The Existence of Invisible Things

Immortal, invisible, God only wise,
In light inaccessible hid from our eyes,
Most blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days,
Almighty, victorious, Thy great name we praise.

To all life Thou givest, to both great and small;
In all life Thou livest, the true life of all;
We blossom and flourish as leaves on the tree,
And wither and perish, but nought changeth Thee.

Great Father of Glory, pure Father of Light
Thine angels adore Thee, all veiling their sight;
All laud we would render, O help us to see:
’Tis only the splendor of light hideth Thee.

Walter C. Smith (1824-1908)

There are invisible things. They exist in truth. They are real, indeed, more real than what we see. This is a deep subject to which I am sure I will return often. God is only one of these invisible things that is more real than what we see. Time, eternity, the past, the future, history, faith, hope, love and life itself are among the other invisible things that are more real than what we presently see–and they are only a very short, partial list of those things. Nevertheless, our modern Western culture has almost completely abandoned its belief in invisible things–in even the possibility that anything we cannot, at least theoretically, see, measure and manipulate–can have any kind of real existence. All such things are routinely dismissed as “imaginary,” and belief in them except by young children is regarded as an hallucination or a delusion, evidence of a mental illness. The consequences of this abandonment of the invisible are drastic, as I will explain below.

In speaking of invisible things, Jacques Ellul’s distinction between “Truth” and (visible) “reality” will come in useful:

Reality is what is seen, counted, and quantified, and is located in space.  But reality is at the same time what is definite. This corresponds clearly to the visual universe. The indefinite is the domain of the word.  Thus, the visual universe is clearly noncontradictory. You can say that a piece of paper is both red and blue.  But you cannot see it as both red and blue at the same time.  It is either one or the other.  The famous principle of noncontradiction is based on the visual experience of the world, just as the principle of identity is.  Declaring that two opinions cannot both be true, when one denies what the other affirms, has to do with vision, which involves instantaneousness.  But language involves duration.  Consequently, what is visible cannot be dialectical.  Knowledge based on sight is of necessity linear and logical.  Only thought based on language can be dialectical, taking into account contradictory aspects of reality. This is basic for understanding the opposition between the two methods of thought… But this distinction also teaches us that language grants us access to knowledge of a plurality of aspects in a reality that sight cannot grasp. In other words, truth includes reality and permits a deeper knowledge of reality.  But this knowledge is not based on evidence or immediacy…

Now let us try to confront seeing and hearing. Their main antithesis concerns, as we have seen, the distinction between Space and Time, on the one hand, and Reality and Truth on the other. Our civilization’s major temptation… is to confuse reality with truth. We are made to believe that reality is truth: the only truth. At the time of the controversy over universals, the realists believed that only truth is real. We have inverted the terms, believing that everything is limited to reality.

We think that truth is contained within reality and expressed by it. Nothing more. Moreover, there is nothing left beyond reality any more. Nothing is Other; the Wholly Other no longer exists. Everything is reduced to this verifiable reality which is scientifically measurable and pragmatically modifiable. Praxis becomes the measure of all truth. Truth becomes limited to something that falls short of real truth. It is something that can be acted upon.

Jacques Ellul (J.M. Hanks, Tr.), The Humiliation of the Word, 10, 27-28

Various writers have called what Ellul calls the realm of Truth different things– for example, ultimate reality, or the reality behind reality. And various allegorical and metaphorical pictures of it have been proposed. The oldest of these is Plato’s cave allegory, which seems, in its simplest interpretation, to suggest that what we see as reality is merely shadows of a true reality we cannot see. In Plato’s allegory, true reality is pictured as above and behind its viewers, outside the dark cave to which they are are confined. All they are permitted to see is the shadows of things that happen outside the cave, projected on the back wall of the cave. Knowing nothing else as reality, the viewers attribute reality to these shadows, and even attribute the sounds and voices they hear behind them to these shadows.

However, Plato’s allegorical picture, in its simplest interpretation, is also extremely pessimistic–the viewers, who seem to represent all people (or, possibly, all people who have not been liberated by pure devotion to philosophy), are said to be prisoners, chained so they cannot move their heads to look at anything but the cave wall in front of them. They cannot ever see anything but shadows. Moreover, Plato’s Socrates character notes that, even if they were freed, and turned around to look at the mouth of the cave, they would be so used to the darkness that the light would hurt their eyes, and they would still not see clearly. See, Plato, The Republic, VII 514a-517a

Whether belief in invisible things requires one to adopt some version of the Platonic doctrine of Forms is something I will discuss in later blog posts. I do not think so, but, for now, I will use Plato’s cave as an illustration of what an underlying reality invisible to us might mean.

C.S. Lewis gives a much more optimistic allegorical picture of what is meant by the realm of Truth, the reality beyond reality, in The Last Battle, the final book in his Chronicles of Narnia. The novel portrays the end of the world of Narnia–and also the end of our own world, which is linked to Narnia in the lives of its heroes, child-monarchs of Narnia and some of their friends and relatives, all from England. At the very end of Narnia, an impostor, an ape, with the aid of human foreigners who wish to rule Narnia, attempts to enforce his rule by casting those who continue to claim allegiance to Aslan the Lion, the true King, through a door into what looks, on the outside, like a dilapidated shed. Earlier, the impostor had stationed a donkey wearing a lion skin disguise inside the shed, and had him come out to announce that he was Aslan. The impostor repeatedly told the crowd that Aslan awaited them inside the shed and would devour them as their final punishment for disobedience if they forced him to have them cast into the shed.

