The Divine Imprint

The so-called New Atheists receive much publicity, but their demand to be provided with incontrovertible evidence for the existence of God, and that such evidence must come from a scientific examination of the physical world, is the wrong approach. As many theologians and philosophers have claimed, the search for God begins by looking inwards into oneself.

But what does that mean? Surely looking inwards we find nothing but the contents of one’s own mind. Where does God come in? It is by the examination of the contents of the mind and trying to understand how they got there that one seeks clues about God’s influence on the mind. Our consciousness bears a resemblance to that Consciousness from which it is directly derived. It bears his imprint. It is from the characteristics of that imprint we get to know what kind of God we are dealing with. Only then can we be open to realizing how that other creation of his, the physical world, also bears his imprint.

Russell Stannard OBE is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the Open University, UK, and a Member of the Center of Theological Inquiry at Princeton, New Jersey. Formerly a high energy particle physicist working at CERN in Geneva, and at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, California, he is a winner of the Bragg Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics. In 1998 he was awarded the OBE for ‘contributions to physics, the Open University, and the popularisation of science’.

He is the author of over thirty books, including The God Experiment (Faber, 1999) Relativity: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2008), The End of Discovery (OUP, 2010) and Science and Belief: The Big Issues (Lion Hudson, 2012). His books have been translated into eighteen languages.