Dialogue on the Christian Religion
I wrote this to myself a while ago and thought I would share it with you guys on the new forum.
Non-believer: It is claimed through revelation that God created the world, and from nothing I might add, an absurd, self-contradictory notion but one I must ignore for now. Either God created the world because he had to or he created the world freely on a whim. Which is it?
Believer: God could not have created the world because he had to, for this would mean that he is determined by whatever caused him to create the world, which in turn means that something other than God is co-eternal with him and that he is not free to act. I say God alone created the world and that he did so freely.
Non-believer: If he created the world freely, then he could have created a world other than the one he did, could he not?
Believer: He could have.
Non-believer: Then he could have created a world without the existence of evil, suffering, and death, could he not?
Believer: He could have, but you must know that evil does not really exist; it is merely the absence or privation of the good, which is God. Augustine speaks eloquently on this. In any case, evil, suffering, and death are consequences of human action and the devil, not of God.
Non-believer: I would be willing to grant this, except that it would surely be possible for God to have created humans, not to mention angels, without the ability to sin and do evil in the first place.
Believer: Yes, but that would deny them their freedom.
Non-believer: This assumes humans are indeed free! But never mind that for now; freedom is already denied if, in being created by God, humans have no choice in being born.
Believer: Perhaps, but God has a plan for his creation. A New Earth will be created after evil, suffering, and death are vanquished.
Non-believer: Ah, that sounds like the admission of a botched job to me! Nor does the end justify the means. God needn't have created anything at all and thus needn't have anything to save. Once again we are faced with the question of necessity. Did God create the world in order to save it, or could he have created the world and not have saved it?
Believer: It must be the latter. God freely chose to save the world. Although one might say that love compelled him to save it, for God is nothing but love, as 1 John says. Love requires both a lover and a beloved. Hence, Christ, as the beloved of the Father, compelled him to save the world and so acted freely, but also in accordance with his nature.
Non-believer: Alright, but why does God tarry in accomplishing this final deliverance?
Believer: I cannot tell you in truth, for that is known only to God.
Non-believer: I see you are parroting God's response to Job when he asked similar impertinent questions! Well, then, it comes to this, that there is and can be no answer to the problem of evil as we have been discussing it. How convenient!
Believer: Hardly! Is it not supremely arrogant to assume you know more than God? Are you so rarely wrong in your words and deeds that you are confident of not being wrong or simply ignorant in the present case?
Non-believer: That may be so, but then I am only exercising the fallible organs God gave me. The cause of a cause is the cause of its effect. If the windows with which I have been given to see God are opaque and created as such, then it should be no great surprise that I and many other people do not see him or mistake him for smudges on the surface of the pane. You are asking that we believe God is on the other side of the glass and that, if we squint a certain way I suppose, we might catch a glimpse of him. How silly! For all you and I know, we are staring right into a yawning abyss without knowing it, one visible finally in death when the glass shatters!
Believer: Ha! You merely repeat yourself, only this time by means of a fanciful conceit. Did you ever consider that God too has suffered? This is the meaning of the Incarnation. I cannot solve the problem of evil, but if God knows our suffering, then surely we have grounds for hoping that it will one day be amended. Not only that, but have you considered that God himself might be ignorant? For if God knows all things, and God himself is not a thing, then neither we nor God know what he truly is.
Non-believer: My venture into extended metaphor is surely more excusable than your venture into obscurantism here!
Believer: Let me explain, then. God is not a thing, not an object or a being, not an item within a genus or species. God is wholly other, the revealed name of the ineffable. He must be or else grace could not be a gift. No object within the world has the power to grant deliverance from the world. That requires something over and against the world.
Non-believer: I sense the convenience of such a claim already. God is a name for the ineffable? Well well, seeing as I cannot, by definition, deny that which cannot be defined in the first place, then I suppose I must concede defeat. But what sort of defeat is this? It is a long way from the grudging admission that God is a cipher for the ineffable to encountering him personally or joining your local congregation. No road has yet been like that of Paul's on his way to Damascus for me, and for most people.
Believer: Indeed, but that is perhaps for another time.
Non-believer: It is claimed through revelation that God created the world, and from nothing I might add, an absurd, self-contradictory notion but one I must ignore for now. Either God created the world because he had to or he created the world freely on a whim. Which is it?
Believer: God could not have created the world because he had to, for this would mean that he is determined by whatever caused him to create the world, which in turn means that something other than God is co-eternal with him and that he is not free to act. I say God alone created the world and that he did so freely.
