We recently had a lectureship series at school on the “New Atheism”. One of the devlopments traced is as follows:
Pre-Reformation: Implausible to not believe in God
Post-Reformation: Possible to not believe in God, though rare
Modernism: Implausible to believe in God
This reminded me of a reflection (this is unedited, unrefined, and not exhaustive) I wrote on one of my Trinitarianism class lectures. It is as follows:
“Do you believe in God?”
“No!”
“Why not?”
“Because you cannot prove him to me.”
In a sense, I wish conversations with the World were as simple as the one above. These conversations occur very frequently, but too often the real issue is cloaked in fancy words and rabbit trails, so the Christian misunderstands the underlying issue. And yet, even if the fluff of arguments were swept away, I think that Christians today still make a serious error: we take the responsibility to try and PROVE the existence of God. Why do we, Christians, think that we need to prove God, when He himself never wrote that proof?
Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” This is the beginning of God’s interaction with the earth and world that we live in. It is interesting to note that there is no account of where God came from. God was…and then He created, starting everything. Let us look, then, in the New Testament to see how the apostle’s understood the beginning, a look back. In John 1:1-2 it says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.” Again, concerning ourselves simply with investigating the existence of God, we see that God was in the beginning and so was the Word, who we know to be Jesus, the Son. So even an apostle, when looking back to the very beginning, having the same revelation that we do today, makes no case for proving God. There is an assumption that God is and therefore no need to prove that He is.
Why is it then, that today Christians battle the challenges to prove that God exists? Clearly it is because science has become the standard by which man measures all that is around him. But, the issue actually descends deeper into man than this. Man was created to rule over all else on this earth. Man has achieved this position today using science. So science is really a means to an end that man seeks. The problem, though, is that man is seeking to place under his rule God. Man is attempting to apply his created standard of measure to God, the Creator who is. This cannot work, and it does not work. Instead of understanding that man’s measure cannot be usable on his creator, God, man chooses to reject God because his belief is that his measure is faultless and all encompassing.
The result is that man does not want to accept the existence of God because he cannot define Him, grasp Him…ultimately, control Him. By God’s design, the earth has been put under man’s rule, but man is reaching out for more to rule over. That which man cannot rule, he rejects.
Christians, therefore, should not be caught up in the arguments for God’s existence. The Scriptures teach us about God, but they are written with the assumption that God exists. I think we, as Christians, should take the same approach. It is not ours to prove God’s existence, though we can indeed offer insights here.
