Some Light Reading. . . .

You know, I look around at the world and sometimes I feel as if everyone has abandoned all belief in anything spiritual.  I feel as if atheism is on a sharp (almost vertical) incline.  But the fact is that most people do still belief in the spiritual, even if it isn't the God of the Bible.  Recent polls indicate that 51% of people worldwide believe in  some form of god (or gods).  With that said, however, there are still plenty of people who don't believe in anything supernatural (18%, according to the same study).  The late Carl Sagan, if I may paraphrase him, once commented that the universe is it:  there is nothing out there greater than what we can see and observe.  Just a brief moment of consideration on that, however, reveals that it is a very faulty and highly arrogant thought, because it's only been within the last few decades that we've been able to observe distant galaxies, and we were unable to observe basic microbes until the 1600's.  In other words, if Leeuwenhoek had had Sagan's attitude, we still wouldn't know about germs.   In essence, what Sagan's statement does is assume that our current knowledge is all we can ever, and all we need to ever, know.  This is not only arrogant, but patently false.  The most interesting thing about it, however, is that, as a scientist, he also argued vehemently for a constant expansion of our knowledge.  Do you see the disconnect there?  What he was essentially saying was that all we can see is all there is, but we need to work to see more.  If there's more to see, then obviously we're not dealing with all there is, right?  It's a backwards, contradictory, and foolish philosophy, but it does raise an important question:  does God exist?

Now that question makes many Christians uncomfortable, and immediately turns us into Scripture-quoting, "church-speak"-talking, half-baked philosophers.  Until we learn to square with the idea that there are people who legitimately don't believe in God, and until we can learn to legitimately reason that there is one, then our faith is really nothing more than a list of rules.  We use Jesus as some kind of intellectual crutch, or an excuse to not have to love God with all of our minds (see Mark 12:30).

So does God exist?

The Apostle Paul, in his letter to the church in Rome, wrote, "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities - his eternal power and divine nature - have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse" (Romans 1:20).  Paul, who perhaps understood the mind of Christ better than anyone who has ever lived, reminds us of a fundamental truth:  everything in the natural world has a beginning. 

A quick inventory of the world around us confirms this:  babies come from parents, plants come from seeds, and so on.  Everything that is natural begins somewhere.  Of course, the converse of that is that anything without a beginning would be eternal, and therefore supernatural.  Paul says, in effect, the universe (natural) had to start somewhere (with the supernatural).

Most modern scientists, however, disagree.  Cosmologists have determined - as best as they can, at least - that the universe had a beginning, yes, but that the beginning was itself natural.  They assert that everything - space, matter, time, everything - had a natural beginning.  They believe that it all began with a burst of energy that we now know as The Big Bang.  There was no God speaking things into existence, no Chaos out of which multiple gods and goddesses emerged, no magical light sources or men made from clay.  There was only an initial bust of energy that naturally created everything.

And when we honestly examine the evidence for this initial burst of energy, we find that the evidence is compelling.  Things like the undeniable evidence that our universe is expanding, things like the Cosmic Background Radiation, all point to evidence of this Big Bang.  If we are truly open-minded about it, there does seem to be, at least superficially, a reason to believe in The Big Bang. 

The problem with this, of course, is that it ignores the question we should be asking:  Where did the initial energy come from?  Instead of asking what the energy did, and what the after-effects of it were, we should be asking, "How was it there to begin with?"  Was it created?  Then there is a supernatural being who created it.  Did it always exist?  Then it is eternal and, therefore, supernatural.  "Ah," some cosmologists might argue, "but there was no 'eternity' at that point, because time was created with that energy!"  Then the energy itself would be outside of time, and, therefore, eternal. 

No matter what view we take, no matter how much we try to mythologize and sanitize ancient beliefs, no matter how hard we try to explain away the supernatural, we are left with one conclusion:  some god in some form must exist.  Maybe it's personal, maybe not.  Maybe there's one god, two gods, maybe an infinite number of gods.  Regardless of our take on things, regardless of what we may or may not believe, regardless of what we want to believe, the very existence of our universe screams:  "I was created by something greater than me!"

If, as Paul points out, we are without excuse, then why do so many people try to close their eyes and pretend there is no god?  At this point, it is easy to suggest that people want to be hedonistic animals who live for instinct, but I don't think that's true.  For some, certainly, but not all.  What I've noticed is that, among all the causes of atheism out there, pain appears to be the most common reason people reject the very existence of God.  It's the old question:  "Why would a good God allow pain and suffering?"  And that is, truly, an excellent question, because when we look around us and see pain, suffering, and death, it doesn't feel right. 