Non-believer: If he created the world freely, then he could have created a world other than the one he did, could he not?
Believer: He could have.
Non-believer: Then he could have created a world without the existence of evil, suffering, and death, could he not?
Believer: He could have, but you must know that evil does not really exist; it is merely the absence or privation of the good, which is God. Augustine speaks eloquently on this. In any case, evil, suffering, and death are consequences of human action and the devil, not of God.
Non-believer: I would be willing to grant this, except that it would surely be possible for God to have created humans, not to mention angels, without the ability to sin and do evil in the first place.
Believer: Yes, but that would deny them their freedom.
Non-believer: This assumes humans are indeed free! But never mind that for now; freedom is already denied if, in being created by God, humans have no choice in being born.
Believer: Perhaps, but God has a plan for his creation. A New Earth will be created after evil, suffering, and death are vanquished.
Non-believer: Ah, that sounds like the admission of a botched job to me! Nor does the end justify the means. God needn't have created anything at all and thus needn't have anything to save. Once again we are faced with the question of necessity. Did God create the world in order to save it, or could he have created the world and not have saved it?
Believer: It must be the latter. God freely chose to save the world. Although one might say that love compelled him to save it, for God is nothing but love, as 1 John says. Love requires both a lover and a beloved. Hence, Christ, as the beloved of the Father, compelled him to save the world and so acted freely, but also in accordance with his nature.
Non-believer: Alright, but why does God tarry in accomplishing this final deliverance?
Believer: I cannot tell you in truth, for that is known only to God.
Non-believer: I see you are parroting God's response to Job when he asked similar impertinent questions! Well, then, it comes to this, that there is and can be no answer to the problem of evil as we have been discussing it. How convenient!
Believer: Hardly! Is it not supremely arrogant to assume you know more than God? Are you so rarely wrong in your words and deeds that you are confident of not being wrong or simply ignorant in the present case?
Non-believer: That may be so, but then I am only exercising the fallible organs God gave me. The cause of a cause is the cause of its effect. If the windows with which I have been given to see God are opaque and created as such, then it should be no great surprise that I and many other people do not see him or mistake him for smudges on the surface of the pane. You are asking that we believe God is on the other side of the glass and that, if we squint a certain way I suppose, we might catch a glimpse of him. How silly! For all you and I know, we are staring right into a yawning abyss without knowing it, one visible finally in death when the glass shatters!
Believer: Ha! You merely repeat yourself, only this time by means of a fanciful conceit. Did you ever consider that God too has suffered? This is the meaning of the Incarnation. I cannot solve the problem of evil, but if God knows our suffering, then surely we have grounds for hoping that it will one day be amended. Not only that, but have you considered that God himself might be ignorant? For if God knows all things, and God himself is not a thing, then neither we nor God know what he truly is.
Non-believer: My venture into extended metaphor is surely more excusable than your venture into obscurantism here!
Believer: Let me explain, then. God is not a thing, not an object or a being, not an item within a genus or species. God is wholly other, the revealed name of the ineffable. He must be or else grace could not be a gift. No object within the world has the power to grant deliverance from the world. That requires something over and against the world.
Non-believer: I sense the convenience of such a claim already. God is a name for the ineffable? Well well, seeing as I cannot, by definition, deny that which cannot be defined in the first place, then I suppose I must concede defeat. But what sort of defeat is this? It is a long way from the grudging admission that God is a cipher for the ineffable to encountering him personally or joining your local congregation. No road has yet been like that of Paul's on his way to Damascus for me, and for most people.
Believer: Indeed, but that is perhaps for another time.
Comments (51)
@Thorongil "It is a long way from the grudging admission that God is a cipher for the ineffable to encountering him personally or joining your local congregation. No road has yet been like that of Paul's on his way to Damascus for me, and for most people."
What route do you think would lead to god? (You don't have to have a 'road to Damascus' experience.)
The road to Damascus experience is primarily a criterion for joining an organized religion for me. Absent it, I will not in good conscience join one. I'm unsure about it as a criterion for experiencing God.
The quotations are from Kierkegaard and William James, two sources I recommend you should read if you haven't already:
1. Works of Love by Kierkegaard (https://www.scribd.com/doc/239527503/Soren-Kierkegaard-Works-of-Love)
2. The Will to Believe (essay) by William James (http://educ.jmu.edu//~omearawm/ph101willtobelieve.html)
You should do yourself a favor and look those both up.
