Is god real? Funny you ask that because that was the very question I asked the late Fr. Barry John (originally shanballymore) 25 years ago. He was a man of wisdom so I’ll try and explain to you what he told me:
If you take 10 people who believe in gravity and 10 people who don’t, line them up on the roof of a tall building, and push them over, guess what will happen: all 20 will plunge to their deaths. Their belief and disbelief won’t matter. This means that gravity is an objective reality. It had the same effects before people knew it existed as it has now that it’s been defined and quantified.
If you take 10 flat earth believers and 10 people who think the earth is round and take them on a space shuttle ride, guess what will happen: all 20 will see a round blue ball out of the space shuttle porthole. Again, objective reality. I don’t need to go to space to test this (though I really wouldn’t mind) - enough people have gone to space and come back with visual evidence, again, always with the same results. Not one person has gone up in space and come back to say they still think the earth is flat.
But if you take 10 atheists and 10 people who believe in god (we’ll leave the question of which god out of the discussion for the moment), you can devise any test of the existence of god you can think of, guess what will happen: those 20 people will walk away with 25 different experiences. The 10 religious people will start arguing with each other about whose interpretation is correct, and the atheists will just laugh at them. Which makes faith, religion, god, whatever you want to call it, A SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE.
There is no objective reality of god, because objective reality works the same for everyone regardless of what they believe, and god obviously doesn’t.