In the remarkable film Grand Canyon, Kevin Kline plays a well-to-do business man whose car breaks down in a rough part of town.  As he waits for a tow-truck, some neighborhood gang members begin harassing him.  One of them pulls a knife, and we get the impression that things would go horribly wrong if the tow-tuck driver, played by Danny Glover, hadn't shown up at that point.  He gets out of the truck and walks over to the guys and gives them a remarkable speech on this subject of a broken world.

"Man," he says, "the world ain't supposed to work like this.  I mean, maybe you don't know that, but this ain't the way it's supposed to be.  I'm supposed to be able to do my job without asking you if I can.  That dude is supposed to be able to wait with his car without you rippin' him off.  Everything's supposed to be different than what it is."

Death, suffering, trouble . . . this ain't the way it's supposed to be.  I find it interesting that we see this idea throughout early mythology:  suffering is an invader into the world of men.  Whether it comes into the Garden of Eden through a serpent, whether it emerges from Pandora's Box, or whether it wraps itself around Yggdrasil, the Norse Tree of the World, in ancient mythology, death and suffering are portrayed as evil. 

And that's because they are evil.

Death is evil, and I believe this is why so many of us reject God.  We have a hard time understanding that Evil can exist in a universe with Good.  To us, pain and suffering just don't add up.  Whether we're watching a loved one die of cancer, we're C.S. Lewis faced with the horrors of war, or we're a lonely desk clerk who has been rejected by one too many people, pain and suffering bring us to one of the most fundamental questions of life:  Does God exist? 

Unlike a great deal of Christians, I don't believe that asking this question is a problem.  After all, the answer we should arrive at ("yes") is only an answer if we first ask the question.  If we never question, then what we have is blind faith, which is dangerous no matter what that blind faith is.  So all of this brings us back to the original question:  if there is no eternal being, then where did all of this come from?  I have an astronomy book from college that tells me that, within a 1,000 light year radius of our galaxy, there are over ten million stars.  Where did it all begin?  Randomly?  Purposefully?  Flawed from the beginning, or did it start perfect and become corrupted?

The first three chapters of the Book of Genesis tell us that we started perfect, and allowed ourselves to become corrupted.  The rest of the Bible unfolds that idea, expounds on it, and lets us know that we are not the center of our universe, and that love and death can - and do - co-exist. 

"But wait!" we argue, "How could a loving God create perfect people and allow them to be corrupted?  Love wouldn't allow that!"  I would agree with you, except that perhaps our definition of love is incorrect.  In fact, I would argue that love can exist, not apart from corruption, but with corruption.  I would also argue that a perfect love does more than co-exist with corruption:  it rises above corruption, defeating it and restoring that which was corrupted.  That is, after all, why Jesus died.

He had no sin, yet He became sin, dying the very physical and spiritual death that comes with sin.  Yet even in that, there was no corruption, for two reasons.  The first, He got back up.

David writes in Psalm 16 that God won't let His Holy One see decay.  Paul, in Acts, relates this to Jesus.  Why?  Because Jesus got back up.  Rather than decay, Death reversed, and Jesus got.  Back.  Up.  His followers, who were hiding behind locked doors three days after His death, were so convinced by His resurrection that they all gladly faced torture, execution, and banishment for this truth.  

The second reason we know that there is now no condemnation is because Jesus ascended into heaven.  Stick with me here:  Jesus died for sin, but He didn't die for His own sins.  That means He died for everyone else's.  Yours.  Mine.  Sagan's.  Everyone.  John, in 1 John 2:2 writes that Jesus died, not just for our sins, "but for the sins of the whole world."  So Jesus, at His death, was steeped in sin.  He was drenched in it.  So much so, that He cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46).  Okay?  Jesus became - literally - the world's most sinful person.  Psalm 15 tells us that the only people who have any shot at all of entering into the presence of God is "he whose walk is blameless" (2).

At His death, Jesus was the most sinful person who has ever lived.  Sinful people cannot enter Heaven, and yet Jesus did.  Why?  Because our corruption - the sin laid on Him - was completely and totally atoned for, paid in full.  His resurrection and ascension prove that God has power, not only to stop corruption fro happening, but to completely and totally overcome it.  This is incredible and amazing, and I have had to retype these last few sentences five times because I'm so excited, I keep making massive typos.

How could a good God allow suffering?  Suffering refines us, it strengthens us, and it teaches us.  Without it, He wouldn't be good, nor would He be loving.  But overcoming it as an expression of love . . . that is Someone worth worshiping.