Suspicions of something more

The following is an excerpt is from the philosopher Thomas Morris' essay "Suspicions of Something More" in God and the Philosophers (pp 16-17):

I married a wonderful young woman with sparkling eyes whom the reportedly psychic grandmother of a high school friend had once described to me many years before as my future wife, although we were not to meet until my junior year at college, and then I set myself to prepare at Yale for the sort of vocation this same remarkable older woman had told me I would follow, despite all my plans for a business career. For someone unfamiliar with modern, logical, analytic philosophy of religion, her description of my future vocation in context was striking-"something like science, only spiritual," she had said. During my graduate years, I studied the techniques of science to pursue topics of the spirit. But at Yale, despite any appearances of having my world view well put together, and deep beneath all my developing facility in arguing that view, I was at many times and in many ways confused, uncertain, and troubled.

[...]

However, it was no amount of philosophical reasoning that originally gave me this picture of the world. Even apart from my formal religious training, I have long had a suspicion that there is much, much more to reality than meets the eye. One of my most vivid memories of childhood is that of hearing my mother tell of the death of her father when she was still a small girl. His last words to the family before he died, uttered in a voice of amazement, were, "It's beautiful." From a very young age, I wondered what he saw and what this statement meant.

There were other intriguing events in family lore. My father's mother was said to have special abilities to bring nearly dead plants back to life and to train, and even more deeply communicate with, animals. When my father as a young man lived in Baltimore, Maryland, he would arbitrarily, with no patterned regularity, make surprise trips back home to the farm in North Carolina. His mother would always have his place set at the table and food cooked for him, saying she knew he was coming that day. When my father first met the young woman I would later marry, he announced to my mother with no clues from me, from her, or from the circumstances, and long before I had a clue, that he had just met my future wife, a revelation he passed on to me only after the friendship had taken a new turn and commitments had been made. On board ship in the Pacific Ocean during the Second World War, he once lived through a bizarre evening of shooting dice all night, somehow knowing before each throw what he would get, feeling his wins before they came, a vivid, alternate-state-of-consciousness state-of-consciousness experience, never to be repeated, which left him stunned, perplexed, and fascinated with what could have transpired. More recently, on a visit to a ministerial friend, as he raised his arm to knock at the man's front door, he "heard" the words "Don't disturb him, he's dead"; lowered his arm; turned around; got back in his wagon; and drove back home. Not much more than an hour later, he received a call from the man's son conveying the news that he had just been found dead in that house of a heart attack.

My father never made much of these and similar unusual experiences, but they clearly meant a great deal to him. He often recounted them to me, but he never tried to explain them. In fact, he sometimes wondered aloud what they meant, how they happened, and even why they occurred. But he did recall them as important, and this was clearly communicated to me.

One professor I got to know well at Yale once told me that he was an atheist and that he did not accept the reality of anything like a soul or a spirit in the human domain, but that one thing worried him: Enter a room full of intelligent and sincere people, loosen them up a bit so that they're comfortable able talking about personal matters, and you'll often hear some strange stories along these very lines, stories that it's terribly hard to make sense of, apart from something like a religious view of the world. I've already mentioned the older lady who once "saw" me almost twenty years down the road in my life, a deeply religious woman reticent to talk about her reputed psychic powers. And my old high school friend who worried about me, when he visited from Harvard, brought back stories from the Harvard-Radcliffe Christian Fellowship that made me listen transfixed-stories about penetrating prophecies, "speaking in tongues," and healing miracles he claimed to have witnessed firsthand, such as a grotesquely broken bone being restored instantly in the midst of a pickup football game in response to group prayer. What do you do when people you respect, admire, and otherwise completely trust tell tales such as these? You begin to be suspicious, despite any inclinations you might have to the contrary, that there may indeed be a great deal more to life than meets the eye.