From Roger Scruton’s leap of faith:
...such a religious frame of mind, Scruton continues, amounts to a ‘reaching out from subject to subject; it searches for a relation that is close, intimate, and personal, with a being who is present in this world though not of this world; and in this reaching out, there is a movement towards sacrifice, in which both self and other might give themselves completely and thereby achieve a reconciliation that lies beyond the reach of ordinary human dialogue’. We experience this searching in love, and we hear it in music. Thus, the atheists’ argument that they can find no evidence of God’s existence is as insufficient as attempting to explain love in terms of reproduction or music in terms of vibration. After all, God may only reveal Himself to those who love Him. Or maybe God is simply not to be found in the universe that He created. Or Maybe God is like the number one: ‘outside space and time… [with] no causal role to play in the physical world.’ But if this is true, and it is the central question of Scruton’s book, then we cannot expect to encounter God anymore than we can expect to meet the number one. But how, then, is it possible for God to ‘be a real presence in the life of His earthly worshippers’? And how is it possible for us to be in love?
