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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Beyond What You Can Know, Imagine

Leonard Pitts, Jr. Knight-Ridder

Imagine God.

It’s futile, but we do it. Do it while worrying about sickness, weeping over loved ones, contemplating mortality. According to a recent Newsweek poll, 87 percent of us believe someone or something up there answers prayers. U.S. News & World Report says 67 percent of us are certain that heaven exists. I knew those numbers in a general sense before I looked them up, knew them because I know how strong is the need to imagine God.

That’s why the result of a recent poll of scientists stopped me. Researchers Edward J. Larson and Larry Witham found that about 60 percent of U.S. scientists doubt or disbelieve in the existence of God.

No, it’s not surprising. People often become better informed and less perceptive at the same time. So men and women who can conceive quantum mechanics and Pythagorean theory find it difficult to imagine God, and I’m reminded of an old Far Side cartoon by Gary Larson: Two fleas are standing in a thicket of canine hair and one says to the other, “Sometimes, I’m not so sure there really is a dog.” The caption reads, “agnostic fleas.”

Canine proof lying all around, and they can’t imagine dog.

So imagine us imagining God.

T’ain’t easy, even if one isn’t blinded with science. We are, after all, limited by the breadth of human creativity, restricted by the fact that mortality cannot conceive infinity. What came before before? What happens after eternity? We’re ill-equipped to pose the questions, much less provide the answers. Small wonder we usually picture Him as an old dude with a long beard.

That’s why I instinctively distrust those who come bearing easy truths, why I’m skeptical of bright-eyed adherents who thump their holy books with the unshakable conviction of those who have never seen the shadow cast by doubt.

Meaning scientists.

Like religious zealots, they are driven by the need for final, irrefutable certainty. We all are, I suppose. The great questions are unsettling and we crave answers. So naturally, science finds it hard to believe in an unseen One who numbers raindrops and gives orders to the sun. God fails the tests science administers for its own assurance.

But where God is concerned, the only assurance that matters lies within, and sometimes we are too full of ourselves to find it. As a pair of Scottish rockers called the Proclaimers once put it, “The less I believe in me, the more I believe in thee.”

I sat up late one night trying to explain that to an agnostic friend who had asked me for reasons to believe. As it happened, I couldn’t give her any.

Oh, we went around in the standard circles. Debated how a God of love can allow a world of cruelty, argued how unlikely it was that the intricacies of life came about by happenstance, yatta, yatta, yatta.

But at the bottom line, I couldn’t give her what she wanted because it wasn’t in my power. She could not accept that there are some things you can’t prove in your head yet you still know in your soul.

The idea was as antithetical to her as it is to science. We have the need to know and the need to imagine God, and it’s hard to conceive two needs being more diametrically opposed. Worse, resolution requires humility - and let’s face it, we are not humble. We are doers and strivers, makers and achievers.

But I find that a song we sang as children in the church choir keeps coming back to me. “Over my head,” it says, “I hear music in the air. There must be a God somewhere.”

So a man strives to make himself humble, strains to hear the song.

Imagine God.

Imagine.

xxxx