What no one outside the shed realized–indeed, what even the true subjects of Aslan did not realize, until they were thrown into the shed–is that Aslan really was in the shed, which was the entryway to Aslan’s country beyond all of the present worlds. When Aslan finally tells one of the heroes, King Peter, to shut the door on Narnia, Narnia–and our world–are no more. But then, and only then, the children can finally see Aslan’s country, the “true Narnia,” the reality behind reality, all around them, and see that it includes parts that are like England where they see their relatives and friends also coming into Aslan’s country. So the “true Narnia” is the real world above and behind all of the previous shadow worlds. And they also begin to perceive that Aslan’s country is limitless, and that it had always surrounded them (though they did not previously see it). The difference between visible Narnia throughout the series and the “true Narnia” seen only at the end is a wonderful allegorical picture of the difference between reality–the realm of present sight–and the realm of Truth–the true reality behind what we see.

The Bible calls this reality behind what we can see several things, One of these names, as we have already seen, is the “Kingdom of the Heavens,” which is above and behind our world, but also surrounds us in the lowest, first, atmospheric heaven (though we do not see it). Another very descriptive term is the “the things which are not seen,” which are our strength in our affliction:

Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day.  For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.

2 Corinthians 4:16-18

So considering the unseen things produces contradictions, in this world. Contradictions should drive us to seek God to provide answers. What we see, with our normal physical sight, in our present shadow world, is that our body is decaying. Indeed, from all we can see, everything in this world, everything in this physical universe, is decaying. Decay is what we see with our eyes. And decay is, ultimately, all that our best science sees–even the most stable atoms, and the fundamental particles composing them, are unstable–the decay of some of them may take billions of years, but they are all slowly falling apart. The universe is physically expanding, and will ultimately reach one of two ends: either it will continue to expand until it can no longer hold together, or it will continue to expand until gravity overcomes the forces pushing it apart, and will ultimately collapse on itself in one of several possible kinds of a “big crunch” or “reverse big bang.” The Second Law of Thermodynamics also agrees with this assessment, stating that an “isolated” or “closed” system always evolves toward thermodynamic equilibrium, which is the state of maximum possible entropy (disorder).

Thus, on the assumption that the visible or theoretically observable physical universe is a closed system–that nothing exists outside of it that could put energy into it to maintain its orderliness–everything we can see agrees with the Apostle Paul’s statement that the things which are seen are “temporal”–they exist only in time and for a limited time. They are decaying.

But the physical universe is not a closed system. There are unseen things both inside and outside it. These unseen things are eternal–they exist outside of and above physical time, and are not decaying. The very first of these unseen, eternal things is God:

Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.

1 Timothy 1:17 (NASB)

This verse shows not only that God is an invisible reality, it also states that he is eternal and immortal, thus identifying two other invisible realities–time and life. These will be discussed in the next post.

Now, however, I will discuss God as an eternal, invisible God underlying all visible reality. If God is God, he must underlie all reality. It cannot be otherwise. He simply exists. As I have previously discussed at some length on the webpage “God is,” on another site, God exists in himself–nothing else existed before him or caused him to exist.

When Moses asked God what his name is, so that he could identify God for the Israelites, God’s answer was “I am that I am,” and then further told him to say “‘I am’ has sent me to you.” God then declared this name to be his “name forever” and his “memorial” to “all generations.” Exodus 3:13-15. As various sources, including Wikipedia’s article on this name of God, point out, the verb form used (generally transliterated ‘ehyeh) is not tensed. (Indeed Hebrew verb forms in general have no distinctions that correspond directly to the time-related verb tenses of Indo-European languages like English). Thus, the most widely accepted Jewish translation of God’s name in English is “I will be what I will be.”

But even this translation does not get around the observation that the name indicates God exists in himself. He is what he is, entirely from himself, and whatever he is becoming, he is becoming entirely from his own being. When Jesus applied this name of God to himself, saying “before Abraham came into existence I am”–and was nearly stoned for it (demonstrating that his hearers understood what he was saying)–the translation of his reference to God’s name used a Greek present tense verb (eimi). John 8:56-59. A future tense reading would not make any sense in this context. Further, when Jesus quoted this name of God in explaining the resurrection, the translation once again used the same Greek present tense verb (eimi), and Jesus went to some pains to point out that God presently is the God of the (as we presently see time) deceased Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Matthew 22:31-32. Again, in this context, a future tense reading would make no sense.

So we have an invisible God who is self-existent. Nothing else is self-existent. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Genesis 1:1. We are told repeatedly that God is the Creator of all things, that nothing exists without him. See, for example, John 1:1-3; Isaiah 43:10-13; Revelation 4:11. All humans are his creation, even the great ones who esteem themselves gods. Proverbs 22:2; Psalm 82:6-7. There is no such thing as a “self-made man.” Even the other invisible things–all of them–were created by him. Ephesians 1:15-17.

Thus, while God simply exists, all other things depend on him–whether they acknowledge him or not, God is their provider. The creation and everything in it is continually held together by God, through his word. Colossians 1:17. God, in the person of his Son, upholds all things through the word of his power. Hebrews 1:2-3. So, if God did not remain active in his Creation, everything would fall apart. It is in this invisible God, who created everything, that we presently live, and move, and exist. Acts 17:24-28. So if he withdrew, we would no longer exist. And the scriptures repeatedly stress that everything we have, God provided. See, for example, John 3:27; 1 Timothy 4:3-5; Genesis 1:26-30; James 1:16-18; Acts 14:15-17; Acts 17:24-26.

This God, who created everything and gives us everything, is the first thing of which we lose sight when we declare that only visible things exist. Our unbelief does not cause God to cease to exist. Rather, its only direct effect is to cut us off from the ability to trust him as our provider. But, having done this, we begin to lose sight of a host of other invisible things, as will be discussed in the next post.