I am up to my eyeballs in thinking about my thesis these days. I’m a philosophy major, so thinking is sort of what we’re destined to do, but don’t let anyone tell you that it’s easy work. Formulating complete ideas is tough.

My thesis is about experience and knowing, and although I won’t bore you with the details, I’m taking a close look at the use of the definite article (the word “the”) as a tool that can either convey oppression or establish thoughtful consideration of a particular thing. Yes, it’s profoundly technical—but such is the work of philosophy—and it’s why I only want to talk about one particular aspect of this problem that dawned on me last Sunday morning.

If there’s ever a time that thinking about God might happen spontaneously, it will be on Sunday morning. The question that I woke up thinking was, “How can I know that God could be present in my life?”

We come to know of God in multiple contexts. Some do not believe in God, but even so we all are exposed to the idea that there is a God and that God exists among the action of our lives. Whether that idea rings true with any particular person is an extraordinarily complicated thing to describe personally, let alone communicate sensibly to another.

In philosophy, problems of understanding and knowing compel me because if we can find a way to better understand something, we have a strong chance at improving human welfare and social justice. I won’t say that I’ve come up with a solution for talking about God, but I do think the insight I’ve learned from studying “the” can give us a place to start talking about it.

John Dewey, a well-known figure from American Pragmatism, reformulates the structure of what knowing is. Traditionally, we think of knowing as a relationship between we, a subject, and our perception of something “out there” in the world, which is an object. Better knowing traditionally comes from looking at the “objects” in the world as impersonally as possible (e.g. objective knowledge), and we usually contrast this to subjective knowledge, or knowledge about objects that are “infected” by our feelings, emotions and biases.

For Dewey, knowing is something entirely different.  He does maintain that objects “out there” really exist and that there is a sense of self that experiences it. Critically, however, knowledge comes as a product of our experience, as an interaction rather than a perception. We, as a self with a history, feelings, social group, body and a wealth of other preconceptions, know something in the context of both ourselves and the thing we’re experiencing. To use a boringly trite example, if there is a table in front of me, I’d know it not as something separate from me, but as something that I could sit on, something that I had dinner on last night and something that bears an uncanny resemblance to a table I saw in Sweden.

So how does knowing God happen? My idea is that we know God through experiencing particular things that inform us of a spiritual dimension of life. Naturally, it is hard to believe in something that has no direct physical manifestation, so we have to feel like God could exist in a different way than, say, the moon does. If we can think God exists (if we were raised in the fellowship of a religious community, if we believe that others have faith in God, etc.) then we’re at least open to experiencing God in the world.

If we can experience God, we can know God. Let me explain: most of us can identify spiritual moments in our lives that profoundly affected us. In our individual experience, we come to know an aspect of “the world out there” that is also in us, something that moves us without any particular manifestation. We then can talk about God (or at least spirituality) by beginning with our experiences.

Looking forward, we can also see God in things. We see a robin in spring and take it as a sign, or a gust of wind encourages us to change the direction we’re walking. Talking about this to other people can make one seem crazy; they might ask, “How can that robin be God?!” But for you, your experience informs you that it is; your belief makes it true on a level that people closed off from religious experience will fundamentally be unable to know.

I don’t wish to pontificate; rather, I hope to ask what it means to know something and broaden what people might traditionally count as what knowing can be. We’re an ELCA college—we should at least think about what it means to know God.