If you're an atheist, then you must believe that man wrote the Bible anyway... so, it's bound to be full of contradictions. Are you familiar with the concept of universal reconciliation? It looks like the best form of Christianity to me.
If I were a Christian atheist, what I would most likely tell myself is that man came up with a pretty cool story about a God who found a way to reconcile man to Himself, even though the solution caused God great pain. It posits that there is a God who loves the poor and disenfranchised, and He is so gracious that He lets the rain fall on the righteous and unrighteous.
It is just a story, so it has some problems... but, it's mostly about a God who loves and forgives, and who shows us how to love and forgive.
Anything in the universe is a being in the sense that it has mass, energy, etc. God on the other hand is not a being, but also not an undefined something. He is simply the openness, the possibility of there being anything at all, independantly from beliefs, we know that God exists because there has to be something that makes possible the existance of every single object.
The biggest implication is that God is omnipresent, which is repeatedly in many religions, including Christianity.
Since we can only know the nature of what we call God, everyone is free to believe whatever interpretation of God he wants.
(English is my third language, so excuse me for any grammatical mistakes).
For example, take this passage:
Quoting Thorongil
What the non-believer should have said was this:
Freedom could still be granted without there being any ability, or alternately any desire, to sin/do evil (per how you defined that earlier). "Freedom" for something like humans, as things are, does not amount to an ability to do anything imaginable. There are things that are not physically or practically possible. That we can't do those things doesn't mean that we're not free, or if it did, you'd not be able to claim that God bestowed freedom on us in the first place. So "freedom" doesn't mean "ability to do anything imaginable." It's an ability to make choices within a limited framework. God could have simply given us a different limited framework, one in which we do not have the ability or desire to sin/do evil, but where we're free to do all sorts of things that are not sins, that are not evil.
I agree with the gist of your post, but it is trying to express a very difficult idea, and one which is easily mis-stated.
I would say that objects possess mass and are moved by forces, but objects are not 'beings'. Perhaps a better word would be that they are 'existents'. In English, the noun 'being' properly only applies to humans - i.e. we are 'human beings' - although it can be used in a more general sense; but whenever it is used in a general sense, the referent is 'living beings', i.e. we can speak of conscious beings, such as primates and elephants. But the word 'being' distinguishes 'beings' from 'objects'.
There was a long thread recently on the cosmological argument which explored many of these topics but suffice to say here that 'God' in the sense you are speaking of, is conceived as 'the ground of being' or 'the ever-present origin'. This is a term coined by Jean Gebser to convey the understanding that the 'origin of being' is not somewhere remote in time, but is the present origin of all existents.
What? If that's the case why is the word 'human' necessary (I have this weird feeling I've had this argument before) as a qualifier when we talk of 'human beings'?
Quoting Wayfarer
Whenever is always! And it's a very specific sense of 'living'. Plants are not beings (unless they're triffids ... which reminds me 'beings' need not necessarily be real).
"Beings" can be synonymous with "things."
It is precisely that ontological distinction which materialism denies.
garden of Eden. This is the cornerstone of the religious narrative. Essentially, humanity left the garden of Eden when they developed intellect. This gave them the option (intelligence)of imagining and then acting on self indulgent, destructive and evil acts. It is the development of this capacity in humans which resulted in the problem of good and evil and an imbalance in nature(on this planet). Before this, point of crisis, all beings in the biosphere were arranged into evolutionary niches, which, while there was some imbalance, change and adaptation, was generally in balance.
The Christian teaching is, if we were not capable of evil, we would not be capable of good, because we'd simply be robotic.
This is interesting, so beings which had self awareness, an awareness of their own actions and that there is an alternative to their conditioned, or genetic actions, which they now have a choice to take. However a while after taking that alternative course of action, they find themselves in a pickle and think how did that happen, where did I go wrong. Was that the right course of action? was it a bad course of action? What course of action should I take now? Now that I have forgotten what my original course was? Am I now lost? Have I lost my way back to the garden of Eden? Help!
'Being' is a verb made into a noun; somewhat like the way in which you could refer to a seeing, or a doing. And just as a seeing must see and a doing must do, so a being must be.
As you said when we speak of beings we are generally referring to human beings; although a commonly used term is 'sentient being' and there are many animals which are considered to be such.
