“Geoff.. I don’t see how you can believe in a God you’ve never seen, or touched. Isn’t that just some myth that the ancients used, some archaic way of looking at things. Why do we need that now?”
I think I have been asked that question more than a few times. I think Christians often miss a chance at a logical answer, because we have been taught that logic and God can’t go together… Maybe we just speak of emotion or feeling, or ‘just knowing’ that He is there.
And I do ‘just know’ he is there and that’s valid. But it’s not really valid for explaining to my friend who doesn’t ‘just know’ about God.
I totally get this argument. I used to make it myself.. We want to experience things. It’s very difficult to take anyone’s word at face value. We want to understand and learn for ourselves. That’s part of being human and having curiosity…
But what if we do experience God?
Think about this. When you see order, organization and complexity, what do you assume about it?
When you see a beautiful painting, or look at a combustion engine, or a well-written book, don’t you blindly assume that someone painted it, someone designed and built it, and someone wrote it? Do you need to look at the book and see the author line to know that it was written by someone??
Why is this? Because we know by experience, that a book is always written by someone, that a painting doesn’t paint itself, that an engine doesn’t build itself. We know that order implies design and we don’t need to be taught that..
So you say you can’t see God, or touch God, or smell God, or experience God with any of your senses, and thus you can’t believe…
But if we see from experience that order implies design, then why not the natural world around us? Why not a sunset? Why not a human body, the most complex and sweetest engine there is? When you actually take a close look at the world around us, and its complexity and order, it’s harder to believe there is not a designer than to believe that there is. It’s like looking at an engine and determining that it just appeared, only because you didn’t see it on the assembly line.
The Bible actually talks about this. The apostle Paul, at the beginning of his letter to the Romans, says the following:
18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 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 men are without excuse.
What Paul is saying here, and what I am saying here, is that it’s easier to see creation and believe in a Creator than it is not to. But by our pride, we refuse to believe this. We don’t believe because we are set against God in sin, and we don’t believe because the consequences of believing mean we must submit to His authority…
More to come…
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