The Truth Paradox: Why God is Real and Atheism Makes Sense

By Rob Sutherland

I had long believed in God, but I was never really sure. Atheism often made a compelling case.

Then I had an encounter that changed everything. This encounter revealed a simple but profound truth about who we are and why we are here. It opened my eyes to the meaning and purpose that permeate the universe, and led me to extraordinarily beautiful and meaningful mystical experiences that I could never have imagined.

"The Truth Paradox" reveals how I came to experience God as an undeniable reality, as distinct from a mental construct, and the reasons why atheism often makes a great deal of sense, but lacks some critical data–the data available to our Spiritual Heart.

In an honest search for truth this book asks some big questions and returns some startling conclusions. "The Truth Paradox" emphasizes that any one of us can have a deep experience of Divine connection, and tap into the joy, peace, and meaning that lie dormant within us.

"It was such a privilege for me to read The Truth Paradox. It is based on the author’s personal experience of discovering his own mystic heart ... Although it is clear from his lucid writing that Rob Sutherland has a powerful intellect, it is always in the service of heart."

From the Foreword by Bruce Sanguin

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rob Sutherland
• Release date: Nov 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311660435

Rob Sutherland

Writer and award-winning filmmaker Rob Sutherland has had a lifelong interest in spirituality and pursuing questions about the truth of existence. His debut feature film 'The Inside Story', a supernatural mystery, was released in 2003 and won the Australian Writers' Guild Award for Best Feature Film Screenplay. Rob is developing a range of fiction and non-fiction projects while working as a freelance writer, director, producer and editor. He lives with his wife and teenage sons in Melbourne, Australia. 'The Truth Paradox' is his first book.

Book preview

Foreword

by Bruce Sanguin

Liberal Christianity is in its death throes. Whether the church experiences resurrection depends on its willingness to embrace death, knowing that new life demands nothing less. This is never easy. What is required is a radical letting go, an emptying, and a period of time in the wilderness. There, in solitude and unknowing, the church may rediscover and reorient around the wisdom of the heart. It is our hearts that know God, not as an intellectual concept, but the true source of reality. Such is the claim of this book and its author. It’s a claim that I endorse.

It is a tenet and practice of evolutionary spirituality that the crisis is the birth. If the crisis deepens sufficiently the evolutionary pressure of creative tension may birth the new thing that Spirit is doing. The worst thing that the liberal church can do at this point is to rally a rescue team equipped with the latest and greatest church program. The most gracious thing it could do would be to do nothing. Isaiah heard the beckoning voice when he faced his own spiritual crisis in a mountain cave: Be still and know that I Am.

I have been a minister for almost thirty years and, for the past fifteen years, a keynote speaker across North America, Australia, and New Zealand. In these roles I have noticed an almost obsessive concern to attract younger generations, who are conspicuous by their absence.

In response, the liberal, or progressive church, has tried just about everything imaginable to be more relevant: small group ministry, serving lattes on Sunday morning before church begins; improved hospitality, changing church governance, implementing the latest stewardship program. Each of these has merit. But without rediscovering the spiritual heart, these are like shuffling the deck chairs on the titanic in an attempt to save the ship. That’s what I love about this book. There are no fancy new church programs offered to boost dwindling numbers, just a gentle reorientation in the heart.

Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner, describes well the futility of structural adjustments without a more fundamental interior or spiritual shift:

All the societal supports of religion are collapsing and dying out in this secularized and pluralistic society. If, nonetheless, there is to be real Christian spirituality, it cannot be kept alive and healthy by external helps, not even those which the Church offers, even of a sacramental kind… but only through an ultimate, immediate encounter of the individual with God.¹

It’s not that the younger generations aren’t interested in spirituality. There are yoga studios on every corner of my neighborhood; Vipassana meditation retreats are oversubscribed; sacred chant abounds; holotropic breathwork is making a comeback; training programs for shamans proliferate; there are waiting lists for hallucinogenic sacred plant medicine weekends. I could go on. If anything, there is more spiritual curiosity and experimentation than ever. The spirituality of my new-age neighborhood is characterized by a degree of intensity, intimacy, and immensity that I do not regularly see on display in liberal congregations. What this generation is seeking is the direct and immediate experience of God.