"What does it mean to be?" : this is Heidegger's key question. For Heidegger there is no being without a world; no being without being-in-the-world; and he thinks animals are "world poor". I think the idea here is that in order to be-in-the-world; you must be able to think of yourself as being-in-the-world.
But being-in-the-world is, for Heidegger prior to, and originary of, the subject/object distinction. Things, in the sense of entities which are brutely and insentiently there (i.e. not be-ing at all except insofar as we conceive them to be), are parasitic on being-in-the-world, in the sense that they only arise for dasein. By the same token the sentient subject who stands over against the world of things is also parasitic on being-there for Heidegger.
I'm sure this must have a lot to do with Christianity, but I can't think what at the moment. One thing is that Heidegger wanted to emphasize that being for him is not God; God is not, for him, primal being; he disparagingly calls the view that posits this "onto-theology".
I think another tie-in between Christianity and Heidegger is that one must "lay down the inauthentic self" and take up the authentic self. This is an archly existentialist theme that Jaspers called the 'loving struggle to become who we are". It consists in a radical rejection of all worldly understandings of the self, or as Heidegger would say, not listening to das Man. It even has resonances with Freud's notion of superego, I think; the introjected story we tell ourselves about who we are, and who we must be.
Well, no. I almost never use 'beings' to refer to humans in practice. I am far more likely to use 'beings' of notional, or less clearly defined groups than of man, mankind, humans, homo sapiens, people (you get my drift!). I talk of extra-terrestrial beings, mythological beings, magical beings, trans-dimensional beings, godlike beings, ineffable beings, unimaginable beings ........ ad infinitum et nauseam .... because it's a useful term for such things. When talking of humans the word 'being' is almost entirely superfluous as far as I can see.
No it isn't!
It would be a rather grave error to take lessons on the use of English words from texts in German, would it not? Whether you choose to accept it or not. in English there is a clear distinction between 'a being' and 'a thing'.
But in all those cases, you are using the word to denote 'beings' as distinct from 'things', which is only the point I am labouring to make.
As regards the Christian doctrine of free will, to recapitulate, central to it is the claim that we are free to choose good or evil, and that we are not compelled to be good. (This was in response to the question, 'why doesn't God simply consitute the world in such a way that we are compelled to do good?')
But when used as a noun, it has specific connotations.
NASA has discovered many kinds of things in space, but no beings, at this point in time.
The same can be said of the word "world," as I used above. If you want to be literal about it, it refers simply to the planet Earth. However, as you well know, it can also refer more abstractly and generically to the universe itself or, beyond this, to anything that is, whether in the universe or not. So it seems to me that, far from having committed some spooky "grave error," it is you gentlemen who are being overly pedantic on this point.
But, how I would express it, is that God is, and cannot be, an existent, or 'something that exists'. Because everything that exists (i.e. 'all manifest objects') are composed of parts, and begin and end in time. So 'everything that exists' is, in this understanding, the 'phenomenal domain' or 'the manifest realm' - what metaphysicians refer to as 'medium size dry goods', which constitutes the domain of exploration of the physical sciences,
Not, not 'a thing', nor 'a being', but being, the only actual existent or only real being - the sole reality. Every particular existent or being, is only real insofar as it is 'created by' or grounded in that source of being; God as 'the is in existence'. (This is similar to Advaita Vedanta. 1, 2.)
According to the SEP entry on Duns Scottus Eriugena, there is a sense in which things that are real from one point of view, are unreal from another:
So the way I am attempting to parse this, is to say that 'existence', or 'those things which exist', pertain to the 'phenomenal realm'. That is the 'horizontal plane', distributed in time and space, which the natural sciences examine. So I would re-phrase the first line of the above quote as 'things accessible to the senses are said to exist.
This is because what is, is something more than 'what exists'. This is because (among other things) it includes the subject as well as the object of analysis. (That is why I say that science is 'what you see out the window', phenomenology is 'you looking out the window'.) The mind synthesises and draws together all of the data of perception and measurement, and that is what constitutes reality for us; it is not simply the aggregate of existents, but also judgement and so on (as per Kant. So number (and the like) are an irreducible component of that, even though from the empiricist's point of view, they're 'only in the mind'.)
That is the sense in which the distinction between 'being' and 'existence' can be discerned; that 'beings' are of another order to what is merely 'existent'.
So now you've moved from justifying your understanding of being from a German text to a Latin one? I remain similarly unimpressed.
