WHERE DO I GO NOW THAT I’VE GONE TOO FAR — ah yes, that classic line from Golden Earring’s “Twilight Zone”. (The refrain from that song has been misheard by many as “when the bullet hits the phone”, quite amusingly.) This question basically sums up my religious life at present.

I was brought up in a fairly devout Roman Catholic family. In college, when most kids gave up on church, I kept on going to mass. I was searching for some meaning and relevance to it all. After college I found a group of priests and parishes and ministries that made up for all the unquestioned ritual and closed views that I experienced at Sacred Heart, the family parish. Sacred Heart was pretty much unfazed by the whole Vatican 2 thing. Sure, they changed from Latin to English and moved the alter away from the wall in ’66. But other than that, there was very little interest in ecumenical outreach or boning up on cutting-edge Catholic thinkers like Teilhard de Chardin or Thomas Merton. If you mentioned Dorothy Day, they would think you were referring to Doris Day. I haven’t been to Sacred Heart in a long, long time, but I’d imagine that things haven’t changed much. If anything, the Roman Church has been “coming home” to the little world of Sacred Heart over the past 20 years. (And why not — a former pastor there hooked up with Cardinal Wojtyla in Poland long before he became Pope John Paul 2).

After my divorce in ’87, I decided to expand my religious views. I tried out other kinds of churches, including the Episcopalians, the Unitarians and the Quakers. THey all were quite groovy, but my mind wanted something more. I needed to go on an intellectual journey into the heart of the Bible, especially the New Testament. I needed to go as far as intellectual rigor would allow me to go (or at least my own sloppy version of “intellectual rigor”). So, in the early 90’s, I started a course of personal research into a variety of topics including mythology, Christian history, early Judaism, the Roman Empire, comparisons between the world’s great religions, and ultimately, the “historical Jesus”.

I wondered if all this would eventually shake my belief in the basic Christian doctrines. Could I “go too far” and reach a point where the Trinity and the Resurrection no longer made sense? Or where even the need for God no longer existed?

The answers, in a nutshell are: Yes to #1; No to #2. Close study of the Bible and the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth and the early Jewish-Christian church has convinced me that Jesus was a man; perhaps a very extraordinary man, but not the Son of Man. If you study other myths from other religions, you can similarly take the air out of them. But what you ultimately can’t do with any integrity is prove that God does NOT exist. And the inverse holds just as well: rationality cannot prove that God does exist, either. The rational process can take apart the complicated, imaginative myths regarding how God is related to humanity; but it cannot wipe God off the map either. In the end, the question is left in the fog of mystery.

Most believers would like some form of rational proof of God; the fog of mystery scares them, after a while. Thus the push amidst modern fundamentalists for “intelligent design” and creationism. After I lost my belief in the Resurrection, I put my stock in two other “Godly manifestations”: the fact that a majority of humanity expresses a belief in God; and the experience that mystics have of other-worldy union (which I myself briefly experienced back when I was practicing meditation regularly).

Unfortunately, scientists have recently shot these rationales down as empirical evidence supporting God’s existence. They’ve found that our minds were wired through evolutionary accident to make us believe in a Great Spirit (or tend to believe in one, anyway). So much for a rational grounding for faith; but at the same time, no reason NOT to believe either.

I realize that a majority of scientists and scholars do not believe in God. They seem to believe that they possess the ultimate world view. But they also seem to forget that whenever scientists in the past thought they knew it all, something came along to prove that the world is really bigger and more complex than they had imagined. As David Hume said back in the 18th century, science continually pushes back the veil of ignorance, but never eliminates it. And as Shakespeare said way back in the 16th Century, “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 5).

Here in the 21st Century, we can say that everything comes from the Big Bang; but where does the Big Bang come from? Right now, we don’t know. Maybe someday, string theory will push beyond the veil of mystery surrounding the Big Bang; perhaps it was due to the collision of “branes” floating in an 11-dimension realm. But then someone will ask, so where did the branes and the 11 dimensions come from?

In my opinion, atheistic scientists need to learn a bit more about the virtue of humility. (But so do Christian triumphalists and Islamic fundamentalists.)

So, my journey into logic and rationality has stripped away everything except God. It’s a lonely place; there aren’t many fellow searchers here. Most seem content to envelope themselves within communities of unquestioning believers or unquestioning atheists. But for those who do make the journey into this, the truest of Twilight Zones, the question becomes: can a person believe that the miracle of their own consciousness — something that the researchers and philosophers have tried to explain away but haven’t, despite various pretensions (e.g., Daniel Dennett) — does this miracle somehow point to the miracle of an ultimate consciousness (as Descartes seemed to be getting at)? The leap of faith is available to us yet, even at the Land’s End of an intellectual quest.