Why I believe Yahweh is God: A brief note to an atheist

One of my readers, "ConverseAtheist", has asked for the grounds I have for believing that it is Yahweh, rather than any one of the other candidates for deity -- Zeus, Allah, Ahura Mazda, Thor -- that is the true God, and thus the one correctly described as the "most perfect being".

I was going to get there through an extended, subtle, and deliciously nuanced narrative in a coffee shop, but well that has fallen flat , or so it would seem. ConverseAtheist prefers a straight answer. And so I shall deliver.

Much of what I said about Matts the plumber in an earlier post has already addressed this question. In "Yahweh as the most perfect being and the burden of belief" I argue (with certain qualifications) that a person does not require special evidence to believe in the superiority of their understanding of God over other understandings.

Fair enough, but still the question arises: what evidence can I provide that Yahweh really is God? Well speaking for myself the answer is actually quite simple: I have repeated experiences of what I would consider to be a providential hand. For instance, in "Faith, doubt, and the day I should have died" I describe an experience I had as a child which I think could be described as miraculous. It was a day like any other when I was riding home on my bike and crossed the street without looking. At that moment I was broadsided by a car going down the hill. Incredibly however, I was not harmed, save a minor scratch. I'll quote myself from there:

Five minutes later I was wheeling my bike up the driveway when the babysitter came out. She told me that she had been on the couch watching TV when God told her that I was in trouble and she needed to pray. So she prayed until she felt God tell her that the danger had passed. Then she came outside and saw me.

I have had many other experiences which, if not as unusual as this, are from a circumstantial sense also very compelling. (Indeed, I am currently compiling similar stories from other Christians.) The former archbishop of Canterbury William Temple famously summarized this phenomenon as follows:

"When I pray coincidences happen. When I stop praying, coincidences stop."

At what point does one conclude that there is something more than a coincidence at work? I don't know the extact threshold but I know I passed it a long time ago.

So let's summarize the facts. I am reared in a community of faith in which I am taught that Yahweh is God and he has the set of attributes attributed to him according to Christian doctrine. This may explain how I start believing, but why do I continue believing? The answer, in short, comes back to the fit with my daily experience. Time and again I have had these experiences which, according to my plausibility framework, strongly suggest that God (defined as the Christian God) is active in my life.

Now no doubt I (and the Christian tradition) have got some things wrong about God. For example, while I believe that God is triune, nobody in ancient Israel believed this, and yet many of those people were in intimate relationship with God. So it is very plausible that I have got some things wrong as well. But on the whole my experience suggests that if I (and my tradition) is wrong in certain matters about God's attributes, we are not fatally wrong any more than were those ancient Israelites.

Perhaps you think that that is not quite good enough. But this description of my belief about God is really no different from a person's description of their belief in the existence of an external world -- that is external to their subjective experience. How do they know they are not in a matrix? Perhaps the best answer is this: fit with their experience, day to day. And if that is good enough for the average Joe to know he's not in the matrix, it is good enough for me to know that Yahweh is God.