There must be something else [to life], " the late Lord Bertrand Russell once wrote to a lady friend, "though I don't believe there is."  The ambiguity of Russell's ruminations makes one swoon.  On the one hand, he realizes that life is more than what we physically experience, but on the other hand, he will not believe there is.  It is at once the grandest and most tragic of existential bargains.
     Like it or not, although we are thoroughly material beings, we all experience immaterial things.  Lord Russell sensed the vacuity of existence, someone else might find love, someone else might touch joy.  In every case, the person knows she is experiencing this thing, even if she cannot physically see it.  She cannot deny that she encounters it.
     That is the crux of the dilemma.  Ordinarily, something material would have nothing in common with something immaterial; what reason would there be to do so?  But the human being is different.  Though the human is material, she experiences the immaterial; although she is physical, she experiences what is not physical--and knows, in the bottom of her heart, that she is doing so.
     Where do we go from here?  We have two choices.  We can dismiss it, as did Lord Russell; or we can embrace it for the mystery it is, and live accordingly.  We needn't run from the immaterial, nor do we need dispute that we experience it, for we know that we do.  But if we embrace it, we must embrace something else:  the possibility that there is more to reality than just us.
     And that, as philosopher Rudolf Otto noted in his Idea of the Holy, published early in the last century, is perhaps the most frightening (and wondrous) reality of all.  Life is unbearably, and happily, greater than we can imagine.
     There is a God.