I feel the struggle and pain of the people who suffer from the doubt of the existence of God. All around are people who may want to believe in God but cannot bring themselves to God’s existence, and hence all the beautiful consequences of this belief. It just seems too much like believing in Santa Claus or in the Fairy God Mother, I mean who does not want to believe in Santa Claus, a jolly old man with mysterious powers, whose only passion is to bring the good children of the world presents and to make them happy. But as much as we may want to believe in Santa Claus there comes a point in most everyone’s life when we realize that Santa Claus, although nice and sweet is just a childish fancy, and no man with a yearning for truth can believe in Santa simply because he is nice and sweet. He will eventually abandon the belief with some feelings of disappointment and regret. Is God not just a grandiose Santa Claus, the Santa for adults? And when we come to see this we no more want to go on believing in God then a teenager wants to believe in Santa.
The problem with believing in God is not that the idea of God is a bad or unpleasant idea; the problem is that there are so many reasons not to believe in God. Many of the “great scientists” tell us that there is no longer a need for a god to explain the universe. Popular culture seems to agree with this point of view. And if you try to talk about God, many people will look at you in much the same way that people would look at a teenager if he was found writing a letter to Santa!
To not believe in God because you see no reasonable way to justify His existence, although tragic, is also noble and in many ways very hopeful, for although you are denying the existence of God you are acknowledging the existence of an absolute. You are acknowledging right and wrong, and in essence you are saying that from what you can see it is wrong to believe in God. If you did not believe in an absolute this statement would be meaningless.
Now I am sure there are many philosophers that from this belief in an absolute would simply make some fancy logical argument to prove God’s existence, but I am not going to try to do that here, for although there may be a good argument, it is not likely to convince the skeptic, and it is more likely to sound like some sort of logical trick. Instead I want to show the reasonableness in believing in God, in fact, to show that it is more reasonable to believe in God then to believe in empirical science itself. Now this may seem like an absurd stretch for many people but think about the following and see if it does not make sense!
You are probably sitting in a chair as you read this, thinking about what I am saying. Start thinking about what you know for sure! What you know with absolute certainty, things that you can have no doubts about. You may say I know I am sitting in a chair reading this essay. But are you sure about that? Is it not possible that you are sleeping and this is some sort of very strange and vivid dream? Maybe you are lying in a hospital bed in a long term coma? I am not saying that this is likely but simply that this is possible. You could be living in a Matrix like world or maybe a Truman Show world? Sure it is highly improbable but on what basis can you rule out the possibility?
You are probably thinking, where is all this going? Well, all I am saying is that if you want to be sure about something then it is important to question all your presuppositions. It is not enough to just question God’s existence; we must question the existence of everything. Let us raise the bar. It is no longer going to be sufficient to simply say that it seems reasonable that our senses are trustworthy. Just because you can see it, smell it, touch it or taste it, it does not mean that it is there. You may simply be suffering from a grand hallucination. What reason do you have to believe what you are experiencing right now? To say that it is "just obvious" or that it is "common sense" cannot be sufficient, for I am sure that anytime anyone believes most anything it seems to them to be obvious or common sense, so if we want to claim the reasonableness of our beliefs it presupposes that we have reasons.
If you do not want to be accused of believing in things that are not real like fairy godmothers then start from what you know for sure and question everything else. I will not only question the existence of fairy godmothers but I will even question the existence of my own biological mother. Maybe I am a product of some evil scientific experiment. Maybe I was cloned in a test tube from the genetic code found in a toenail. Maybe my mom was a clipping. Maybe I am still in the test tube. Who really knows? I mean if you don’t want to be tricked and be found to look silly you need to question everything. You need to believe only those things that you know with absolute certainty. Just because it seems obvious to you is no reason to believe it, I mean, to children there is nothing more obvious than Santa! To saints there is nothing more obvious than God! To scientists there is nothing more obvious than the Big Bang. But just because it is so obvious to someone does not mean that it is real!
So, what do you know for certain? Well, you cannot trust your family or friends, as they may not really exist. You cannot trust any of your senses as they could be just an illusion. You cannot trust your memory as it could have been altered or simply fabricated. So it would seem that we are in a bit of a predicament. It would seem that I cannot know anything with absolute certainty. But this is not the case. There is one thing that I can know. I can know that I am conscious! I have absolute certainty about that! I can rest assured that this one fact is not an illusion. What my eyes show me may not be real, in fact I may not even have eyes, I may not even have a body, but I know I have consciousness. And if I have a consciousness then there is a source of this consciousness. I will call this source my spirit. Therefore I know I have a conscious spirit.
This, I think, is our core knowledge. This is something that we can rest assured with in bed at night. It may not be night, I may not be in bed but I know I have a conscious spirit. Where does this leave us? It may seem like a rather dark and dreary place, but it is a perfect place to start to build your knowledge, for it is solid. But can I know anything else with certainty? I do not see anything else you can know with this same level of certainty, apart for the obvious like 1 + 1 = 2. So, from this foundation we can now look to see if there is anything that is reasonable to believe, something that I have reason to believe. I still see no reason to believe my senses. The senses show me images but there is nothing about the images that say these are a reflection of an absolute reality. So what can I know? Well I know that I exist so it would seem that there are two options; I either existed from all eternity or I was created. The first option would mean that I was some sort of god with a very bad memory. So from my perspective I have good reason to rule out this option. The second option is that I was created. This is the necessary consequence if the first option is ruled out. Since there was no way I could have made myself I must have a maker. You may say at this point, of course you have a maker, your parents. But I have no reason to even believe that my parents exist, let alone that they created me. But if I know that I was made then I know there is something beyond myself (or someone). Since I know I am a spiritual being it is reasonable to assume that whatever made me must be spiritual to. It does not seem reasonable to think that something lesser can create something greater. I also know that I do not have the knowledge to create a spiritual being. Therefore the spiritual being that made me must be greater than me. So of all the things in the world the most reasonable thing I know is that I am a spiritual being and that I was made by a spiritual being that is greater than me, a spiritual being that is capable of creating spiritual beings.
We still do not know if it is reasonable to trust our senses, and here we will remain! Unless! Unless our creator was good, that he was not a deceiver. If he was a deceiver we can go no further. We are isolated spiritual beings made by a deceptive creator. But here is where our senses come in, for our senses show us a great world, a world full of beauty. The beauty of the world is given as evidence of the creator’s goodness. It is like an invitation to trust his goodness. Would an evil creator make a beautiful world? Would he shower us with people that love us? This invitation to trust in his goodness, although reasonable, still requires a leap of faith. If we are able to make this leap of faith then, and only then, is it reasonable to trust our senses. For a good creator would not be a deceiver. From this we can finally enter the world in all her glory, able to embrace other people as fellow spiritual beings. It is only with this faith in a good creator that we can trust our senses and hence to trust what empirical science tells us.
So as I see it, faith in a good creator is not only reasonable it is the most reasonable thing in the world, or rather I should say, it is the most reasonable thing through which we can enter the world.
A truly reasonable man would doubt everything in this world before he could doubt the existence of the Good Creator! Or should I say, God!
No comments:
Post a Comment