If you are one of the many, many people who are undecided about God, or inclined to follow Richard Dawkins, or who just don’t think anything can be proved, I’d suggest that you go and read the article elsewhere in here called “The Universe and Everything and All That”. Then when you’ve done that and thought a little, come back and read this article.

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I’m making the wild assumption that there is an extra-universal God, who caused the Big Bang and set in place about a dozen or so arbitrary and immutable rules of physics that ensured that at least one planet such as earth would exist and that life could therefore be sustained on it.

We humans are part of that life and we are the life form that God regards as His special creatures into whom He has placed a spirit that is akin to his own.

So here we are, you and I, jogging along through life. Common sense and observation tell us that one day we are going to die, because everyone else before us has died and we cannot see how we could be an exception. However there’s a tiny glitch in that because humans almost never actually expect to die. We live as if we shall live forever.

The thing about that is that almost all humans have held to one religion or another for some forty odd thousand years, and the ones that we have records of all assume that there is life beyond death. The ancient Egyptians assumed a life hereafter, the ancient Celts assumed a life hereafter, the ancient Persian Zoroastrians assumed a life hereafter, the Jews likewise and of course moslems and Christians do too. So is it reasonable to assume that all those humans throughout history got it wrong?

Today the most advanced religion on earth and the largest is Christianity. And Christianity most certainly has held for the past two thousand years tacking on from ancient Judaism’s previous one thousand five hundred and more years of existence belief in the same God. But the belief in the same God goes back long before that – probably around ten thousand years. So let’s guess at 14,000 years of belief in the same God that Christians believe in today.

That means that humans for an awfully long time have had this sense all over the world in unrelated civilisations, that their spirit did not die with their body. Can we just in this last generation decide that humans have been wrong all that time. Of course social scientists (a misnomer if ever there was one) and psychologists can and do argue for all sorts of reasons that explain away this sense.

Humans throughout that period again all over the world have sensed a God figure beyond their normal senses.

I would argue that it is a brave man who claims to know better. Why would he do so? Because in our highly materialistic and artificial world, not just our physical senses (hearing, eyesight, sense of direction) have deteriorated through gradual disuse, but our extrasensory sensitivity has deteriorated also because of our highly artificial existence.

Only fifteen hundred years ago, the inhabitants of these islands would have laughed to scorn the idea that there was no God and no afterlife. They knew not from books but from personal sense that there is indeed a God and an afterlife – that it was not possible for it to be otherwise.

If then this human sense that a human spirit lives on after the body has died is true, what are we to make of it?

Do we just make up something? Or is there good reason to accept the long held beliefs of other humans down the centuries?

In the article “The Universe and Everything and All That” we came to the conclusion that there is good rational reason to think that there is in fact a creator for the entire universe and that creator intended for us to exist in it. None of that is “supernatural” it is simply dealing with the observable facts.

If then the resultant humans in that universe sense that there is in them something that does not in fact die with their body, might not that be worth taking seriously? If those humans down the many centuries have identified that Creator and have managed to have dealings with Him, and been given some clear idea of His intention for the way they should live and prepare themselves for the eternal life beyond this one, should we not at least examine this? Because if they are right, then it might be an excellent career move to actually follow what they have found out and been told.

So for around 14,000 years humans have believed in one Creator God. Over that time, they understood more and more about Him. Then after 12,000 odd years, Jesus Christ – God Himself – turned up and began to pull it all together for everyone.

So now we really know something tangible, we have a record of what He thinks is the best way for us to live and act. He calls us “His people” and wants us to live very carefully so that in the hereafter, we will enjoy the further life that He has in store for us. In other words this present life is really something like doing your degree at university in preparation for the career in the life to come. The authority (in this case the Creator not the university examiners) wants you specially trained and prepared.