You also set up a false dichotomy by completely failing to recognise that the emphasis in Aquinas' thought is not on 'not a being' but on 'not of this world'. Of course Aquinas isn't claiming that God is a thing because he's not a being (and nothing in my definition of being requires that he should be) because he's not saying that God is not a being but that God is a being 'but not as we know it' to borrow a phrase from Star Trek.
I don't understand why you apparently think the only alternative to God being a being is God being a thing. But I agree with Heidegger in rejecting the idea of God being being. The ideas of both things and beings are objectivizations. Things have being, on this objectivized view, as much as beings have being. So, God cannot be being, because being is the being of things and beings, and God is not that. 'Being' is itself an objectification of existence; it is the idea of sheer isness.
Insofar as we are persons we are like God; personalty is the truth of the spirit; beyond all objectification, and beyond all being. It is this understanding that distinguishes Christianity from all other religions. For the understanding I have outlined here I am indebted to two texts: I Am the Truth- Towards a Philosophy of Christianity by Michel Henry and Slavery and Freedom by Nicolas Berdyaev. The way I read them both these texts are saying substantially the same things.
Well, then we no longer disagree, it seems to me. I'm satisfied.
Quoting Barry Etheridge
I mentioned the scholastics in the post to which you originally responded. They wrote in Latin, in case you didn't know.
Quoting Barry Etheridge
They amount to the same thing.
Quoting Barry Etheridge
No where does he say this, to my knowledge. A quote, if you please, otherwise I remain skeptical.
Quoting John
I was saying that this was an implication of Wayfarer's position with respect to these words. I was providing a counter-example.
Which is a complete non-sequitur, hence the need for cleverer interlocutors in a dialogue like this.
Well, because the dialogue presented said nothing at all about that. I was presenting a more challenging comment from the non-believer for the context presented.
So let's assume that what you're doing in your comment to me is rather presenting a response to my non-believer's response in that context that you feel is more challenging to the non-believer,
There are two problems with that as a response:
(1) Non-believers obviously are not going to buy the Garden of Eden story in a religious context, So if the Garden of Eden story in a religious context can be taken to say such and such, that's not going to work as an argument solely on the basis of it being a foundational story for the religion. It would only be relevant if something in the story were more or less a logical argument for why something must be the case.
(2) The Garden of Eden story and its relevance for the "problem of good and evil" as you're presenting it doesn't actually meet the objection. Sure, that's the received view in Christianity. But the non-believer is challenging the metaphysical justification for what that received view describes. Why would God make a world where intellect/intelligence would give his creations the ability to imagine and/or carry out evil acts?
Answering "because then we wouldn't be free" wouldn't address the response I gave for the non-believer, because the response is exactly about that comment. It points out that the ability to imagine and/or carry out evil acts isn't required for freedom.
It's not a non sequitur. What I was responding to was this:
The point about this remark, is that it demonstrates lack of knowledge of what the Christian understanding of 'freedom of the will' means, and why it is significant. The basic drift is that humans are free agents and can, indeed must, choose a course of action. If they were led to it, or compelled to do it, or given no choice but to do it, then they would be robotic, i.e. they wouldn't be acting freely. The fact that humans are endowed with individual autonomy is one of the distinctive attributes of Christian philosophy.
Calvinism in particular seems to explicitly deny free will in relation to the power to choose sin vs not-sin. Life is a process of either waiting to discover, or striving to discover, whether the decision God made before he created us about whether we would be saved was a Yes or a No.
I have done a bit more research on this. I found the following on a Calvinist website:
So, I think you're actually correct - that in effect, Calvinism denies that humans are capable of choosing good. I think that the implication of their doctrine, is that only the elect are able to choose the good, and that everyone else will be damned. Which, I think, is a strong reason for rejecting Calvinism.
Whereas, I would interpret the first of the two verses as a kind of rhetorical flourish on the part of Paul; i.e. not to be interpreted literally.
It's possible to make a world where humans are free agents and can, indeed must, choose a course of action, but where there would either be no desire or no ability to choose evil courses of action. You can have a potential infinity of choices that are not evil, however.
I have no idea what that's saying, really.
God can create the world as God wants to create the world, which is an idea the topic creator explicitly asserted in the dialogue they presented.
Unless "real risk of failure" refers to the possibility of doing evil--in which case we're back to question-begging territory, then there's a real risk of failure in a world where we have freedom but can not do evil acts. After all, attempting but failing to do a good or neutral act doesn't imply that one does evil.
