Every prayer, every confession of faith or fault is a dynamic of the present striving to create a better, a richer, a more healthful future. Do they have consequence, do they have power, do they have ability to create change, even a change of course? I say Yes. Our every step forward is a matter of belief and hope, and therefore love, that tomorrow, that the next moment is and will be worth it, that we are not clogs in an unmovable system, but that we have power to change events, change hearts, change ideas, change reality because we are a part (in religion’s term “a child”) of the creative power (in religion’s term “God”) out of which and in which all is now and evermore.
Is there an endurance of personality beyond death? Are there ghosts, spirits, saints, demons? What rests beyond our moment of death is and always must be a mystery, an unanswerable question for both philosophy and religion. Religions may provide narratives about an after-life to enhance the value and meaning systems of this life, but beyond the poetry of their visions they can offer no certainty, only inspiration meant to vivify and enhance this life. St. Paul dismisses the question when it is put to him. He preaches about a seed trying to comprehend what comes after it falls to the ground. How can the seed imagine the experience of germination, of becoming or being a plant?
Aristotle and many of his philosophical disciples posited a sort of universal mind in which all rationality is rooted, with this aspect of intelligence having an endurance beyond any and all individuality. Some of his Christian followers were pressed to get around this important aspect of his epistemological theory and hold to their religion’s vision of individual immortality. Some, not quite at the point of being able to differentiate between the speculative nature of philosophy and the visionary poetics of spirituality, proposed a system of two truths standing side by side. Personal immortality remains a problematic issue for any form of “realist” philosophy, any system grounded in empiric evidence. It is less so for “idealist” systems grounded in the primacy of spirit or mind, but then in them the value of this fleeting world stands on sand. It seems philosophy has perennial difficulty straddling heaven and earth simultaneously.
Personal immortality is a tenant of certain religions, a vision of what ultimately individual life means. Some religions hold reincarnation and envision an ultimate escape out of individuality. If eternality is envisioned as a falling into the arms of the eternal creator enraptured in love, could not one expect that to entail a melting away into the sheer creativity of the eternal one? But then could not one argue the value of the individual would be treasured and somehow preserved? Religions in the west have usually gone the route of supporting individual preservation, in the east they have gone toward a dissolution into the divine-creative power. Both are visions about the value of life, and neither is a disparaging of life. They all speak about responsibility for life and transcending the limitations of human effort.
Philosophy can provide no answer. Religions exist to provide visions to encourage healthful existence, to cheer us on. Philosophy can speculate on experience with a certain academic air, it can formulate ideas based on personal experience and the work of science, but it can, like religion, offer no more than edifying vision. But if moments of time endure beyond our passing consciousness of them, is there not here some basis for our experience of Aristotle’s universal active mind, of ghosts, spirits, saints, heaven, hell? If we are all ever tied together in all that has ever happened, can it be we sometime can awake to some distant or subtle thread of this fabric of history and see, feel, comprehend, be seized by something beyond the ordinary flow of smell and touch and vision and thought? How do we with some intellectual legitimacy reconcile in speculative thought extraordinary experiences without resorting to the affirmations offered (validly in its field and context) by religion as moral visions?
Do I believe in God? Let me rephrase the question because every word in your question is laden with hidden meanings and passion. Do I trust that there is that greater than anything I can grasp with my mind? Yes, I do. Do I trust that expressing that in-expressibility as some power–creative and loving– will help move me toward becoming a power creative and loving, do I trust setting the mask of perfection on “the beyond all-is all-within all” will inspire (literally “spirit fill”) me to rise up to live an integrated, wholesome (“holy”) life? Yes, I do. Philosophy, with its branches of metaphysics, theology, epistemology and ethics, has the intellectual task of supplying theories to circumnavigate that radical trust in living a good life, religion has the emotive and psychological task of creating the narratives, the arts to reinforce that trust.
All theology, all religion is not about a god, but about man, man seeking meaning, seeking answers, the ultimate meanings and values of life. “God” is the face, the mask we place over our highest and deepest hopes. Are our deepest hopes real? Are our deepest hopes something greater than the sum of their parts? Are our deepest hopes beyond us in source and end, in definition, in expression? I trust they are. And so I can and do—truthfully, ritually, realistically–sing “O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come”.