Divine Guidance and Extrasensory Perception
C. S. Lewis tells about a time when he had an “unaccountable nagging” in his mind to get his hair cut. When he went to the barber shop, the barber said that he had been praying that Lewis would come in. Then the barber told him about a problem he was struggling with. Lewis had helped the man on several previous occasions, and he realized that if he had delayed coming in, it would have been too late to help him with this particular problem. I have heard quite a few similar stories told by Christians about having a persistent urge to visit or call someone. In the typical story a need for the visit becomes apparent only after acting in accordance with the urge. Such an experience can leave one with a sense of being guided. It is not uncommon to hear Christians say that the urge came from God.
We can easily be skeptical about this kind of story. It could be pointed out that we notice and remember it when our urges lead us to do something that we can recognize as purposeful, but don’t recall cases in which there is no such meaning. The objective evidence of a connection between an urge to act and some beneficial result is usually pretty weak. Nevertheless, some cases are especially striking, and the impression of the inadequacy of standard skeptical responses can be enhanced when we view these accounts in the light of numerous stories that suggest the operation of extrasensory capacities.
A common type of story suggesting extrasensory means of acquiring information involves an awareness of danger to someone with whom there is a close personal connection. Like accounts of divine guidance, stories suggesting extrasensory perception are often dismissed as instances of misreporting or coincidence. In some cases, this kind of explanation is adequate, but there are a significant number of cases in which such explanations seem strained, and the cumulative force of hearing about many such cases can be convincing. However, it is one thing to hear about such things from people you don’t know and another when the accounts are closer to home. Some prominent thinkers who were initially skeptical have been convinced only after a personal experience that was difficult to dismiss or by reports of experiences from people they trust.
In stories of extrasensory perception, the extraordinary awareness seems to come from a person’s unconscious mind. This awareness can come into consciousness in the form of a dream or vision or a bodily sensation. It might also reveal itself as a persistent thought or feeling. Consider a case in which a man has dream in which a doctor diagnoses a rare, life-threatening disease in his young son. The man tries to tell himself that it is just a dream, but he is troubled enough to persuade a doctor to run a test. The test reveals that the son does have the disease, and the doctor is able to provide an effective treatment. The dream in this case can be understood as a dramatization of information acquired through an extrasensory process.
If we think that there are such extrasensory processes that sometimes give us information that couldn’t have been acquired in an ordinary way, it can seem plausible to view Lewis’s puzzling urge to get his hair cut as arising from an extrasensory awareness of the barber’s desire that he come into the shop. Someone might object that thinking of what happens in terms of extrasensory perception conflicts with thinking of it as divine guidance. I don’t see that it does. It is a standard Christian view that God often acts through natural processes. Many Christians don’t find any conflict in saying that God creates and affirming that things have come to exist through an evolutionary process. So, it is possible to think of extrasensory awareness as a means through which divine guidance occurs.
Saying that God can work through nature does not imply that everything nature does should be attributed to God, but rather that in some events that nature brings about we can recognize indications of what God is doing. In other words, there are events that at one level can be understood as natural phenomena, but might also have a fuller meaning for a person of faith. Perhaps some cases of God working through nature are a matter of allowing nature to take its course, but we might also think that God’s presence can be an influence on what created things do. Physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne suggests that God influencing what happens can be understood in terms information input. Such information would presumably be available through extrasensory channels.
People often think of extrasensory perception as rare. It may be true that in individual cases, we can rarely be certain that extrasensory information is involved. But if extrasensory perception occurs, it is likely to be a hidden factor that frequently affects behavior. Someone might, for example, act to avoid a danger without consciously recognizing that any danger is involved. Or an idea that comes into consciousness could guide us even if we have no way to determine where the idea came from.
People who believe in divine guidance usually think of God as sending particular information about what to do. But there is another way it could be conceived. We could think that God has created an order in which there are capacities to acquire information by means that go beyond what we think of as ordinary. Such information might include awareness of another’s need or even awareness of what God seeks. God might be thought of as providing guidance by giving us the capacity to access this kind of information in particular circumstances.
There are cases of divine guidance in which the message received seems precise and authoritative, but the Christian experience of divine guidance is more often like the biblical “still small voice” that is easily missed among all the noise. This experience resembles some cases in which extrasensory awareness depends on being attentive to impressions from the unconscious mind that we can ignore or misinterpret. Discerning the meaning of these impressions is a skill that may be enhanced by practices learned in a community of faith.
For a fuller discussion of this topic, see chapter 6: Crisis Revelations, chapter 7: Dream Messages, and chapter 8: Revelatory Visions in Making Room For Mystery: Anomalous Events, Extraordinary Experiences, and Christian Faith.
