Big Questions
If God is there, why doesn’t he prove it?
This post is the text of a talk given in Ballygrainey on 29th January. It relies heavily on the work of much better communicators than me - namely Paul Williams and Barry Cooper ('If you could ask God one question'), Michael Ots ('What kind of God?'), Tim Keller (The Reason for God) and, of course, CS Lewis. If you find anything here that is helpful it probably came from one of them. Anything that you find unhelpful almost certainly came from me.
The Clues
I have no doubt that it is one of those stories that is told that has just grown and grown until every teacher in every pre-school classroom claims it happened to them but it goes like this. The teacher asks the pupils to sit down and draw a picture of what they did at the weekend.
They all happily go about drawing swimming pools and swings supermarkets and then the teacher discovers one child drawing something different. ‘What’s that Jimmy?’ asks the teacher. ‘That’s God’ replies Jimmy. ‘But no-one knows what God looks like’, says the teacher. ‘They will when I’m finished’, replies Jimmy.
And that is our problem. We don’t know what God looks like and so we end up coming up with all sorts of pictures for him ourselves. We start saying there are hundreds or thousands of gods, or we say that planet earth is a kind of god. We make God in our image.
The only way we can know what God is like is if he reveals himself to us. And we have a God who has done that and has left us with a number of clues to his existence.
I am going to talk a little about some specific clues God has given us to show that he exists and then, later on we’re going to look at the main way in which he has revealed himself to us.
I am going to deal with four questions about the universe, whose answers give us clues to the existence of God.
1. Why is there anything rather than nothing? Just about every scientist now aggress that the universe had a beginning. They call it the Big Bang, we call it Genesis 1:1. In his book The Reason for God, Tim Keller quotes Francis Collins one of the driving forces behind the Human Genome project; ‘We have this very solid conclusion that the universe had an origin, the Big Bang. Fifteen billion years ago, the universe began with an unimaginably bright flash of energy from an infinitesimally small point. That implies that before that, there was nothing. I can’t imagine how nature, in this case the universe, could have created itself. And the very fact that the universe had a beginning implies that someone was able to begin it. And it seems to me that had to be outside of nature.
The point is that if everything in the universe depends on the existence of something else, then the universe itself depends on the existence of something outside itself. This argument doesn’t prove that the God of the Bible exists, but it gets us to the possibility (or even probability) of a Creator. Either a creator outside of the universe started it all off or nothing just exploded into something.
2. Why is there life in the universe? Why is it that the universe is perfectly set up to support life, particularly life on this small blue-green planet called earth? Things like gravity, the speed of light, the composition of atmospheric gases on this planet all come together to support life. If any of these forces were out in even a tiny way, we could not exist. This suggests to many people that the universe was fine tuned by God in order to sustain life.
Atheistic scientists will come back on this and say that there might well be an infinite number of universes out there and we just happen to live in the one that supports life. There is absolutely no scientific evidence for multiple universes whatsoever and it almost certainly requires more faith to believe in that than to believe in a creator.
One philosopher called Alvin Plantinga, quoted by Keller, gives this example; Imagine a man in the Wild West dealing himself twenty straight hands of four aces in one poker game. As his companions reach for their guns, he says this, ‘I know this looks suspicious but what if there are an infinite number of universes out there so that for any possible distribution of cards in a poker game there is a universe where each one comes about and we just happen to be living in the universe where I always end up with four aces without cheating!’ What effect do you think that will have on the man’s fellow poker players? What effect do you think it will have on the man’s chances of making it out of the saloon alive?
It is possible that, purely by chance, we happen to be in the one universe out of trillions where life could exist but does it make sense?
3. Why is the universe ordered and regular so that it can make sense to a rational mind? Science itself depends on regular patterns in nature – gravity, speed of light etc. make sense to rational minds. To many people that suggests that there is a rational mind behind it. If there isn’t we have no justification in assuming that the patterns will keep going because there are, in fact, no patterns.
The interesting thing, when it comes to science, is that all science relies on these patterns to continue but, without God there is no guarantee that they will. Without God, scientists are just hoping that every day the patterns will keep working the same way they did yesterday and the millions of days before that. It probably doesn’t cause them to lose much sleep but it is what they are doing.
4. Why beauty? Here is one of the greatest clues of all. Somewhere out there is a work of art, a piece of music, a natural phenomenon or another human being who, when you look at them, they just take your breath away. Why do we find things to be beautiful and not just functional? And why is it that the things we find to be beautiful don’t satisfy our inner desire for beauty? For a moment, they take our breath away, but then we find something else that takes our breath away.
Could it be that our innate desire for beauty corresponds to something that will one day finally and fully satisfy that desire? Could that thing, in fact, be God?
From these four clues people have worked out that God is, at least possible. But then the atheists come along and say that belief in God is simply a part of the evolutionary process – that belief in the same God, even though it wasn’t true, was something that allowed communities to be formed and was, at one stage, helpful for natural selection. We don’t really need it any more but it has been hardwired into us by evolution for so long that it is hard to get rid of.
