own, but God reveals this to us by means of the Holy Spirit.  (The “Holy Spirit” of course is God Himself, the third Person of the Trinity.)  Just like your own spirit best knows what is deepest within you, when you “receive the Holy Spirit,” you will understand who God is and what He is willing to do for you. 

  If you reject the Holy Spirit?  Well then, you’re like a person wearing ear plugs at a concert, a person with a blindfold at an art gallery, or my friend with no taste at a gourmet dinner.  You have no real way of perceiving what it’s all about.  It’s not that there’s no evidence for it; it’s that you’ve closed yourself off to the evidence, so no wonder you can’t see it.

  When we debate about God’s existence, far too often we are trying to settle a spiritual question on natural terms.  Surely that must suffer the same shortcomings as trying to describe a flavor in literary terms.  Oh, maybe it can be done.  Maybe it can even be done well.  But it can never be as good as letting that chocolate melt in your mouth.  Maybe that’s why the psalmist said…

  Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good!
  Blessed is the man who trusts in him!

  (Psalm 34:8)

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