Rahner continues: The devout Christian of the future will either be a ‘mystic,’ one who has experienced ‘something,’ or he will cease to be anything at all. The ‘something’ he is referring to is a direct, or numinous, experience of that which has been traditionally named God.

The seminary that prepared me for ministry reflected the values and worldview of modernist rationalism–factual history over mythic superstition, materialist reductionism, and reason over faith. There was, quite rightly, an agenda to ensure that by the time the students were released into congregations we would know that the Bible wasn’t the literal word of God and that Jesus didn’t die for our sins. As well, the central tenets of philosophical postmodernism–that all truth arises in, as, and through context and perspective–were drilled into us. By the time I was done, I knew that there was no truth, there was only context and perspective. The so-called myth of the framework had replaced the traditionalist myth of the given. I was also, functionally, an atheist. But I didn’t know it.

My New Testament professor, whom I loved, would point to his head and beg his students to think. This was an absolutely necessary first step to help those of us who walked into classes like his steeped in fundamentalist Christianity. We were fed a steady diet of historical, biblical, and textual criticism. As well, we were taught to think deeply about the social issues of the day, the bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other, as Karl Barth recommended for pastors. All good and necessary.

However, nowhere on the curriculum could I find a course on prayer or meditation. For that I needed to take a walk down the block to the Roman Catholic seminary. Even here, the irony is that the courses were typically academic. Suffice it to say that I came out of seminary able to think better than when I went in. But I had virtually no devotional life. My intellect carried me for a while. Ten years to be exact. Then I burned out. I couldn’t bear to deliver one more sermon, which typically addressed the social justice issue of the week as determined by the media, without feeling any direct sense of connection with God. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only minister running on fumes.

The media in Canada is currently having a heyday with the story of a United Church of Canada minister who has declared herself to be an atheist and who intends to continue to be a minister in her congregation. She is a good, compassionate human being. But for her, God is not real.

This situation was inevitable in the liberal church. My colleague is an externalization of the interior condition of much (not all) of the liberal church, the endgame of a modern, rationalist worldview, dissociated from the mystic experience. It’s my contention that we have unconsciously adapted to scientific materialism–the dominant ideology of our age. This ideology reduces all of reality to matter. Life and the emergence of consciousness, according to this worldview, has been a happy accident. We have not been careful enough, in the liberal church, to distinguish between the scientific method, which has its usefulness, and scientism, which is science that proceeds on the ideological assumption of materialism. This fine woman is functioning as a mirror or an icon for the liberal church, reflecting back to us what happens when God becomes an arbitrary concept that is no longer required.

That is why it was such a privilege for me to read The Truth Paradox. It is based on the author’s personal experience of discovering his own mystic heart. It is in many ways the story of a liberal Christian making the transformative journey from the head to the heart. Although it is clear from his lucid writing that Rob Sutherland has a powerful intellect, it is always in the service of heart.

It is a mistake to separate the heart and the mind, for the heart has a mind of its own. But it’s not an abstracted mind. It is a connected mind–connected both to the affairs of Earth, and to what the ancients called the heavens, the subtle realm of the spiritual.

The heart’s mind knows the world, and God, through what sociologist, Jean Gebser, calls verition. Whereas mere mentality can construct or deconstruct any kind of reality at will, the heart knows. It sees through, diaphanously, into the ever-present Origin that animates worlds. This is more akin to clairvoyance (clear seeing) than rational deduction. It is the knowing of the mystic. At the end of his life, the Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung, wrote that he didn’t believe in God. He knew God. Jung enjoyed a formidable intellect, but in the end what mattered to him was this quality of verition, of knowing the truth that is available through the heart.

My own writings were a response to my own mystic experience that the evolutionary process itself is the overflowing and unfolding of love in space and time–the wisdom and heart of the divine incarnating in a way that has eventuated in humans, capable of consciously becoming aware that we, like the rest of creation, are love incarnate. My heart tells me