Not Every Door Leads Somewhere

By now we have a rough sketch of what must be true if the last six essays have been honest. Behind the world stands a Mind — rational, since the world is intelligible; good, since the moral law is real; and personal, since only a person lays down law and only a person could be the source of persons. And in front of that Mind stands us: awake, accountable, aching for what the world cannot give, and fractured by a wrong we cannot deny. Any worldview worth adopting must make room for all of that at once. Most cannot. This essay is about testing the doors.

I am writing especially to the reader who believes, as many now do, that all spiritual paths are really the same — different routes up the one mountain, and that it is arrogant to think any of them truer than another. It is a generous instinct. But it does not survive contact with what the paths actually claim, because they do not describe the same mountain. They cannot all be right, for they flatly contradict one another about the things that matter most: whether God is personal or impersonal, whether you are a creature or secretly divine, whether the evil in you is real or an illusion, whether death is a door or a wall. Sincerity is not the issue. You can be sincerely wrong about a mountain. The question is which account fits reality.

The door that dissolves you

One great family of belief — much of it drifting westward now as "spirituality" — says the ultimate reality is impersonal: a divine everything, a ground of being, an energy of which you are a spark. All is one; separateness is illusion; enlightenment is waking from the dream of being an individual self.

It is serene and, in its way, profound. But test it against what we have found. If the ultimate is impersonal, where did the moral law come from — for an "energy" issues no commands, and a force has no character to make cruelty wrong? If separateness is illusion, then so is love, which requires a lover and a beloved who are genuinely other. And if evil is illusion, then so is every atrocity, and the murderer and the murdered are, at the deepest level, the same reality doing nothing to itself. Whatever else this teaches, it cannot account for the moral law we established, nor for the fracture we admitted, nor for the weight of being a particular someone who really loves and is really guilty. To reach its peace it must call the most certain things — you, right and wrong, love — a mist. That is a steep price to pay for calm.

The door of the endless treadmill

A second family says the ultimate is personal, or at least that there is a moral order — and what it asks of you is performance. Keep the law, do the rituals, tip the scales of your deeds toward the good, and you may earn acceptance, a better rebirth, paradise. This is the intuitive religion of the human race, and in one sense the honest one, because it takes the moral law seriously.

But it runs straight onto the reef of the last essay. If the standard is real and I cannot keep it — and we saw that no one keeps even their own lower standard — then a religion of earning is a treadmill I am already losing on. It can tell me what I owe. It cannot tell me what to do about the debt I have already run up and go on adding to daily. At its most honest it offers effort and uncertainty: try harder, and hope it was enough. It has a diagnosis of the disease and a prescription I have already proven I cannot fill.

The door of the absent landlord

A third option keeps God but sends him away. There is a Maker — the arguments from the cosmos are strong — but he wound up the world and withdrew, a distant architect indifferent to the tenants. This deism is tidy. It fits the fine-tuning. It asks nothing.

And that is its failure. A God who is the source of the moral law cannot be morally indifferent; a goodness that lays down law yet never acts is a strange, half-hearted goodness. A God who makes beings that ache for him and then refuses all contact is crueller than no God at all. Deism honours the evidence of the Mind while ignoring the evidence of the conscience and the longing — the very things that make the Mind personal. It is a resting-place for people who find the Maker plausible but the meeting terrifying. It cannot last, because the God the evidence actually points to is not absent. He is implicated.

The door that was bricked up from the start

And then the option we have tested throughout: that there is no one there at all, only matter and chance. We have watched this door fail repeatedly — it cannot ground the moral law, cannot trust its own reason, cannot explain consciousness or the longing, cannot even call the fracture a fracture. It is the most confident worldview of our moment and the one that must deny the most in order to hold together. It does not answer our questions. It rules them out of order.

The shape of the surviving door

Cross off the impersonal, the treadmill, the absent, and the empty, and notice the shape of what remains. We are looking for a God who is personal and good — so the moral law has a source. Who is holy — so our fracture is a real offence and not a mist. Who is not distant but acts — so the longing has somewhere to go. And who does for us what we have proven we cannot do for ourselves — so the treadmill is replaced by a gift. A personal, holy God who steps into history to rescue people unable to rescue themselves. That is a very specific door. Remarkably, exactly one figure in the whole history of the world stands in front of it, claiming to be the way through — and it is time we looked at him directly.