23. The World is Hiding (3)

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There is, consequently, a price that anyone exposed to GOD must pay . . . and most of us lack the spiritual capacity to pay it. By leaving us relatively unexposed and ignorant, GOD is leaving us with an excuse, and thus mitigating the penalty we might otherwise incur if we were to refuse, like Satan, to believe and obey after encountering an undeniable sign of the Divine. Punishment is for deliberate denial, not excusable ignorance. Unconscious creation is incapable of denial, its default state being one of submission:

This is one reason why GOD ‘hides’ from us. The other is that the question ‘Why is GOD hiding?’ is in itself half the answer. The ‘Why’ – and all other questions – would be meaningless if GOD were manifest. Indeed there would be no need to ask questions, and no one to ask them.

Once again, the answer is in plain sight – ‘That you might seek Him’. GOD is implicit not only in the hiding but also in the seeking; we cannot ‘get’ GOD without GOD’s being wholly involved as both Sought and Seeker. So purely physicalist, reductionist answers that objectify God, failing thereby to consider His presence as a subject, are out of the question. If we want clues to GOD, we have to look for GOD-like clues, not ones that correspond only to our puny conceptions of how things are put together. And because the answer – GOD – is infinite, and hence infinitely beyond our capacity to understand, the faith that motivates us to seek is, at this stage of our existence, more important than the extent of what we find. The hiddenness of GOD not only spurs us to keep seeking but also ensures that our ceaseless finding, however small, is eternally rewarding.

The paradox of GOD being both transcendent and immanent, both infinitely remote and infinitely present, is that He is never ‘found’ in the sense that, once discovered, He is entirely known and defined. With the right perspective, we find Him in the absolutes by which we live from day to day, or rather we find signs of Him, for that indeed is all we can ever discover of the Divine. Do the doubters who complain about His hiddenness imagine that He could be pried out of the universe like a boulder excavated from the soil and left to dry in the sun? And if they could not see Him in His Wholeness, would they not continue to cavil that they do not see Him, but only a partial god, a semi-divine being? Would a wholly visible God be at all credible or worthy of worship? Although He manifests Himself in finite things, no amount of them could adequately express His infinity. So however much a doubter attempts to see of GOD, it would never be enough to reveal His infinity or convince an atheist of the absurdity of her request.

The very nature of the atheists’ demand belies their sincerity and seriousness, and betrays ignorance of the simplest concepts of theology. A scientist who demands that GOD show evidence of Himself on these materialistic terms reminds me of a child who asks to see the original manuscript of the theory of relativity so he can make a paper airplane.

The human faculty that best appreciates the presence of divine infinity is termed, in Qur’anic parlance, the heart. The vision of the heart, or spiritual insight, is what is lacking when we complain that we cannot see GOD. The spiritually blind simply cannot imagine what they are missing, and so assume it does not exist.

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