Here is what is being said; We cannot trust our minds to guide us into truth because all that our minds will do will be to guide us to what is appropriate for our evolution, even if it is not true. But hold on a minute. If we can’t trust our minds to guide us into truth, why should we trust the people that tell us through the use of their minds, they have discovered that atheism is true? Couldn’t their minds be deluding them?
Listen to what Tim Keller says about this; ‘It seems that evolutionary theorists have to do one of two things. They could backtrack and admit that we can trust what our minds tell us about things, including God. If we find arguments or clues to God’s existence that seem compelling to us, well, maybe he’s really there. Or else we could go forward and not trust our minds about anything. … It comes down to this: if, as the evolutionary scientists say, what our brains tell us about morality, love and beauty is not real – if it is merely a set of chemical reactions designed to passon our genetic code – then so is what their brains tell them about the world. Then why should they trust them?
But if God exists then our minds do work and we can trust them to work because he made them to work in such a way as to understand truth and process beauty and recognise love and discern right from wrong and reason things out. If God exists then the fact that the universe had a beginning and the fact that it works in a consistent, regular way and is fine-tuned in a way to sustain life, makes perfect sense.
None of these clues PROVE, in a scientific way, the existence of God. But they are clues. And I think that, together, they make a pretty strong case and certainly explain what we see around us better than the theory that there is no God.
But if there is a God, why doesn’t he show himself to us more clearly? Well, he did. And we’re going to see how he did it in a few minutes.
The Man
Michael Ots tells this story in his book ‘What kind of God?’ A friend of his moved away to university and quickly got to know everyone in his particular hall o residence. But there was one student who remained a mystery. Despite continual knocking on door D23, they could get no response. Soon, they began to query whether anyone lived in the room at all. But then the clues started to appear. There was a strange smell from under the door – something like food but not particularly appetising. There was strange oboe music coming from the room late at night and a strange sound of something dissolving in the sink. None of those things conclusively proved the existence of the student in D23 but they gave some indication that he existed.
In order to demonstrate his existence he would have to have come out to meet them. The clues on their own would not have been enough. The same is true for God. The clues by themselves are not enough. In order for us to know that God exists he has to come and introduce himself to us. And that is exactly what he did.
The Gospel writers and the whole of the NT are in agreement. God did show himself to us on earth. He did it convincingly. He did it authoritatively. He did it in such a way that he could be heard and seen and touched.
The Word, who was responsible for creating everything, who was God, became flesh and dwelt among us. That is the claim the gospels make. That is the claim Jesus makes for himself.
Don’t let people tell you that Jesus didn’t claim to be God. In each of the four most reliable accounts that we have of his life, he claimed exactly that. When he forgave people’s sin he was claiming to be God. When he said ‘I and the Father are one’ he was claiming to be God. That is why, as soon as he said it, the crowd picked up stones to throw at him.
When he said ‘Before Abraham was, I am’, he was deliberately using the name God had given himself when he appeared to Moses and applying it to himself. Make no mistake. Jesus claimed to be God and people wanted him dead because of it, but he kept on doing it.
If you are going to claim to be something you need to be able to back it up. I could claim to be a great undiscovered footballer with more talent than Wayne Rooney, Thierry Henry, Gary Lineker and George Best combined. After 30 seconds on a five-a-side pitch you would soon find out I was talking nonsense.
Compare that to someone like Muhammad Ali whose constant refrain was ‘I am the greatest.’ If you are going to say it you had better be able to back it up. And of course Ali could.
And that’s the point about Jesus. He could back it up and he did it back it up. All the time. Calming storms at sea, feeding 5000 people with a packed lunch, healing the deaf, blind and lame, raising the dead. The evidence of the gospels is that Jesus walked this earth as if he owned the place.
Here is the point. We do not believe in God because of the clues that he made the universe and sustains it all, even though those clues are amazing and even though we believe that he did create it all. We believe in God because of the man called Jesus.
Here was a man who made stupendous claims about himself and did things that no-one else has ever done, including rising physically from the dead. No-one at the time was able to conclusively disprove the resurrection stories by bringing out a body. No-one since has been able to come up with another more plausible theory.
If we find all the clues about God’s existence compelling, they should at least make us consider the possibility that he exists. If Jesus made the claims he did and backed them up the way he did and if the resurrection happened, then he would need to take seriously his claims about himself. There are a number of things that all these conclusions point us to.
First, God exists and has shown himself to the world in Jesus. Second, he is interested enough in us, not just to enter this world but to die for our salvation. Third, everyone who hears this has a response to make to him, he cannot be ignored.
Let me finish with that wonderful passage from CS Lewis’ brilliant ‘Mere Christianity’ because few people have said it better;
‘I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit on him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.’
