Meet God (Before You Die) (eBook)

Questions

I’ll bet you can’t go a day without asking a question. Try it—you can’t. Life is filled with questions. We handle thousands daily: “What am I going to wear? What am I going to do today? Where should we eat? Why does he do that? Why did he do that?”

Some questions make us laugh:

“What color is a chameleon?”

“Why is it called afterlife when it’s really after death?”

“Who cut off Mickey’s tail?”

Some questions, though, are not so funny:

“Why did she have to die?”

“Why did I get cancer?”

“Why did he run out on her?”

“Why did this have to happen now?”

Why is our way of life. We humans must know why. Life should make sense; the pieces should fit. So, we ask questions. Loren Eisley had it right: Mankind is the “cosmic orphan,” the only creature in the universe that asks “Why?”1

Two questions are especially constant, like background noise in our daily life. Sooner or later, we have to look them in the eye—or realize they are staring at us. These are the two Big Questions we “cosmic orphans” must face sooner or later:

Is there a God?

What is he/she/it like?2

You would think we would ask these questions in that order: first, is there a God, and if so, then what is God like? This is rarely the case. Usually, we make up our minds about the First Question because we’ve already answered the Second Question. Let me explain: Have you ever said, “if there is a God, how could he allow so much suffering and evil in the world?”

Or “How could a God let my child die?”

“How could a God….?”

What we think about the Second Question (What is God like?) often dictates how we answer the First (Is there a God?).

The Second Question is the tricky one: What is God like? Our answer to the First Question doesn’t matter much unless there is some hopeful, meaningful answer to the Second Question. If God is just some “Force” (or the “Universe”) that is indifferent to us, or some great “Thing” that started everything up and abandons us, then so what? The writer Frederick Buechner imagines that if God were to prove himself by writing a message in the stars that says, “I EXIST!” that would be exciting and thrilling and might prove to most people that God exists. But after a while, if there was nothing more, we would start to ask “So what? What difference does that make?” As Buechner writes,

For what we need to know, of course, is not just that God exists, not just that beyond the steely brightness of the stars there is a cosmic intelligence of some kind that keeps the whole show going, but there is a God right here in the thick of our day-by-day lives who may not be writing messages about himself in the stars but who in one way or another is trying to get messages through our blindness as we move around down here knee-deep in the fragrant muck and misery and marvel of the world. It is not objective proof of God’s existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God’s presence.3

The two questions, “Is there a God?” and “What is God like?” are interrelated, and we humans refuse to ignore or separate them because both are so important. After centuries of Enlightenment thinking and industrial and technological progress, decades of post-modern “deconstructing” everything that we have been taught about life and God, we humans still cannot escape these haunting questions. There is something deep within us that longs for the transcendence reflected in our glorious, enormous, beautiful universe. Philosopher Charles Taylor expresses well our human angst. He calls our secular world “restless at the barriers of the human soul,” “deeply cross-purposed” because deep down in our souls, we feel that there must be meaning, some satisfying answer to “Why?” But having thrown off belief in God through what we have been told is “logic” and “science,” we have a deep hole that must be filled. There is the haunting sense “that there is something more…Great numbers of people feel it: in moments of reflection about their life; in moments of relaxation in nature; in moments of bereavement and loss; and quite wildly and unpredictably. Our age is very far from settling into a comfortable unbelief.”4

Clues of Someone Out There

Are there answers to our two haunting questions? One of my favorite thinkers is the late physicist, John Polkinghorne. Polkinghorne was a physicist for 25 years, teaching at Cambridge, Stanford, Berkeley, and the CERN. Then, at the age of 47, he entered seminary and became a reverend in the Church of England. He wrote extensively on the close connection between science and theology. Polkinghorne suggests that if there is a God, one might expect we would be given some clues to the fact of God’s existence. These clues might come in two ways. The first would be moments of history in which God somehow revealed himself in some way. All the great religions testify to this—God acts to reveal himself. Then Polkinghorne suggests a second way that God might be glimpsed: “through the character of the world God’s claimed to have made. And here science can help.”5 Polkinghorne cautions that we mustn’t confuse science with religion, “but some sort of nudge in a religious direction seems a reasonable thing to look for if there really is a God behind the scenes of the universe.”6 If there is a God, whatever we can grasp of him would need to be consistent with what we can discern from the reality of the universe. And if there is a God, whatever we could know of him would also need to be consistent with who we are as humans, as “creatures” of this God. You might say that God must be “real” all the way throughout reality, from those vast reaches of the cosmos down to the intricacies of this earth and into the depths of the human heart. Polkinghorne is right: science does provide some clues.

The Heavens Declare the Glory of God

Many people think science has somehow disproved God. Just the opposite has occurred over the last 100 years! Science provides endless clues pointing to a God beyond the universe. Renowned physicist Paul Davies goes so far as to say, “It may seem bizarre, but in my opinion, science offers a surer path to God than religion.”7 The 20th century’s most famous atheist, Anthony Flew, actually changed his mind and became a believer in God on the basis of modern science. As he stated in his book There is A God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind:

I now believe the universe was brought into existence by an infinite Intelligence. I believe that this universe’s intricate laws manifest what scientists have called the Mind of God…Why do I believe this, given that I expounded and defended atheism for more than half a century? The short answer is this: this is the world picture, as I see it, that has emerged from modern science. Science spotlights three dimensions of nature that point to God. The first is the fact that nature obeys laws. The second is the dimension of life, of intelligently organized and purpose-driven beings, which arose from matter. The third is the very existence of nature.8

This shouldn’t be surprising. The ancient Hebrews proclaimed, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (Ps. 19:1). The apostle Paul appealed to creation itself as evidence of God: “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 humans are without excuse” (Rom. 1:20). These ancient praises to God the Creator have been affirmed by recent scientific discoveries. The universe does provide clues to the existence, and even to the nature, of this God, which serve as invitations for us to think deeper and draw closer. Consider these remarkable clues.

The Universe Had a “Beginning”

The Bible begins with this affirmation: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). Physicists now unanimously agree that the universe did have a beginning, when matter and energy in the smallest and densest proportions exploded in what is called the “Big Bang.” The universe is still expanding from that initial explosion. Everything in this vast universe, all the potentiality that finally has come to be, was contained within that first explosion! Physicist and Nobel prize winner Arno Penzias commented on the similarity of the Big Bang with the Genesis account: “The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the first five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole.”9 As astrophysicists Robert Jastrow famously said, “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”10

The Universe is Filled with...