I don't know what an "artificial environment" refers to.
Again, we're talking about God making a world of His choosing, which is what the TC's dialogue posits with the world as it is, where we can do evil.
Then I would venture to suggest that you interpret it wrongly. There is absolutely no doubt that Paul believed that every act of human will is sin, that no act of human will could ever count as a step toward God or to the fulfillment of God's will and it is therefore always a step away from God, a turning of the back on God.
But surely there cannot ever be absolute freedom in any physical Universe. Popular as the phrase appears to be amongst the positive thinking brigade it is not literally true that "you can do anything" and never could be. There is no such thing as infinite choice and that, as I've suggested before, is no bad thing. Greater choice is greater paralysis. Infinite choice would be infinite paralysis and that is the very negation of freedom.
I don't believe in that model of 'God'.
It is curious, then, that Catholics and Calvinists both believe in the Bible, yet Calvinism is fatalistic in a way that Catholicism is not.
I don't think the religious idea of freedom is 'being able to do anything', or being able to act without constraint, or a matter of choice. It is freedom from fear, doubt, dread, anxiety, and, ultimately, death.
I would love for a Calvinist to turn up and explain why they believe that the last sentence doesn't contradict the first. Whence came the so-corrupt nature of the unbeliever? Did they make it themselves? If so was it in their nature to fashion their nature to be like that?
The middle sentence is an interesting transition. To say somebody is free to choose what they want to choose is something that even the most rusted-on hard determinist can agree with. The point of course is that - according to the determinist - they cannot choose what it is that they want (they have no control of their 'wanter'). This is very different from what St Augustine or other devoted RC proponent of libertarian free will might say, which is that the unbeliever is free to want to believe anything.
It is always worth reflecting on the fact that from the point of view of the Eastern Churches there is barely any difference between Catholic and Protestant at all. Both are built on a theology which pictures God as absolute monarch and judge directly electing those who will be saved by vertical acts of power. And that has far less to do with the Bible than the political landscape within which the western Church grew, especially after its (un)holy alliance with the Emperor Constantine. Calvinism represents something of an extreme of this theology but it is far less remote from Catholicism than you imagine. The saints that are appointed by God in Calvinism may lack the capital letter that denotes their Catholic counterparts but how they are appointed is essentially identical.
I would also advise caution in saying that any Church 'believes in the Bible'. They certainly believe that the Bible authorises their particular understanding of theology, soteriology etc. but that is nearly always a reading back into the text beliefs that are formed outside it. We are familiar with this process in creationists and so-called fundamentalists today but the truth is that it has been going on from the very earliest days of Christianity in the established churches as well as the sects, and schismatics, and 'heretics'.
I see Calvinism (and Protestantism generally) as a radical break with Catholicism. (I'm reading an interesting historical study The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society by Brad S. Gregory on this very point. )
Orthodoxy is different to both Catholicism and Protestantism in many key respects, not least in not accepting the 'doctrine of vicarious atonement'. But I think Calvin was a really sinister character - not for nothing is he referred to as the 'Ayatollah of Geneva'. (It's worth reading up on the execution of Servetus.)
I also believe that a vital aspect of religion was lost in the original formation of the orthodox Church, with the suppression of the Gnostics. That is not to say that Gnosticism (which is not in any case a school of thought) was an unalloyed good, but the experiential dimension which it embodied, which was symbolically profound, was part of what was lost. I think that some of the early Bishops, particularly Iraneus and Tertullian, embodied an authoritarian attitude which forever marked the way Christianity developed.
God doesn't always give everyone those kinds of great experiences.
But if you fast and pray and get serious enough, eventually He will reveal Himself to you in a clear and distinct way.
You just have to persist in true humility before Him and humbly wait for His timing. None of us deserve any special revelation. He created us, gave us life we didn't deserve, and yet we have all rebelled against Him, killing His prophets, even crucifying His only Son.
He loves you, like big-time! But you might have to go through a few months, even a few years, of diligently searching, praying, fasting, meditating, reading the scriptures, before He gives you that "road to Damascus experience."
In the mean time, the historical evidence for the resurrection of Christ should be enough to bring you to faith. An empty tomb and devout followers willing to live in poverty and ridicule for the rest of their lives to preach that message - even going to martyrdom and death. The immediate and rapid expansion of the Christian faith amidst such great persecution can only be explained one way!