The Argument for God from Body Language
The visible reveals the invisible when you recognize the symbolic nature of reality.
You see the following image of a person smiling.
What do you infer that she is feeling? That she is happy.
You believe that her inner experience at that moment contains this thing called “happiness”, which you yourself have experienced. Although you might not have experienced “happiness” in exactly the same way as her, you are confident enough that you “know” the feeling that she os feeling beyond some threshold of merely subjective interpretation.
Or at the very least if you’re scared to commit to calling what you see on this image as “feeling happy”, you might be comfortable confidently asserting, “She’s definitely not feeling sad!”
Yes?
There’s a real thing happening beneath the surface, even though you can’t see that thing directly.
The inner experience is invisible, but the external features of the face reveal it, like a symbolic doorway connecting the inner world to the external world.
You see the crinkling around the eyes, the lifting of the cheeks, the full display of teeth, corners of the mouth stretching wide… but you don’t see the “happy”. And yet you know the “happy” is there.
Have you read any books or watched any videos on body language?
Perhaps you believe that you can tell when someone is feeling anxious versus when someone is feeling confident. You might even consider yourself astute in being able to spot deception, to tell when someone might be lying to you.
In other words, you believe that external, readily accessible sensory data (e.g. the expressions you see, the tone of voice you hear, etc.) can serve as reliable signs or symbols for transmitting to you information about data that you can’t access readily with your senses (e.g. a feeling someone is experiencing).
You believe that the effects you see on the outside have a cause you can’t see on the inside.
Now, get ready for the big bridge… which, at this point, I’m sure you can feel coming with full anticipation.
Reality is the Body Language of God
You can see everything that exists and “know” that it points to something else.
In the same way that a frown points to sadness or an increased and shallower pace of breathing points to stress, the experience of a celebrated joy of togetherness occurring over a meal with loved ones, points to God.
The phenomenon of feeling obsessed with the pursuit of truth and how it pulls you into a deeper and deeper journey (which, I venture to assume, is why you are here reading this), points to God.
The overwhelming sense of delight you encounter when witnessing an artifact of intricately ordered beauty, points to God.
The functional ecosystemic coherence and irreducible complexity found in the natural world, points to God.
When you contemplate these these things, each reveals to you that it is a sub-part. participating within a greater whole. Those little nuggets of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty you encounter within the units of existence in life, inherit their substance top-down from a fuller, superabundant whole, rather than bubbling these things up out from the bottom of nothingness.
Everything is relational. Everything points to another thing. Nothing exists in isolation.
Reality is like a web of balls… it’s a mistake to think you can take one of the balls, clip the connective threads holding it in place, and remove it from the webbed matrix of balls without killing that ball and destroying its identity.
The modern philosophical error comes down to doing exactly this. We have been trained and programmed to think in terms of the atomization of the parts of reality, and worstly, the atomization of the self.
The disconnection of the sign from the thing being signified is what has stripped people from their sense of purpose, meaning, and ultimate fulfillment which can only come from God.
There is a symbolic nature to all of reality. Things point to other things. The apparent thing reveals the thing that is more hidden.
We know this very clearly with something like body language. I can see visible manifestations—“signs” and “symbols”—on a person’s body (body language). These signs point to something hidden: their internal state.
I can never “prove” their internal state… but I do know it’s happening. At least something is.
Before you are tempted to write this off as mere “analogy”, consider that the deepest parts of reality are in fact only knowable through analogical participation, as opposed to reducible discursive operations of the intellect.
As humans have body language that reveals the structure of inner reality, reality itself has a “body language” that reveals the structure of God.
