The Evidence We Don’t Want


There’s a comforting idea that most of us carry around, especially those of us who like arguments.

If people only knew.

If they could see the evidence. If the facts were undeniable. If God would tear open the sky for five minutes, settle the matter, and then let everybody get on with things.

Surely then we’d believe.

Bertrand Russell once imagined the question being put to him from the other side of death: Why hadn’t he believed? His reported answer was essentially a complaint to God: Why didn’t you give me better evidence?

It’s a formidable question, and not a foolish one. If God wants to be known, why remain hidden enough to be doubted?

Laurence Cosse’s A Corner of the Veil doesn’t so much answer Russell as disturb the assumption beneath the question. What if better evidence came? What if God’s existence ceased to be a matter of probability or argument? What if the veil were pulled aside just far enough that disbelief became intellectually impossible?

Would we actually become different people?

Cosse’s great disturbance isn’t simply the possibility that God might be proved. It’s the darker possibility that proof might not accomplish what we imagine it would.

The problem's never been only the evidence.

There’s also the heart.

Jesus says something terrible about this in the story of the rich man and Lazarus. The rich man begs Abraham to send Lazarus back from the dead to warn his brothers. Give them something undeniable. A dead man walking through the front door ought to settle things.

Abraham answers:

“If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.”
— Luke 16:31

It’s an astonishing sentence because Christianity itself stands on a man rising from the dead.

And still Jesus says: that may not be enough.

We tend to imagine unbelief as a problem of insufficient information. Sometimes it is. There are people who’ve been taught badly, wounded by Christians, handed caricatures of God, or simply never given serious reasons to believe. Arguments matter. Evidence matters. Truth matters.

Russell’s question deserves that much respect.

But there’s another kind of unbelief.

It understands perfectly well.

It simply doesn’t want the truth to be true.

Because truth, if it’s really truth, rarely remains politely on the page. It enters the room. It rearranges the furniture. It opens drawers we’d rather leave shut.

If God exists, then certain questions stop being theoretical.

Whom have I refused to forgive?
What am I doing with my money?
What have I made excuses for?
Who owns my body?
What does love require of me?
What will I have to surrender?

A man can spend years saying he wants proof when what he really wants is permission.

Permission to remain himself.

The frightening thing about certainty is that certainty may leave the will untouched. A person can stand before the truth and resent it precisely because he can no longer dismiss it.

We’ve all experienced smaller versions of this.

Someone tells us something about ourselves we know is true, and within seconds we’re explaining why it isn’t.

You’re drinking too much.
You’re cruel when you’re frightened.
You’ve made work more important than your children.
You’re still angry with your father.
You don’t want reconciliation. You want vindication.

Sometimes the sentence lands with the peculiar violence of recognition. For half a second there’s nothing to say.

Then the machinery starts.

Context. Qualifications. Counterexamples. Other people’s failures. Childhood. Stress. Intentions.

The mind is wonderfully talented when hired by the will.

And so a person may possess the truth without allowing the truth to possess him.

That’s the deeper terror behind Cosse’s premise. Even if the veil were pulled aside, even if the great metaphysical question were answered beyond reasonable dispute, the essential drama of human freedom would remain.

We could still say no.

Perhaps that’s why God’s apparent hiddenness can’t be understood simply as the withholding of information. God isn’t trying to win a courtroom case.

He wants something stranger and far more dangerous.

Love.

And love can’t be compelled by evidence.

Evidence can tell a man that his wife's been faithful to him. It can’t make him love her.

A laboratory can establish paternity. It can’t make a father get out of bed when the baby cries.

A wedding certificate can prove that two people are married. It can’t make either of them stay when staying becomes costly.

Certainty can establish what is.

Love answers what shall I do about it?

Faith lives somewhere inside that answer.

This doesn’t mean faith is irrational. Christianity has never required us to admire ignorance. The disciples touched Christ. Thomas put his hand near the wound. Paul argued in synagogues. The Church has spent two thousand years thinking, disputing, defining, studying, and occasionally becoming far too pleased with itself for doing so.

But arguments can bring a man to the door.

They can’t make him walk through it.

There’s always that final, almost invisible movement of the heart.

Yes.

Or no.

And the no doesn’t usually sound like no.

It sounds reasonable.

Not yet.
I need more time.
There are unanswered questions.
Christians are hypocrites.
The Church has done terrible things.
My circumstances are complicated.
I’m not ready.

Some of these statements may be completely true.

That’s what makes resistance so difficult to recognize. We don’t usually defend ourselves with obvious lies. We defend ourselves with truths arranged carefully around the one truth we’ve decided not to face.

The rich man in Jesus’ parable believes a miracle would solve everything.

Send Lazarus.

Let the dead man appear at breakfast.

Let his brothers hear the impossible knock at the door and see the grave dirt still on his clothes.

Then they’ll change.

Abraham says they may not.

Because conversion isn’t what happens when the intellect runs out of objections.

Sometimes conversion begins when a person stops using objections to protect the life he’s unwilling to surrender.

And this is where the matter becomes uncomfortable for believers too.

We can know that God exists and still keep Him at a manageable distance.

We can recite the Creed while preserving whole provinces of the heart under private ownership.

We can believe in forgiveness and nurse the grievance.
Believe in Providence and live terrified.
Believe in eternal life and organize everything around avoiding loss.
Believe Christ is present in the Eucharist and glance at our watches.

Certainty isn’t conversion.

Even orthodoxy isn’t conversion.

The devils, James tells us, believe.

They know more theology than most of us.

What they can’t do is adore.

Perhaps the veil remains partly drawn not because God fears being discovered, but because revelation's always been an invitation rather than an invasion.

Christ rises from the dead.

The stone is moved.

The tomb is empty.

And still, somewhere in the world, a man stands before the evidence constructing an explanation that will allow him to go home unchanged.

Another asks why God didn’t give him better evidence.

Meanwhile another man, with less certainty and more fear, whispers a prayer he isn’t even sure anyone hears.

One of them knows.

The other's begun to surrender.

And perhaps heaven is nearer to the second man than either of them realizes.

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